Fashion Research Symposium 2025: Creating Afterlives

Welcome to the 2025 edition of Fashion Research Symposium, Friday 21st of March! The symposium is an annual event for research, knowledge-sharing and critical discourse around fashion. The theme for 2025 is “Creating Afterlives”.

Fashion Research Symposium is an ongoing collaboration between the National Museum of Norway and International Library of Fashion Research.

This year’s edition extends on the themes and dynamics unveiled by the exhibition project “Ephemeral Matters. Into the Fashion Archive”, based on Marco Pecorari’s seminal book “Fashion Remains - Rethinking Ephemera in the Archive” and curated by Marco Pecorari and Hanne Eide at the National Museum of Norway.

Coinciding with the finissage of this exhibition, Fashion Research Symposium 2025 gathers Norwegian and international researchers, collectors and practitioners to explore ephemeral afterlives through alternative and critical archival practices in fashion.

One might argue that an ephemeral fashion object segues between life and death. It’s a paradox: in many ways these fragile and flimsy time capsules decline with use and touch, on the other hand they come to life through activation. Objects with inherently short lifespans are prolonged when safeguarded in storages with proper conditions. Yet, they’re more often than not rescued by noble collectors from the garbage bin, its ultimate end. Whether artefacts, clothes or the ‘dying’ medium that is paper, how is ephemerality dealt with in archives, libraries or wardrobes over time? And what does it mean to intellectually consider remnants and remains of fashion’s past for the future – rather than perpetuating ‘the next’ or ‘the new’?

By inviting people behind fashion archives small and big – from public to private institutions – to commercial or accidental collectors of fashion ephemera – the presence of the collector as a persona or character will be investigated further. Is the autonomous archive more ephemeral than the public one? And what happens when collectors pass on their life-legacy? All-in-all, Fashion Research Symposium 2025 attempts to shed further light on contemporary archives-making and the ephemeral fashion objects they preserve.