This study examines the Dior-Bihor case (2017) through the lens of contemporary fashionology, appropriation, and epistemological hierarchy within the global fashion system. The vest from Romania's Bihor region appropriated by Dior serves as an example of a process where form is detached from memory and authorship shifts from the local community to the fashion center. The paper employs concepts of the empty center, semi-periphery, and radical imagination to explain the structural mechanisms of symbolic and epistemological expropriation. The response by the Bihor Couture initiative demonstrates how a costume-based resistance can reaffirm collective knowledge, authorship, and social production relations, offering an alternative model of fashion authorship. The Dior-Bihor case thus illuminates tensions between aesthetics, power, and memory, opening space for critical and epistemological intervention in fashion.
Ewa Stojičić-Katarzyna (Thu,) studied this question.