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 Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), particularly textiles and crafting. Her research aims to raise awareness of cultural sustainability within and through fashion by decoding the symbolism and narratives embedded in Romanian traditional costumes. By critically examining the consequences of cultural appropriation, she aims to uncover how traditional attire can foster new forms of sustainability in fashion, influencing craft culture, promoting transnational networking, fostering pre-/post-colonialism values, and facilitating psychological repair.
As a practitioner, Elena works with various textile specialists, artisans, and Romanian Communities, which include key points of observation of the material culture, particularly traditional costume and related fabrics, classification markers, authenticity, and other symbolic dimensions. Using interdisciplinary methodology in her research, Elena also brings technological tools of digital research to create new perspectives on cultural heritage collections, preservation, and research activities.
To explore narrative, community, and pattern modernly, her textile practice is based on hand techniques. Her research focus is on historical, ethnographic, and folk textiles, crafts, and traditions. Textiles' narrative potential and ability to serve as communication tools and archives of society or personal history pique her curiosity. The use of colour, textile screen printing techniques, dying, weaving, and hand embroidery are essential components of her work.
With an academic background in humanities and experience in data-driven cultural research, she works to develop a digital project that enhances accessibility and public engagement with heritage collections. She will bring a unique blend of hands-on craft expertise and digital research skills, significantly contributing to traditional and born-digital heritage.
Elena has a diverse academic and educational background. She is also engaged in exploring the cultural Intellectual Property Rights Initiative and social phenomena from the media perspective through an interdisciplinary perspective.
Her research areas include:
Cultural Intangible Heritage
Digital Research and Innovation
Conservation and preservation
Cultural sustainability through crafts
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 research degree intersects the fields of textile and crafting, innovation, technology and digitalization, materials, museums, conservation/restoration, safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, anthropology, sociology/psychology, and legal rights.