Call for Papers – Special Issue of International Journal of Fashion Studies
CLOTHING AND DRESS IN TIMES OF MASS VIOLENCE
Clothing is ubiquitous in practices, experiences and images of genocide, occupation and displacement. Garments appear on bodies, against bodies and – devastatingly – in the absence of bodies; they are also used as instruments of humiliation enacted by military state apparatuses as well as tools of insurgent protest and resistance (see Archer 2014; Tynan 2020; Filippello forthcoming 2026). Clothes are materially and conceptually bound to these conditions, as they are carriers and signifiers of intimacy, labor, ideologies, care and memory. Moreover, clothes circulate through journalism, humanitarian discourse, legal frameworks, digital media and global spectatorship. To attend to clothing in contexts of mass violence is to attend to the conditions under which lives are made in/visible and un/grievable.
Fashion, dress and clothing provide a critical lens for interpreting the material, social and affective dimensions of colonial state violence, revealing how vulnerability and power are inscribed onto, and contested by, un/clothed bodies. This Special Issue of International Journal of Fashion Studies seeks to develop methods capable of positioning fashion/dress/textile scholarship in relation to urgent political and humanitarian concerns. Recent work has indeed begun to address this gap by attending to garments as trace, relation and evidence within the image field of unfolding ethnic cleansing in Palestine (Fahd and Robinson 2026; Muhawar 2026). Building on this scholarship, the Special Issue asks what it means to think about clothing under conditions of state violence, and what it means to do so at this current juncture. We take the ongoing destruction of life in Gaza as a central provocation, while also acknowledging other contemporary sites of mass violence, including Sudan, Congo, Lebanon and Iran, among other contexts.
While this Special Issue will necessarily engage the connections between bodies and clothing under political, social and physical duress, we encourage authors to consider both reparative and diagnostic approaches. Reparative methods might attend to forms of memory, care, resistance and sociality through clothing and material culture, while diagnostic approaches may analyse how garments register and make legible the dynamics and ideologies of state violence. The Special Issue will foreground interdisciplinary approaches, drawing from anthropology, visual culture, media studies, sociology, art history, photography theory, gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies and postcolonial studies.
The issue will include five to seven articles in the 6000–8000-word range that combine theoretical and empirical work, as well as shorter (non-peer-reviewed) submissions, visual essays, creative and/or reflective works and reviews (which will be featured in the journal’s ‘Open Space & Reviews’ section). Submissions may address, but are not limited to:
● dress under siege, displacement and occupation
● clothing and the killed body
● dress in images of genocide and mass violence
● uses of clothes in solidarity movements
● repression, looting, or confiscation of clothes by military enforcement entities
● archives of clothing, disappearance and loss
● garments as trace or evidence or memorial form
● clothing and grief, mourning and care
● humanitarian visuality and the politics of dress
● the ethics of looking at clothing in images of violence
● children’s clothing and domestic life in conditions of destruction
● interdisciplinary approaches to, and methodological interventions for, the study of dress and violence
If you are interested in writing a piece in a language other than English, you can find information regarding translation on the journal’s website, where you can also see this CfP: https://www.intellectbooks.com/international-journal-of-fashion-studies
Timeline:
Deadline for abstracts: AUGUST 21, 2026
Notification of selected contributors: September 4, 2026
Submission of full manuscripts: February 1, 2027
Submissions should be sent to the three guest editors of the Special Issue: Dr. Roberto Filippello ([email protected]), Dr. Cherine Fahd ([email protected]), and Dr. Todd Robinson ([email protected])