Dr Ellen Sampson

Assistant Professor

School: Design Arts and Creative Industries

Ellen Sampson is an artist and material culture researcher whose work explores the relationships between clothing and bodily experience, both in museums and archives and in everyday life. Using film, photography, and writing, she examines the ways that garmnets become records of lived experience: how people and the things they wear become entwined. Sampson has a PhD from the Royal College of Art, London and was 2018/19 Polaire Weissman fellow at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and 2019/20 Professorial Fellow at University for the Creative Arts.

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Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

A Museum of Uncollected Things

At a point when what belongs in museum fashion collections is increasingly scrutinised and debated, this project explores not what these collections contain, but what is absent from them: what is missing, lost, or was never acquired. Dress is central to human experience, a medium through which individual and collective identities and histories are constructed and performed. Thus, museum clothing collections are sites through which multiple histories are communicated and defined. Yet these collections are only ever partial reflections of dress history; shaped by past collecting policies often predicated upon hegemonic and Eurocentric definitions of fashion and changing understandings of what merits preservation. Thus, historic clothing collections are rarely reflective of the communities they now serve; a dissonance which can reduce engagement amongst communities underrepresented in museum collections and perpetuate ideas that fashionable historic dress was the preserve of the few.

As museums increasingly work to broaden and decolonise their collections through revised collecting policies, historic dress presents a particular challenge, because the fragile and disposable nature of clothing means that uncollected historic garments often do not survive. Consequently, museums need novel approaches to the problem of uncollected and now uncollectible historic dress.

Working with London Museum’s Dress and Textile Collection this project explores how absences inform the ways audiences and museum staff engage with, manage, and care for museum fashion collections. In turn, it asks how museums can address these absences without accessioning new objects and through that engage new and broader audiences. As such the project does not seek to replace or recreate absent garments, but instead asks how making visible what cannot and never will be exhibited, can help us to tell different clothing stories, ones reflective of fashion's diverse histories.

This Project is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number UKRI2104]

Enclothed Knowledges: Practice-Based Fashion Research Network

This project will develop an international network which maps and interrogates the value, knowledge, and methodological innovations brought to fashion studies through practice-based research. Through a partnership between Northumbria University and Parsons, The New School (New York) and a series of collaborative knowledge exchange activities between an international cohort of practice-based researchers, activists museum and industry professionals, the project asks how methodologies of making, wearing, and performing can expand upon existing research practices in fashion studies and, in turn, broaden access to and participation in the field.

At a point when both fashion studies and the fashion industry are at critical points of change and must confront the environmental impacts and systemic biases which underscore the fashion industry, the central aim of this research network is to explore what practice-based research can do: how research through practice can address and develop innovative solutions to challenges facing fashion and the field. Over 18 months, the network will map current fashion practice-based research, identifying themes, commonalities and opportunities for further collaboration. Over the course of four workshops participants will develop a practice-based project and write a reflective chapter which outlines their methods and the innovations and knowledge that their work produces. Central to this process will be the development of an open and iterative peer-review model, ensuring both transparency and rigour.

This project is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/Y006321/1]

The Afterlives Of Clothes

'The Afterlives Of Clothes', was initially developed while on a Fellowship at the Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2018-19) and an artist’s residency at Bard Graduate Center, New York (2019- 2020). The project the project brings together archival research with auto-ethnographic writing, image, and filmmaking to explore the affect of damaged garments in museum collections. Focusing on accessories, objects which Jones and Stallybrass term “detachable parts” of the self, it seeks to highlight the bodily practices of wearing and maintaining clothes, clothing as lived and embodied experience, in objects where little or no biographical evidence exists. Asking how in a field where absent bodies and narratives are already understood as problematic, these traces might re-contextualize objects and bring into focus bodies and narratives which would otherwise be excluded from display. The Afterlives of Clothes will be published by Bloomsbury in 2026.

Curative Things

Curative Things was a collaborative project organised by the Thing Power Research Group (Leeds Arts University), Thinking Through Things (Wellcome Trust Funded Project, Durham University), and Fashion Research Network.

Bringing together new scholarship at the intersections of medical humanities, fashion research and visual arts practice, this Project explores the relationship between wearable objects and human health, with particular emphasis on how artists are creatively responding to and rethinking these relations. Wearable objects might include, but are not limited to: clothing, footwear, headwear, jewellery, implants, prostheses or physical aids; things that have the potential to restrict, contain, embrace or extend the body; things that we wear and things that wear us

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Close Looking: Some Reflections on Methods and Practice based Research, Sampson, E. 29 Apr 2025, Re:Dressing American Fashion, New Haven, United States, Yale University Press
Leaky bodies and Intentional accidents: Liquids, Pourousness and the Fashioned Body, Sampson, E. 1 Sep 2025, Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion, London, SPBH Editions
Liquid bodies: Stains, Evidence, and Trace, Sampson, E., Woolley, D. 2 Jun 2025
On Not Fixing Things: Ambivalence and Reparation in the Fashion Industry, Sampson, E. 10 Nov 2025, In: Fashion Theory - Journal of Dress Body and Culture
Portfolio, Sampson, E. Sep 2025, Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion, London, SPBH Editions
Postmortem life: thanobots, digital twins and feminist immortality, Pitsillides, S., Sampson, E. 30 Jul 2025, In: AI and Society
Rummaging: Losing and Finding Myself in Clothes, Sampson, E. 30 Apr 2025, Dressays, London, United Kingdom, Bloomsbury

Professional Activity

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Organising a conference, workshop, ...: Practice Based Fashion Research Network: Workshop 2 Methods 2025
Organising a conference, workshop, ...: Practice Based Fashion Research Network: Workshop 1 Knowledges 2025
Examination: PhD Examiner: Rachel Jackson, The Autoptic Eye: A Methodology for Drawing Worn Clothes and Narrating the Past in Collections of Textiles and Dress, Arts University Bournemouth 2025
Participating in a conference, workshop, ...: Border Control 2024
Examination: PhD Examiner Rachel Cummings The Information Behavior of Fashion Students in the UK, City Univesity of London. 2024
Examination: PhD Examiner Slivia Bombardini The Shoplifter’s Clothes: Technologies for a Feminist Practice at the turn of the 20th Century, Goldsmiths University 2024
Oral presentation: Liquid bodies: Seepages, Stains, and Interminglings 2023
Invited talk: Why wornness: imperfection, embodiment and the radical power of the worn. 2023
Oral presentation: Shoetopia 2022
Editorial work: International Journal of Sustainable Fashion & Textiles (Journal) 2022

PGR Supervision

Isabel Mundigo-Moore Love-Clothes: Aging, Womanhood and Feelings in UK Wardrobes Start Date: 01/10/2021 End Date: 07/08/2025
Brooke Stephens Locating Lace in the Landscape of Desire: Mapping the Hidden Histories of the Antique Lace Trade through the Blackborne Collection at The Bowes Museum Start Date: 01/10/2025 End Date: 17/10/2025
Nikola Markoviç Clothes and Familial Sensory Postmemories in the Balkans: Exploring (Post)Memory-Based Design/Archival Practice Start Date: 08/01/2024 End Date: 17/10/2025
Nikola Markoviç Ghost-Dressing: Conjuring, Re-Embodying, and Animating Spectral Garments of the Family Archive Start Date: 08/01/2024
Brooke Stephens Locating Lace in the Landscape of Desire: Mapping the Hidden Histories of the Antique Lace Trade through the Blackborne Collection at The Bowes Museum Start Date: 01/10/2025