Bunad in a Multicultural Norway

This program is in conjunction with the exhibit Dressing with Purpose: Belonging and Resistance in Scandinavia

Dress helps us fashion identity, history, community, and place. Dress has been harnessed as a metaphor for both progress and stability, the exotic and the utopian, oppression and freedom, belonging and resistance. Dressing with Purpose examines three Scandinavian dress traditions—Swedish folkdräkt, Norwegian bunad, and Sámi gákti—and traces their development during two centuries of social and political change across northern Europe.

Photo credit: Camilla Rossing in Beltestakk for East Telemark. Photo by Laila Durán, courtesy of NBF.