The pictures of Ukrainian refugees fill us with horror and sympathy. We see women, children and elderly people with bags and suitcases who will soon become part of everyday life in Denmark. Our clothes look the same. As a result of globalization, we all wear the same jeans, puffer jackets, knit caps, cotton T-shirts and sweatshirts, but our living conditions are worlds apart, and we do not speak the same language. The image of a refugee has become a person with a suitcase, someone who owns little else besides the clothes on her back and a few hastily packed belongings. Perhaps she picked a few special items from her closet at the last minute to take with her as mementos; or maybe her hurried selection was random.

In any case, these hasty wardrobe choices become meaningful, because the clothes are a tangible link to a different time. In a way that is difficult to put into words, clothes provide a sense of security and a sensory connection to important memories. This question of what happens when someone has been forced to leave their homeland and now has to navigate new and alien dress codes and customs was the focal point of two research projects: THREAD (The Textile Hub for Refugee Empowerment, Employment, and Entrepreneurship Advancement in Denmark), supported by Innovation Fund Denmark (2017–19), which in turn led to the EU-funded Creative Europe project The Fabric of My Life (2019–22).

This article will include research insights from both projects, which included wardrobe studies of women refugees, textile workshops and talks, courses in running an independent business, municipal integration policies and practices, podcasts on memories about clothes and textiles in 12 languages and textile artworks co-created in Paris and Kolding.

A peek at the clothes worn by hyphenated Danes

In an asylum for Syrian refugees in Denmark we spoke to young women who told us they missed Syrian jeans: ‘They just fit better than other jeans.’ Anthropologist Mark Vacher calls this diasporic longing. We talked about missing clothes, wearing the same clothes from home in order to hold on to one’s identity and memories, encountering the huge amounts of used clothes donated by Danes and wearing clothes that once belonged to a stranger.

These conversations were carried by frustration and sorrow over politics, war, integration laws and hopelessness, but they also contained openings of joy. Talking about clothes also means talking about life, parties, fashion and bodies – a different story than the one we often hear about or from refugees and immigrants. There are many scientific angles on these conversations, which we have continued to explore and which offer new knowledge and perspectives to us as researchers.

In THREAD, the design researchers set out to explore how a refugee, migrant or hyphenated Dane integrates their past, present and a notion of a future in Denmark in the clothes they wear. What wardrobe choices does the person make every morning, and how can clothing mediate their adaptation to Danish society and the need to preserve their own style and identity? We visited persons with a refugee, migrant or hyphenated background to interview them about their wardrobe and clothing habits.

We peered into closets, suitcases and bags full of clothes in attics and sheds and under beds, where old and new items are stored and organized. Many described deliberately putting a damper on their love of colours and affinity for sparkling surfaces and jewellery in order to adapt to the Danish style, which is described as dark and dull.

This point typically came up in conversations about everyday life in Denmark, such as picking up the children from school or preschool, going to the supermarket, taking the bus or going to work or Danish lessons. On the other hand, the women explained they might compensate with colours and more festive clothes at get-togethers, when they would often dress to the nines, usually in non-Scandinavian style. The research team was shown mobile telephone photos of sequins, draped and layered fabric, sophisticated turban wrapping and striking make-up as well as clothes that were typically bought abroad or modified, for example with the addition of rhinestones to maximize the dazzling effect.

These pieces were usually bought on holidays in the homeland, by relatives abroad, through online shopping or in Danish charity shops, which have a wider selection of colours and patterns than conventional Danish shops. Specific requirements concerning cover, silhouettes and combinations presented many of the women with challenges when they sought to convert typical Danish clothes to match other norms. Young fashion-conscious Muslim women with roots in Denmark, on the other hand, are highly articulate in their visual identity in relation to Scandinavian ideals, global Muslim fashion and covering.

Other women, especially ones who had recently fled to Denmark, used their clothes from home as a way to find calm and a sense of security and expressed concern about how long these cherished pieces would last. Thus, the data collected by the design researchers underscore that in a globalized world, we are going to need more diverse clothes, clothes that last and which can be altered and repaired.

Uniform, disposable clothes are no use when it comes to expressing personal diversity through our identity and using clothes as carriers of memories and emotions. This is relevant knowledge, both to the fashion industry and in relation to the green transition.

(Women’s) life stories told through clothes

Deutsches Textilmuseum Krefeld has knowledge about family memories and stories related to clothing. Grandchildren and heirs hand in worn items of clothing to the collection accompanied by the family story about them, for example that this was the last thing their great-grandfather was able to take with him out of Poland at the end of the Second World War or that these were the clothes the family took with them when they fled the East Germany.

Descendants of Turkish immigrants who came to Germany to take part in the Wirtschaftswunder hand in clothing representing the family’s Turkish/Kurdish traditions. This is 20th-century German history told through clothing as well as intimate, personal family history, often related to the women’s life. How can this be preserved and presented?

In addition to the design researchers’ detailed interviews and the museum curators’ collection of old clothes, in The Fabric of My Life we used our smartphones to record short clothing-related stories: Tell me, in your own language, about a piece of clothing that means a lot to you. Describe it. Describe your feelings about it. Tell us the stories associated with it. These guiding questions were also posted on social media in Danish, English, Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish along with an invitation to people to share their clothing stories. We collected 78 stories from all over Europe in 12 different languages, which are now available on iTunes and other platforms. You can also record your own clothing story and share it on the platform https://www.thefabricofmylife.com/

This dimension is primarily gendered, and indeed, most of the members of the research team are women. Five years into these projects, it is our conclusion that it is easier to have a conversation about clothes with female informants. Whatever the cause may be, it proved effortless to have women informants engage in articulate, lively and multifaceted conversations about their clothes.

Another gendered insight is that many people’s stories about clothing are about the women in the family, especially mothers and grandmothers. Most informants talk about clothes from their maternal grandmothers, a jumper knit by their mum, an embroidery granny taught them to make and so forth. At this level, the stories almost become doubly private and doubly veiled, as ordinary citizens – mainly the oft-overlooked source constituted by ‘women’ – talk about contributions to their stories by other overlooked historical sources in the form of impermanent and unrecognized monuments: textiles.

This gives rise to a parallel and alternative web of family stories spun from bonds between women and dealing with such topics as learning to sew, embroider and knit and about worn, ‘banal’ things people save because they hold meaning, even when they no longer serve a practical purpose. Clothes tell the women’s stories, shaped by personal encounters, common plans and daily life. This inspired us to imagine a new way of writing History (with a capital H), a way based on textile and clothes that shows us the global history of Eurasia through the clothing-related stories of the silk roads and the history of all of Europe seen through workrooms, linen growing, the processing of wool, vegetable dyes, the impact of colonialism on the production and use of clothes and home-based contributions to the textile economy. This gives us a completely different image of the planet’s economic development, labour, technology, business and legislation.

Insights into the cultural heritage and significance of crafts

In the collaboration between researchers, cultural institutions and women refugees, we sought to engage in two-way communication and learning. Even though – or perhaps because – we met in a very unequal situation with unequal living conditions, we sought to enter into collaborative exchanges, where we were interested in the knowledge possessed by the new residents.

We tried to turn the situation on its head by choosing themes on which the women refugees and migrants were the experts, and we, the members of the research team, were there to listen and learn. Women refugees and migrants have a good network of other women, and they speak languages and dialects that have not previously been included in textile research, including Arabic dialects, Kurdish, Farsi and Tigrinya. In her research, terminologist Susanne Lervad has long been raising the need for additional multilingual glossaries and databases of textile terms. This is a complex linguistic and semantic field, and dictionaries outside Europe are still characterized by the values applied by Western-educated men in the study and documentation of languages.

At the level of dialects, this problem is even more pronounced. Terms describing clothing, textile, crafts, techniques, knitting and tools are absent from mainstream dictionaries. Lervad abandoned the traditional methods of terminology research as she was unable to apply a text-based approach. Instead, she interviewed her informants while they were knitting or sewing together, talking about stitches, needles, knots, threads and so forth. They would draw tools and techniques or find films online and use arrows to indicate terms and concepts. Most of the informants had no particular knowledge of crafts; some Eritrean women had lived in refugee camps for years, and the Syrian refugees were young and embedded in the modern fashion industry culture, but they had parents, grandparents and others whose knowledge they could draw on. Some informants contacted older female friends and family members to identify additional technical terms. A rich vocabulary reflecting women’s experiences was gathered in a creative explorative process that also served to elevate the women’s cultures and knowledge.

What the many refugee women taught us was not limited to terminology. They also provided insights into techniques and the mastery of textile crafts. Given the availability of cheap industrial products, generally, we no longer need to be able to alter or repair clothes, and much of the knowledge about material properties and usages that was commonplace just a few decades ago is now lost. That is one of the main barriers in the green transition in the fashion industry, which calls on us to manage our resources in a manner that is closer to the more modest approaches of earlier times: we need to use things for a long time, we need to reuse and recycle, we need to use everything, we need to use things up.

Textile has made a comeback as an acknowledged material, technique and culture. In international art, especially in connection with conflicts, textile appears to occupy a unique role. Countless exhibitions use clothes and textile to express identity, gender, migration and life. The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei curated the art project Laundromat in a New York gallery. The artwork consisted of clothes left behind by Syrian refugees in a camp in Greece. In another example, in an exhibition of historical items of clothing from the refugee crisis in 1922, the Museum of the History of Greek Costume in Athens included a black dress that had belonged to a woman refugee who had drowned off the Greek island of ​​Lesbos in 2017. These works of art raise crucial questions about the intimate physical experience of displacement and fleeing and about how those experiences may be communicated and represented in museum displays.

In Denmark too, textile is finding its way back into the art museums, as described by Karen Grøn, the director of Trapholt, in Formkraft.

Not everything went according to plan in this research project. COVID-19 made it difficult to meet, both locally and across borders. The refugee camps in particular were hard-hit, and we were unable to work with them. However, for some women, the lockdown gave them time to embroider at home, and the project provided a sense of meaning during the long time spent waiting and in isolation.

Ethically, it is a challenge that we, as researchers, come into this context with our safe and secure lives and regular income, seeking to work with people who are in a hopeless situation, with no real income, and mainly consumed by the daily challenges of official systems, permits, paperwork, social workers and so on.

One of the insights that we in the research team take away from this is a recognition of the wealth of stories that are told through clothes and crafts across different cultures. How becoming would it not be for us as a society to fully acknowledge the competencies and rich clothing-related cultural history we encountered thanks to all the women who contributed to our research.