WELCOME TO FOLKWEAR SOCIETY
Folkwear Society is a global platform that reignites the curiosity of exploring into the visual and material folk cultures by salvaging and preserving original folk clothing and by embedding these full of life artefacts into their own forgotten history, as well as into our contemporary story.
Folkwear Society is a celebration of local traditions, of cultural artefacts that age beautifully, of the creativity and artistic taste expressed by such creations — but it is equally a call to record and generate the anthropologic content around these salvaged items.
SALVAGE
Folk art is not something that can be institutionalised — on the contrary, it is alive, unconventional, unrestrictive, untheorised, forever open to change and transformations. Nonetheless, peasant folk art can be captured in a society’s collective memory. These creations that lie at the border between cultural artefact and work of art are slowly disappearing without a trace. Folkwear Society wishes to salvage and preserve as much as it can.
DISCOVER
Folkwear tells a story about ancient ethnographic regions, ethnicity, social status, occupations and occasions — of centuries of socio-historical interactions and transformations. These artefacts are not static labels of a time long past, but played an active role in the process of identity creation of both individuals and communities. Folkwear Society wishes to retrieve — and generate — as much as it can of this evanescent knowledge.
CONTRIBUTE
It is up to each and every one of us to bring these unique pieces back into the value system they deserve. Folkwear Society is open to all folk clothing enthusiasts who want to contribute to the recording of original items of Romanian folkwear as well as get involved in the creation of ethnographic knowledge around these salvaged artifacts or trigger debates around concepts of “authenticity” and “heritage”.
