Established in 2013, Critical Costume is an international research network focused on the promotion of new costume scholarship and practice. Critical Costume 2026 is the seventh event within the Critical Costume research platform and is co-convened by Donatella Barbieri, Jessica Bugg, Nadia Malik. For more information, please visit Critical Costume 2026.

https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/london-college-of-fashion/critical-costume-2026

This conference explores the existing reach and future potentialities of costume in the contemporary context, uncovering the intersections with other disciplines and with the critical issues of our times in new and emerging contexts.

Given the multiple current global crises and conflicts, including climate change, social marginalisations, and epistemicides, how do entanglements presented by costume address the world as it is, considering pasts and proposing future possibilities through performance?

Centring a dialogue around costume innovation and global futures, we consider social and environmental sustainability alongside analogue and digital technologies, which are approached as embodied and enworlded. Equally, we see costume innovation as a means of artistic expression directed towards communal wellbeing, access and inclusion through performance. Discourses around costume can be fluid and porous, as well as addressing social, environmental and political concerns that focus on costume’s potential interfaces, entanglements and interdisciplinarities. These can be framed as problematising, future-facing and meaningfully active.

We call upon researchers, educators, and practitioners in costume and related fields to engage with an ethical, political, environmental and socially engaged questioning of practices and discourses.