Clothing has always been part of everyday life. As objects that accompany and identify us, it is only recently that they have been collected and exhibited in museums, namely since 1907, when the French Société de l’Histoire du Costume was created and began to assemble collections of historical clothing, now housed in the Palais Galliera in Paris (Basse-Krueger 2018). Although interest in the history and cultures of clothing and the documentation of garment making dates back a long way (Rublack & Hayward, 2015), being Cesare Vecellio and his De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diverse parti del mondo published in Venice in 1590 a case in point, the constitution of collections preceded the standardisation of specific terminology, which allows for their inventory and classification, and thus promoting knowledge, dissemination and innovation around material garments, discourse and the system of meanings of fashion that reflect and shape the culture and ideology of societies.

In 1975, ICOM Costume – International Committee for Museums and Collections of Costume, Fashion and Textiles began developing a standardised fashion vocabulary with basic terms for cataloguing, with the aim of creating a common terminology for museums around the world (Buck 1981). The Portuguese versions appeared later, first in Brazilian Portuguese, with the Terminologia do Vestuário (Clothing Terminology) project, which began in 2018 and was completed in 2020, and later in European Portuguese, as part of the TERMVEST – Terminologia do Vestuário: European Portuguese Version (NOVA CLUNL), completed in 2026, which motivated this meeting.

What’s costume got to do with terms? Terminology and clothing heritage in the Portuguese language aims to contribute to the state of the art of research in Portuguese on clothing and its terminology – presenting the results of projects that have been developed at NOVA FCSH (TERMVEST, VESTE, DRESS) and at the Universidade Federal of Rio de Janeiro (with the Clothing Terminology Extension Project, and research carried out in the postgraduate programme in Visual Arts at the School of Fine Arts, under the guidance of Maria Cristina Volpi) –, stimulate the development of collaborative networks between the various participants, in a multi- and transdisciplinary environment, and encourage the creation and development of new projects, while also seeking to align research on the history, cultures and terminology of clothing in Portuguese with ongoing international debates.

Registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScdDtU6JzpdzKNW90BJSdyI3P2_nh26UQw_oIzDEYYBDBBUxQ/viewform.

Book of Abstracts (.pdf)

Organization

CHAM

CLUNL