Enfilade

From the conference website:

Mapping Fashion Savoir Faire: Craft, Space, and Scale, 16th–21st Centuries

Paris, 11–13 December 2025

Organized by Ariane Fennetaux and Emilie Hammen

A typically French and even somewhat untranslatable expression, the notion of ‘savoir-faire’ in France seems to refer to the traditional sets of specialist technical skills and know-how underpinning the fashion trades. This narrative however is predicated upon what is commonly understood as ‘the fashion system’, itself a cultural, social and economic construction invented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often in relation to the great Parisian fashion houses.

The notion of space invites us to recalibrate our gaze and ask new questions about fashion, its actors, its sites and its dynamics—in space and time. Looking beyond the twentieth century, and beyond the European-centric prism that often dominates thinking about fashion and dress, the conference aims to question the traditional vision of fashion as a Western invention. By looking at clothing practices, textile crafts and the materials and resources specific to other regions of the world, the conference borrows from global history and examines the links and spatial dynamics between various centres and peripheries.

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Institut Français de la Mode, Auditorium

9.00  Registration and coffee

9.30  Keynote
• Mei Mei Rado (Bard Graduate Center), Cross-cultural Savoir-faire and Remaking: Transformations of Chinese Skirts into Western Fashion

10.30  Tea and coffee break

10.45  Colonial and Post Colonial Crafts
• Pierre Jean Desemerie (Bard Graduate Center/ Musée des Arts Décoratifs), ‘Moderniser’ la Chebka (dentelle algérienne) en période coloniale
• Pragya Sharma (University of Brighton), ‘Everyone will praise you’: Fashioning the Knitted Self in 20th-Century India

11.45  Lunch break

13.00  Interlocking Networks and Scales
• Miriam Fleck-Vidal (McGill University), French Silk, Global Networks: Negotiating National Identity through Silk Production in Early Modern France
• Tristan Dot (Universitéy of Cambridge), 19th-Century Textile Design Studios as Nodes of Visual Circulation
• Victoria De Lorenzo (London College of Fashion, University of London), Crafting a Culturally-Situated Demand: A Microhistory of Market Sub-Segmentation in Chile and Peru, 1845–1855

14.30  Tea and coffee break

14.45  Transnational Circulations
• Kirsty Hassard (V&A, Dundee), Tartan: Mapping Craft, Space, and Scale in Scotland and Beyond
• Antonia Behan (Queen’s University), The Texture of Nationalism and Transnational Handweaving Revival
• Elena Kanagy Loux (Bard Graduate Center), Interlacing the Globe: Mapping the Magdalena Nuttall Lace Collection

16.15  Tea and coffee break

16.30  Workshop #1

19.00  Opening of the Savoir Faire exhibition at the Galliera Museum (for conference speakers only)

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Institut Français de la Mode, Auditorium

8.45  Coffee

9.00  Keynote
• Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge University), The Triumph of Fashion

10.15  Coffee break

10.30  Resources and Techniques: From Local to Global
• Marie Colas des Francs (EPHE), Le voyage des plumes: Provenance des matériaux et des techniques de la plumasserie parisienne autour de 1600
• Jean-Alexandre Perras (IZEA, Martin-Luther Universität, Halle-Wittenberg), Technial Expertise in 18th-Century Women’s Hairstyling: The Case of Rouen

11.30  Tea and coffee break

11.45  Colonial Couture
• Khemais Ben Lakhdar (Université Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne), Une jubla parsie devenue dernier cri de la mode à Paris: Itinéraire d’une tunique brodée entre la Chine, l’Inde et la maison Paul Poiret dans un contexte colonial
• Tokiko Sumida (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès), L’art du Savoir-Faire du Kimono et la Résistance Spatiale: Du japonisme aux Innovations Contemporaines en France
• Chiara Faggella (The Daniel and Gayle D’Aniello Syracuse University Program in Florence), Beyond the Tourist Gaze: Colonial Legacies and Spatial Entanglements in the Making of Italian Fashion

13.15  Lunch break

14.30  Géographies du réemploi / The Geographies of Reuse
• Miki Sugiura (Hosei University, Tokyo – University of Antwerp), Mapping Savoir-Faire in the Circulation of Second-Hand Kimono in Early Modern Japan
• Estelle Dupuis (Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne- IFM), Vraie et fausse usure dans la mode: Circulations esthétiques paradoxales à l’heure de la crise environnementale

15.30  Tea and coffee break

16.00  Workshop #2

20.00  Conference Dinner – Le Bougainville

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INHA, Galerie Colbert, salle Vasari

9.30  Keynote
• Malick N’Diaye (Cheik Antia Diop/ IFAN, Dakar), Le Musée sur le fil

10.30  Coffee Break

10.45  Museums and Decentered Narratives
• Pierre-Antoine Vettorello (Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts), Decentering the Fashion Museum: Colonial Legacies and Indigenous Voices in French Fashion History
• Chiara Tuani (École du Louvre), Tositea Moala Hoatau Broutin et le Tapa: Transmission des Savoir-Faire d’Uvéa et de Futuna en Nouvelle-Calédonie

12.15  Workshop #3