Fashion archive abilities. The impact of digital technologies on the development and research of fashion heritage

Fashion heritage—the collective memory embodied in garments, accessories, images, and the history, know-how, and craft techniques behind them—has traditionally been preserved through museums, archives, and exhibitions but, in recent years, has been transformed and reinterpreted in its meanings and means through advances in digital technologies. In 2011, Vogue launched the first digital archive of their American magazine, revolutionizing the process of fashion research and preservation of fashion heritage. What was once a tedious process of searching bound issues for references, advertisements, and editorials became a simple search by keyword. Ten years later, in 2021, the Center for Fashion Curation at University Arts London launched the Exhibiting Fashion website as an extension of the book Exhibiting Fashion: Before and After 1971 , which was published in 2014, and its archive continues to grow each year and with each new fashion exhibition. Museum collections have similarly invested in digitizing their holdings in the hopes of facilitating access for researchers and the public alike through keyword searches. In each case, the physical archive has been the impetus for creating an online presence and the progression from physical to digital has been fairly straightforward, where the holdings inform the parameters of online representation through the use of schematic language. However, there are also examples where the archive has been imagined or reimagined through the needs or experience of exhibitions, opening a new sphere of possibilities at the level of conservation of, research on/through, and engagement with fashion heritage. This article considers case studies in which an exhibition informed the process of digitally integrating a fashion archive (and vice versa ) and the ways in which digital tools can be used to enable different ways of activating the intrinsic knowledge shared by fashion archives, generating new knowledge related to the fashion archive’s materials and contents. Case studies demonstrate how digital technologies reawaken and recover lost aspects of fashion heritage, enable new forms of access and reinterpretation, and showcase and preserve craftsmanship and production processes knowledge that might otherwise be lost, in practice and memory. In light of this, the article critically analyzes and systematizes the abilities of integrated fashion archives and exhibitions into an original three-level interpretative model (Augmented Fashion Archive Abilities Model) as a framework for understanding how digital technologies can preserve the tangible dimensions of fashion; unlock its intangible dimension related to experiences, narratives, techniques, and processes; and innovate the engagement of the public and stakeholders with fashion heritage. Digital technologies offer the opportunity to layer digital experiences and data onto historical artifacts and narratives, and make fashion heritage evolve from a static repository into a hybrid platform where its identity and contents are continually reinterpreted and reactivated, requiring new strategies to support accessibility, sustainable preservation, and engaging forms of presentation and education.