Elena Călin

Biography

Elena Calin, a cultural researcher and textile practitioner, is a PhD student at the London College of Fashion, UAL. Her work focuses on preserving, promoting, and innovating Cultural Heritage (CH), especially textiles and crafts. Her research aims to raise awareness of cultural sustainability within and through fashion by decoding the symbolism and stories embedded in Romanian traditional costumes. By critically examining the effects of cultural appropriation, she seeks to uncover how traditional attire can foster new forms of sustainability in fashion, influence craft culture, promote transnational networking, support pre- and post-colonial values, and enable psychological healing.
As a practitioner, Elena collaborates with various textile specialists, artisans, and Romanian communities, focusing on key aspects of material culture, particularly traditional costumes and related fabrics, classification markers, authenticity, and other symbolic elements. Using interdisciplinary methods in her research, Elena also employs digital tools to generate new perspectives on cultural heritage collections, preservation, and research activities.
To explore narrative, community, and pattern in a contemporary way, her textile practice relies on hand techniques. Her research emphasises historical, ethnographic, and folk textiles, crafts, and traditions. She is intrigued by textiles' storytelling potential and their capacity to serve as communication tools and archives of society or personal history. She incorporates color, textile screen printing, dyeing, weaving, and hand embroidery into her work.
With an academic background in the humanities and experience in data-driven cultural research, she is working on a digital project that improves access and public engagement with heritage collections. She combines practical handcraft skills with digital research expertise, making a significant contribution to both traditional and digital heritage.
She is also committed to exploring cultural Intellectual Property Rights and social phenomena from a media perspective through an interdisciplinary approach.
Her research interests include:
- Cultural Intangible Heritage
- Cultural Sustainability through Crafts
- Digital Research and Innovation
- Conservation and Preservation
- Cultural Appropriation vs. Cultural Appreciation
- Symbolism and the Imaginary in Fashion Archetypes
- Textile Anthropology
- Intellectual Property Rights in Cultural Sustainability
- Sociology/Anthropology
This practice-based, multidisciplinary PhD program bridges the fields of textiles, crafts, innovation, technology, digitalization, materials, museums, conservation/restoration, safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, anthropology, sociology/psychology, and legal rights.