FASHION ARCHIVE AS METAMEDIUM unfolding design knowledge through digital technologies

Abstract

Currently, the issue of archival fashion is mainly to explore emergent methods and digital technologies' application to foster innovation in terms of activation, knowledge-sharing and knowledge-generation related to archival artefacts. The complex archival collections consist of a plurality of artefacts, meanings, and practices interconnected through technologies that make the archive a knowledge-generating process.Narrowing the study on fashion archives, these are characterised by a significant heterogeneity of materials preserved by companies, private collectors and cultural institutions as evidence of heritage values, design activities, manufacturing culture, and creative processes embedded in artefacts and intangible know-how.This inner knowledge inherently linked to archival fashion stays permanently implicit in the artefact and usually cannot be accessed by public audiences. Even though Cultural Institutions currently deploy technologies to democratise three-dimensional garment explorations, there are still rare attempts that operate with digital technologies to allow an in-depth study of the creative process and technical know-how lying behind fashion heritage.In light of this, the paper explores the Reverse Engineering (RE) methods applied to fashion archives to access and unlock the implicit features and techniques embedded in archival fashion to facilitate knowledge-sharing and knowledge-generation processes in exploring culture-intensive artefacts through digital technology application.Through the explorations of case studies in the fashion archival context, the paper will focus on augmented fruition practices to derive knowledge from the reading of the archive itself, starting with RE and reflecting on virtual and augmented integration to represent and disseminate fashion culture with the final aim of activating the vast inner fashion knowledge patrimony.Specific considerations will regard the potentialities of digital integration in fashion archives in terms of (1) the different nature of the knowledge unfolded through RE depending on peculiar aspects of archival artefacts; (2) technologies used to encode/decode inner knowledge; (3) the future digital directions related to archival practices and experiences derived from them, also in light of the changes in design languages when technological approaches hybridise those of humans.