The First Network of Researchers in France: Joining Culture(s) de Mode
On the first network of fashion researchers in France, what it has built since 2018, and joining it as an individual member
Christopher Banks is an individual member of Culture(s) de Mode, from 19 October 2026.
The network gathers the people in France who study clothes, textiles and the trades that make them, and it has spent eight years building the things such a community needs and rarely has: a directory of who is working on what, a bibliography, a journal, a set of maps, and money for the researchers coming next.
What Culture(s) de Mode Is
It was launched on 29 September 2018 by Sophie Kurkdjian and Maude Bass-Krueger, and it is attached to the association Filatures, Histoire et mode. The French Ministry of Culture supports it, and describes it on the Ministry's own pages as the first network of researchers in France in this field.
Around four hundred and fifty people belong to it. They are researchers and doctoral candidates, museum curators and archivists, designers, conservators and journalists, which is to say the full range of people who handle a garment professionally rather than only the academic end of it. The network sets out four aims: to give fashion research visibility, to grow the community of researchers, to build a digital platform for that research, and to support the researchers who come after.
That last aim is the one that tells you what kind of organisation this is. A network can be a mailing list. This one decided to fund people.
What It Builds
The practical output is a set of shared instruments, and they are the reason to be a member rather than merely an admirer.
There is an annuaire des chercheurs, a directory of who is researching what, which is the single most useful object a dispersed field can own and the one it almost never builds. There is a bibliography developed by the members of the network, which is to say the reading list is assembled by the people doing the reading. There are podcasts. There are workshops and events, free to members, and networking occasions reserved for them. And members may apply to project calls funded by the network itself.
Alongside those, Culture(s) de Mode publishes a revue gathering work from researchers, curators, photographers and journalists, and maintains thematic maps of French fashion culture, covering museums and collections, the métiers d'art, French manufacture and eco-labels. The maps matter more than they sound. Anyone who has tried to find out which French institution holds a particular kind of garment, or which workshop still practises a particular technique, has discovered that the answer exists and is scattered across several hundred places. Somebody sat down and gathered it.
The Doctoral Bursary
The clearest statement of the network's purpose is the research grant it carries jointly with the Ministry of Culture, described in the announcement as portée conjointement par le ministère de la Culture et Culture(s) de Mode.
It is ten thousand euros a year for three years, for a doctoral candidate working on public textile and clothing collections in France. Three funded years is the difference between a thesis that gets written and a thesis that gets abandoned, and aiming it at public collections points it exactly where the work is hardest and least rewarded: at holdings that belong to everybody and therefore to no particular budget.
An organisation reveals what it values by what it pays for. This one pays for somebody to spend three years in a store room.
My Place in It
I joined as an individual member. Membership belongs to me rather than to Objects of Affection Collection, which is the right shape for what this is: a researcher joining a community of researchers, on the same footing as the curators, archivists and doctoral candidates already in it.
I am new, and the correct posture for a new member of a community eight years into its work is to read the bibliography before adding to it. The directory, the maps and the revue represent a great deal of accumulated knowledge about French fashion heritage that I do not have, and the first useful thing I can do is learn it.
What I Hope to Bring
One method, offered narrowly, and some evidence to go with it.
My work is on how a record states what it does not know. A conservator examines a garment and the examination settles nothing. A curator asks a donor where a piece came from and the answer is genuinely lost. A researcher spends three weeks with a workshop's papers and establishes no fact at all. In each case real work was done and no answer was produced, and most cataloguing systems have nowhere to put that, so the result looks identical to a question nobody asked.
French fashion archives meet this constantly. A garment whose maker is unrecorded, a workshop that closed without papers, a provenance that stops at an invoice. I have taken the question of how an archive records a search that found nothing to a standards body this month, where it was heard, left open, and sent back with a request for further cases. Culture(s) de Mode is the community most likely to have those cases, and the people in it will know immediately whether the distinction is useful or whether it is a solution looking for a problem.
Beyond that, the ordinary work of a member: turning up to the workshops, reading the revue, adding to the bibliography when there is something worth adding, and being a reachable person on the other end of a question about how an object's record is kept over time.
Coda
Fashion research in France is a field with serious institutions, deep collections and a long scholarly tradition, and until 2018 it had no single place where its people could find each other. Two researchers built one, a ministry backed it, and four hundred and fifty people joined.
That is a provenance record of a different kind: a field keeping track of itself. It is a good thing to be a small part of, and the useful first step is to listen to what is already there.