The importance of being Fashion Heritage
Fashion is really a strange topic: we have dressed up every day, from the beginning of human history, but we needed thousands years to understand its artistic value. Now that a rising interest in fashion has gone hand in hand with digitization and the Internet, Europeana Fashion plays a unique role.
Nowadays it is quite usual to see fashion and contemporary art walking together in innovative exhibitions. But it was something quite shocking and totally new in 1997 when Germano Celant, art curator, organized the first Biennale di Firenze dedicated to “Art and Fashion” and their relationship from the beginning of the last century.
One of his most interesting critical reflections, following the Biennale, was that they serve in more than a way each other purposes as both are dealing with creativity: while fashion gets inspired with art, art learns the reproducibility from fashion. It’s not so difficult to understand how, since then, art came on catwalks and fashion moved from the shop window to the display case as an art piece.
In more recent years a further step has been taken to understand the importance of fashion heritage and its cultural relevance not only in museal collections, but where fashion itself is created: in the fashion brands and in their archives.
Fashion heritage has turned up to be much more than an asset of a fashion brand: it is something that deals with its own identity: Brand archives do not only keep a number of documents and old clothes, they cherish the memory of the founder’s dream, they focus on keeping alive the identity of the brand and its values.
Heritage just means that fashion has got a past, a history, and if we recognize its importance in the social and economic development, we need to established highlights in this history.
In recent years an increasingly large audience has developed a growing interest in fashion content for research, learning and leisure. The digital era and the development and wide availability of new technologies have proven to be fundamental in allowing many institutions to face and solve their different conservation and access issues.
Moreover the Internet has become the principal source of information for the fashion world and industry through a wide range of websites, portals, blogs, social networks, etc. The virtual dimension has become a fundamental territory for the creation, diffusion, consumption and study of fashion, requiring a global recognition. The difficulty of collecting and studying the enormous amount of knowledge produced within the Internet has become an urgency of the contemporary study of fashion.
However, there is an evident lack of structured, easy searchable and reliable contents. At present, searching these digital materials is difficult and is likely to become even more complicated as digital content on fashion continues to grow in a scattered way.
In addition to disclosing and showing to the largest possible audience the richness of European fashion heritage, a project about fashion heritage should work as a dictionary, it should analyse the products of fashion, to give them a name, to understand what they mean, to help understanding the differences in levels of quality and relevance.
This is the ambition of the Europeana Fashion project and its consortium, which represents the leading European institutions and collections in the fashion domain, gathered together to build a thematic fashion aggregator, while putting a strong emphasis on the quality and the granularity of data, reflecting the versatility of fashion as a medium.
Fashion is a langue, can you imagine what does it mean to write an Encyclopédie about celle langue? It means acting the unique opportunity to present high quality fashion content not only to the general public, but especially to creatives, researchers, all the professionals involved in the multiform fashion domain.
Check out the article at the bottom of this list for some tips on how to click source move the needle