Call for Contributions: Fashion’s Sacrifice Zones

The global fashion industry has reshaped dress practices around the world and continues to exert considerable influence over local, Indigenous, and traditional systems of adornment, production, and cultural expression. While fashion is often celebrated as a vehicle for expression and economic growth, its expansion has been accompanied by the erosion, displacement, and commodification of longstanding dress traditions. As fashion systems seek new markets, labor sources, consumers, and sites of production, they frequently encounter communities whose relationships to clothing are grounded in cultural, social, spiritual, and historical values that differ markedly from the logics of capitalist fashion.

Sandra Niessen describes these clash points as "sacrifice zones," places where people, cultural practices, landscapes, and ways of life become expendable in the pursuit of economic development and global market expansion. Viewed through this lens, the spread of global fashion can be understood as a contemporary form of colonialism, one that often privileges Western aesthetics, production models, and economic values while marginalizing alternative systems of dress and textile production. Across the globe, communities actively negotiate, adapt, resist, revive, and reinvent dress traditions in response to the pressures of globalization and fashion capitalism.

This edited volume, to be published as part of The CSA Series, seeks contributions that critically examine the impacts of global fashion systems on traditional, local, Indigenous modes of dress. We are particularly interested in scholarship that investigates how Western fashion styles, manufacturing practices, marketing strategies, retail systems, and capitalist models of production have transformed cultural dress practices, as well as research that explores the ways individuals and communities resist these influences to preserve or revitalize traditions. The goal of the volume is to assemble a multidisciplinary collection that documents the complex and uneven relationships between global fashion and local dress traditions across diverse geographic regions, historical periods, and cultural contexts.

We welcome contributions from scholars in fashion studies, dress history, anthropology, sociology, geography, cultural studies, museum studies, material culture, art history, area studies, Indigenous studies, and other related fields. Research may employ historical, ethnographic, archival, visual, critical, theoretical, or mixed-methods approaches. Potential topics include, but are not limited to: 

• The displacement or transformation of traditional dress due to global fashion systems
• Indigenous dress traditions and cultural resilience under global fashion systems
• Textile and garment homogenization
• The commodification of cultural dress and heritage
• Tourism, authenticity, and the production of dress for external markets
• The impact of export economies on local textile and apparel production
• Garment labor and development initiatives as mechanisms of economic growth
• Secondhand clothing markets and textile waste in the Global South
• Changes in intergenerational knowledge transmission related to dress practices
• Resistance to, adaptation of, or negotiation with global fashion systems 

Contributors are encouraged to examine both the harms and complexities of fashion's global expansion, including questions of cultural loss, adaptation, agency, and resistance. By bringing together diverse case studies and disciplinary perspectives, this volume aims to advance understanding of how dress traditions are transformed through encounters with global fashion and how communities continue to assert cultural identity through clothing and textile practices.

Abstracts should clearly articulate the proposed chapter's research question, methodology, and contribution to the volume's central theme of fashion's impact on, or interaction with, traditional systems of dress. We particularly welcome submissions that foreground underrepresented regions, communities, and voices in discussions of global fashion and cultural change. 

Submission

To submit an abstract for consideration, please send the following materials to Katrina Orsini at katrina.orsini@gmail.com by March 1, 2027. 

• Full name as you would like it to appear in the book
• Position title and affiliated institutions if applicable; work is welcome from independent scholars
• Email
• Paper title and abstract
• 2 pages single spaced
• Include: purpose, methodological approach, major findings, and the status of the work (e.g., data collection completed)
• Include: the number of images you plan to include in your final manuscript and your rights to use the images. This publication has a small budget for purchasing image rights; if you would like to submit an image for consideration, please provide the importance of the image to your research.
• CV 

Due dates, publisher, and questions:

This edited volume will be submitted for consideration to the Costume Society of America series at Kent State University Press. If your abstract is accepted, you will be asked to turn in the completed manuscript of 6000-8000 words no later than July 1, 2028. All submissions will be peer reviewed and must be approved by the press.

• For submission questions contact Katrina Orsini (book editor) at katrina.orsini@gmail.com 
• For more about the CSA series at the Kent State University Press visit our website.