Decolonizing Fashion: Refashioning Objects in the Ethnographic Museum

This two-day workshop at Museum Volkenkunde aimed to critically explore overlapping discourses of museums histories and practices, and the aesthetic concepts that have informed the category of fashion, to engender a decolonized conception of what fashion is and can be. The workshop was organised by the Research Center for Material Culture (the research institute of the National Museum of World Cultures) organised together with the Research Collective Decolonizing Fashion.

Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden, the Netherlands, 14.11.19 – 15.11.19

Detail from a kaftan from Central Asia 1991

Lesiba Mabitsela at the workshop in Leiden

Bamboo hat for field work in Java, 1964, in the archive at Museum Volkenkunde