CFP: Fashion, Meaning and Language: International Symposium

Fashion, Meaning and Language: International Symposium

Institut Français de la Mode, Paris

November 20-21, 2025

The Institut Français de la Mode and the University of San Diego are pleased to announce an international symposium exploring the intersections of fashion, meaning, and language. This two-day event will bring together researchers from diverse disciplines to examine clothing and fashion as non-linguistic systems of communication.

Symposium Theme

Fashion constitutes a complex visual and material language that creates, conveys, and negotiates meaning across social contexts. Beyond mere utility or aesthetics, garments function as potent communicative devices—speaking without words, encoding cultural values, social positions, personal identities, and collective aspirations. This symposium aims to explore the communicative dimensions of fashion, interrogating how clothing operates as a non-verbal language or signaling system.

The theoretical landscape has changed drastically since The Fashion System (1967) by Roland Barthes, who applied tools of semiotics to understanding fashion. On the one hand, the study of material culture has given a more prominent place to the objects themselves, and on the other, contemporary linguistic models have long moved away from the Saussurean structuralist view that was typical of the French 1960’s.

The Fashion, Language and Meaning International Symposium welcomes papers focusing on the theoretical tools and frameworks that best model the production of clothing signals and their interpretation, studies of the meanings conveyed by a particular class of clothes, and other broad theoretical or historical enquiries that bear on these topics. 

For example, we seek to investigate questions such as:

• How do garments and fashion systems create and transmit meaning in ways that parallel or diverge from verbal language?
• What semiotic, semantic or pragmatic frameworks best capture the particular communicative properties of clothing?
• How do clothing, accessories, and whole outfits acquire their meanings?
• How do clothing and fashion signals reflect specific cultural or group conventions?
• What role can fashion signaling play in activism and political messaging? 
• What potential is there for reappropriating or changing the meaning 
• How do material properties of fashion objects (texture, weight, structure, etc.) contribute to meaning-making?
• How do fashion's communicative functions vary across historical periods, cultural contexts, and social groups?
• What cognitive processes underlie our interpretation of fashion signals?
• How do fashion objects mediate between individual expression and collective understanding?

Disciplinary Perspectives

We welcome contributions from scholars across multiple disciplines, including but not limited to:

• Philosophy
• History 
• Sociology
• Anthropology 
• Cognitive Sciences 
• Linguistics
• Design Studies

Submission Guidelines

• Abstract Length: 350-500 words
• Languages: English or French
• Deadline: July 15, 2025
• Notification of Acceptance: September 1, 2025
• Submission Format: PDF document including: 
• Abstract (350-500 words)
• 5 keywords
• Brief author biography (150 words maximum)
• Institutional affiliation
• Contact information

Please submit abstracts via email to: [email protected]

Symposium Format

Selected participants will present approximately 30-minute papers followed by discussion periods. Presentations will be made in English. The symposium will also feature keynote presentations and panel discussions. A selection of papers from the symposium will be considered for publication in a planned edited volume.

The conference will take place at Institut Français de la Mode in the heart of Paris, France. Some funding support will be available. Those without funding alternatives will be prioritized. 

Important Dates

• Abstract Submission Deadline: July 15, 2025
• Notification of Acceptance: September 1, 2025
• Full Paper Submission: October 15, 2025
• Symposium Dates: November 20-21, 2025

Organizing Committee

Sarah Banon (Institut Français de la Mode)

Marilynn Johnson (University of San Diego)

Benjamin Simmenauer (Institut Français de la Mode)

Contact

For inquiries, please contact : [email protected]

Institut Français de la Mode
34 Quai d'Austerlitz
75013 Paris, France
www.ifmparis.fr