Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019

Currently there is a trend for the digital in archives, collections and museums of fashion. Not only are museums digitalizing and giving free online access to their collections, but new types of digital fashion archives and collections are emerging thanks to the advent of the Internet and the proliferation of social media. This article explores this shift, functioning as both an introduction to this thematic issue and as a mapping of the different transformations lived by archives, museums and collections in the age of the digital. How has the digital effected a different understanding of fashion in museums, archives and collections? What types of challenges is the digital bringing to museum practitioners and scholars? In the following sections, my aim is to emphasize some areas of transformation, highlighting four contested fields: (1) the dichotomies between archives/museums and the digital in relation to issues of access and fashion heritage; (2) the shift from material to digital archives and the effects of practices of digitalization of fashion archives; (3) the emergence of new ephemeralities and the utopic practices of conserving online fashion; and (4) the expansion of the understanding of fashion archives and the consequent effects on users’ agency and research practices. Drawing on digital studies, archive theory, museum studies, heritage studies and fashion studies, I reflect on these shifts, contextualizing the articles published in this thematic issue and revisiting the scope of some of the projects I developed in collaboration with the EU-funded project Europeana Fashion.

The term ‘curation’ has migrated from the museum into everyday life, particularly on social media, and this speaks to a shifting understanding of people’s engagement with arts, culture and commodities. ‘Curation’ accentuates the participatory nature of social media, as users co-produce, edit and share content online. The term also alludes to social media’s capacity as archive and exhibition space for the documentation, display, collection and recollection of looks and styles, experiences, events and emotions. The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) in New York was one of the first museums to acknowledge the increasing impact of participatory media with the 2007 exhibition blog.mode: addressing fashion. This established a connection between the museum collection and the fashion blog as two different forms of fashion archiving, display and discourse. Today, the use of social media and the museum visitor’s own image production (for example, for #artselfies) is a component of curatorial practice, increasing the appeal of fashion exhibitions and new forms of engagement with museums and museum objects.

By reviewing selected examples of fashion museums and archives in the United States – two major museums and two independent online archives – this article explores some of the convergences between the material culture of fashion, mediatization and musealization, including fashion curation beyond the museum, and cultural memory-making through ephemeral media.

The digitalization of cultural heritage has become an increasingly common practice among museums and online organizations. Many heritage digitalization projects are driven by an approach called ‘sharing is caring’; that is, the purpose of digitalization is accessibility, making what is considered to be valuable cultural heritage an accessible resource for everyone, while stimulating identity production and sympathy for that heritage. The digitalization of fashion heritage can be seen as part of this movement. In recent years, Europeana Fashion (launched in 2015) and the Google Cultural Institute’s Google Arts and Culture project, We Wear Culture (launched in 2017), have become major online platforms for the distribution of fashion heritage. The aim of the present article is to explore and understand how fashion heritage is performed by these two online initiatives and what constitutes fashion heritage in this context. The article is based on an explorative analysis of the two digital sites, interviews with the managers of each initiative, as well as insights from existing studies of cultural heritage and digitalization.

Digital platforms propose themselves to be repositories of objects, translating the actual archive into a digital architecture made of files and data. However, in becoming digital data, the very materiality of fashion objects changes, leading to the formation of structures that preserve and organize these objects. This article considers digital archives dealing with fashion, aiming to capture the nuances of the digitization and opening up of collections in relation to definitions of the fashion archive and of fashion itself. It looks at the ways in which institutions dealing with fashion heritage have relied on digital technologies to archive data and make them available to wider audiences. The article does this through the examination of three case studies: Open Fashion, the platform developed by fashion museum MoMu (ModeMuseum Provincie Antwerpen) in Antwerp, together with Artesis Hogeschool Antwerpen; Europeana Fashion, a platform gathering digital data linked to fashion heritage from more than thirty institutions around Europe; and the Digital Archive of Armani/Silos, a corporate archive open to the public but searchable only from within the exhibition space in Milan. These three projects will first be described, then their digital platforms and strategies will be analysed in order to evaluate both their positive aspects and the risks involved in setting up and maintaining these digital depots. Ultimately, the main objectives of the article are to evaluate both the spaces and the boundaries that these archives have created and to understand the ways in which access generated by digitization channels either enables or restricts interpretation of fashion objects.

Since its beginnings in the mid-1980s as an interdisciplinary field of study indebted to its more entrenched sister disciplines of costume studies and dress history, fashion studies has witnessed scholars adopt a number of innovative methods and approaches, stemming from fields as disparate as economic history and ethnology. Even amid this diversity of approaches, however, the object – and more specifically, the garment – continues to hold a place of special importance in the minds and research of fashion studies scholars. What happens, however, when the material record is lacking or absent? What methods and resources can fashion scholars employ to reconstruct a history of fashion without fashion?

With my doctoral research into the history of the stoutwear industry – the early-twentieth-century predecessor to what is today known as plus-size fashion – serving as a case study, this article will examine how the digital may enable scholars to recover histories of fashion; retrace historical self-fashioning practices; retrieve lost memories; and reconstruct bodies that have been lost due to conventional practices of conservation, collecting and archiving. In addition to describing my process and findings, this article will more generally consider the possibilities, but also the perils, of conducting historical fashion research in the digital realm.

Fashion conservators face documentation challenges specific to the very nature of fashion objects, including their fragile and ephemeral materialities, three-dimensionality and inherently mutable forms. Conservation documentation is, in this sense, central to the definition of an object in a museum, moving beyond its practical and bureaucratic function of capturing an object’s current state and the treatment undertaken to address its problems.

This article presents an insight into the work of the conservator and reflects on the different issues connected to digital and non-digital documentation practices within a fashion museum. It explores the ways in which a fashion conservator generates technical documentation to capture information regarding the methods of an object’s creation and what might have been done to it before it entered the museum. What is this archive of conservation documentation and how is it made? Who uses it and what do they do with it? How do conservators document fashion and are they successful in capturing its temporal values? This article provides answers to these questions, exploring an overlooked practice and readdressing the agency of the fashion conservator in the definition of fashion in the museum.

Archaeology of Fashion Film, Central Saint Martins, London, 6 July 2018

Helena Rubinstein: L’Aventure de la beauté, Museé d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme, Paris, 20 March–25 August 2019