Magali An Berthon

Professor Berthon is a French-Vietnamese textile and dress historian focusing on the modern and contemporary history of Southeast Asian dress and textiles, with a specific interest in the intimate politics of dress and silk textile crafts in Cambodia.

From January 2022 to July 2024, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral research fellow attached to the Centre for Textile Research at the University of Copenhagen. Her research project TEX-KR explored the surviving textile practices, production, and heritage during and after the Khmer Rouge regime, relying on the study of clothing, textiles, and archives at the National Museum of Cambodia and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia.

She currently continues to explore Cambodian dress and textiles practices in conflict and post-conflict times.

With experience in textile design, exhibition curation, and documentary filmmaking, she earned a PhD in History of Design from the Royal College of Art of London with her thesis titled ‘Silk and Post-Conflict Cambodia: Embodied Practices and Global and Local Dynamics of Heritage and Knowledge Transference (1991–2018)’ in 2021.

Research areas and areas of expertise:

• global fashion and textile history
• politics of dress
• Cambodian modern history
• materialities of conflict
• crafts & making processes
• sustainable fashion
• decolonial praxis