Elena Călin

Biography

Elena Călin is a researcher and practitioner whose work examines how Traditional Knowledge Systems embedded in dress and textile heritage contribute to cultural sustainability through contemporary fashion and textile practice.
Her doctoral research at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, uses Romanian traditional costumes and textiles from the Vâlcea region as a case study through which these broader questions are explored.
Situated at the intersection of Dress Studies, Material Culture and Sustainability Studies, her research contributes to emerging debates on culturally grounded approaches to fashion sustainability by integrating symbolic analysis, material practice and heritage research. It addresses a significant gap in both Romanian textile scholarship and wider fashion and textile studies by examining embroidery as an embodied and socially embedded form of knowledge production, responding to the historical marginalisation of practice-based and participatory methodologies.
Drawing on semiotics, symbolic anthropology, material culture theory, practice-based research and thinking through making, she has developed the Textile Meaning Framework (TMF), an original interdisciplinary analytical and practice-led methodology for interpreting the symbolic, narrative and material dimensions of dress while positioning making as a mode of inquiry and knowledge production.
Methodologically, her research combines ethnographically informed fieldwork—including semi-structured interviews, participant observation and community workshops—with visual documentation, museum collection research, reflective studio practice and material culture analysis. This integrated approach investigates how storytelling, symbolism and Traditional Knowledge Systems can be collaboratively documented, interpreted and reactivated through creative practice.
Her creative practice follows a cycle of unmaking, making and remaking, investigating how symbolic meaning is generated, negotiated and transformed through material processes. Through motif reconstruction, embroidery sampling and textile making, she explores how storytelling embedded within dress can inform culturally grounded approaches to contemporary fashion.
Working in long-term partnership with local source communities, she develops collaborative approaches that support knowledge exchange, community-informed interpretation and the cultural sustainability of contemporary fashion, positioning source communities as active contributors to cultural knowledge and heritage research.

She is the Co-Founder of HERITERRA – the Cultural Heritage Hub, an initiative dedicated to connecting researchers, museums, cultural organisations, artisans and communities to support living heritage, crafts, knowledge exchange and cultural sustainability.