Fashion Archives Research Articles

Westminster Menswear Archive

The Westminster Menswear Archive (WMA) was established in 2016 as a specialized teaching and research collection focused on menswear. Addressing the historical underrepresentation of menswear in fashion archives, the WMA has rapidly grown into a vital resource for both academic and industry research. This article explores the archive’s origins, collection strategy, and its pivotal role in supporting design education, research, and industry engagement. Through key acquisitions, including garments from designers like Alexander McQueen and Massimo Osti, the WMA highlights menswear’s diverse evolution, from military uniforms to high fashion. The archive has also contributed to significant exhibitions, including Invisible Men (2019) and Umbro 100: Sportswear x Fashion (2024). This paper outlines the challenges the WMA faces, such as managing rapid collection growth and expanding digital access, while underscoring its critical role in shaping the future of menswear studies.

Imagined possibilities and bodily feelings embedded in personal fashion archives

This article examines the significance of the body and its sensory and embodied aspects associated with a historical milieu and set of practices associated with ‘rave’ subculture and its relationship to fashion creativity. It focuses on a personal fashion archive that documents menswear designed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Using an autoethnographic approach, the study investigates how the design of the garments in the archive was shaped by ways of experiencing and understanding the body that integrated the embodied experiences of moving and dancing with electronic music, the embodied experience of dressing, and the embodied experiences of designing men’s fashion in the years that followed. While rave and electronic dance music cultures received considerable scholarly attention in the mid- to late 1990s, less attention was devoted to men’s fashion and the interaction between fashion design, embodied experience and the rave sensoria. Moreover, while this study lays at the intersection rave and electronic dance music culture, fashion and design, all of which are understood to have European and North American origins, the article considers the way those practices took a unique shape within an Australian context. The contribution aims to provide insight into fashion as part of situated and embodied practices, that take place in local milieus, and the way fashion creativity can be understood not as surface ‘ripples’ moving out from global fashion centres or trickle-down versions of ‘authentic’ fashion developed elsewhere, but as fashion creativity, shaped by global forces, energies, and technologies, and embodied and enacted via local manifestations.

Fashion archive fervour: the critical role of fashion archives in preserving, curating, and narrating fashion

ABSTRACT Fashion items and artefacts across the 19th and 20th centuries were once considered unworthy of placement in museums and archives on account of their perishable nature and their association with the shallow pleasures of low culture. The perceived fragile and ephemeral nature of fashion garments and accessories has been re-evaluated with material objects now considered worth saving for multiple purposes and uses. Awareness of the high social, cultural, economic, and historic value of physical fashion relics has resulted in the trend for fashion designers, brands, and museums to collate, create, and manage fashion archives. The article analyses the importance for both industry and consumer of preserving and accessing fashion archives in the 21st century in both digital and traditional ways. It highlights the benefits of collating a holistic multi-modal archive by combining material and textual cultural objects in various forms to portray and contextualize the lived social experience. A case study will analyse a selected educational fashion archive based in postcolonial Hong Kong. The contemporary fashion archive’s role is evaluated from the perspective of archivist and user regarding contested issues such as commercialization, curatorial objectivity, or controlled access, while evaluating future directions for the fashion archive as ultimate style repository.

Disrupting the Fashion Archive: The Serendipity of Manufacturing Mistakes

Literature has documented how designers use fashion archives as explorative inspiration for designing and cutting fashion collections. (Clarke and De La Haye 2014; Rhys 2011; Riegels Melchior and Svensson 2014; Murphy 2011). This derivative research can inform choices of fabric, silhouette, shape and the skills and technologies employed in the execution of the collection. This paper describes a case study that asked design students to identify mistakes in manufacture, in selected garments from the Yorkshire Fashion Archive held at University of Leeds. It explores the potential for accidental or intentional mistakes to be a source of inspiration for fashion design. There is a lack of literature that describes how fashion designers have been inspired by manufacturing mistakes in archive garments, which the research seeks to redress. A broader literature review emphasised how definitions of human mistakes have stimulated ideas and resulted in innovation in different disciplines and contexts and these ideas are transposed into a fashion context within this study. Some of the manufacturing mistakes identified in the archive garments included: sleeves sewn in the wrong way, incorrect stitch tension, using patterns that were unsuitable for a design, cutting fabric without making sure pattern pieces were straight, using the wrong interfacing or no interfacing at all, etc. These findings informed the design and eventual manufacture of a collection of contemporary garments. The documentation of this process provides an important reference point for garment creators to disrupt conventional approaches to fashion design and technology and supports the development of innovative skills. These can be utilised to create new and novel clothing designs with which to enrich the global fashion industry.

Fashion archives, museums and collections in the age of the digital

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.

Navigating fashion: On the role of digital fashion archives in the preservation, classification and dissemination of fashion heritage

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.

Heritage narratives in the digital era

Purpose By considering the role of technology in museum archives and exhibitions, as well as company archives and production, this paper aims to present that digital technologies offer new approaches and tools to consider fashion know-how, traditions and memories. Design/methodology/approach Through an extensive literature review and a close consideration of multiple sources, this paper analyzes fashion, tradition and knowledge creation through the lens of museum and company archives. A section on museum archives analyzes the role of fashion in the museum and the use of technology in cataloging, online resources and exhibitions for knowledge transfer of fashion history. The second half of the paper considers the relationship between heritage, company archives and technology in branding and consumer engagement. Findings The paper summarizes recent scholarship in the fields of fashion archives and demonstrates the still current importance of heritage in generating new design and exhibition practices. Despite having its roots in the past, heritage demonstrates continuity with the present and looks to the future with the same devotion and commitment, thus guaranteeing quality and authenticity for both museum collections and company productions. Originality/value Through a case study methodology, this paper presents how digital technologies can offer new approaches and tools in museum archives and exhibitions, as well as in company archives and collection development, to reconsider and translate fashion know-how, traditions and memories in the digital era.

Memories of style: Digitizing the Yorkshire Fashion Archive

Although many fashion archives find it challenging to accurately represent their collections in a digital format, the task the Yorkshire Fashion Archive faced when creating their first electronic catalogue was uniquely difficult, as their collection spans far more than garments. As an archive that aims to represent socio-cultural history through clothing, it also collects oral histories, personal photographs and ephemera related to the garments from the original owners. While putting this information together into one digital record presented challenges, this also provided opportunities preserve the remembered history of the fashionable history of the Yorkshire region, alongside the objects and ephemera in the collection, to create a textually rich electronic archive.

Mummies are Called upon to Contribute to Fashion: Pre-Tutankhamun Egyptian Revivalism in Dress

Since 2007, Karin J. Bohleke has served as the director of the Fashion Archives and Museum of Shippensburg University. She holds a Ph.D. in French language and literature from Yale University; she also spent two seasons as an Egyptology reference librarian at the Epigraphic Survey of the University of Chicago in Luxor, Egypt. Her research interests focus on the nineteenth century and include fashion, early photography, the dissemination of French fashions in the United States, and women’s travel accounts of journeys to Egypt. Together with her husband, she actively teaches nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social dance.The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 instantly inspired “Egyptomania” garments and accessories for women. However, “Tutmania” flappers had numerous precedents throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper correlates surges in Egyptomania styles with contemporary events in Egypt, archaeology, and Egyptology. Archaeological discoveries and international tours of artifacts sparked fresh waves of Egyptianizing fashions. Socio-political events, such as Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, also stimulated fashions. Ancient Egypt inspired motifs, textiles, color, and even personality—in the form of Cleopatra—that have passed from one civilization to another, crossed the East–West divide, and traveled through millennia. This article analyzes attestations of Egyptomania fashions scattered throughout European and American fashion magazines before the 1920s to establish the trends beyond jewelry, painted portraits, and operatic costumes.

Physical and Digital Environments : Engaging Fashion Design Students in Archival Research

With the rapid development of digital technologies potential exists to expand upon the accessibility of fashion archives and increase their use as a pedagogical tool for research. At present this is compromised due the three-dimensional, tactile nature of the objects being viewed and the fact that they are not necessarily replicable in a digital format. The aim of this paper is to examine art and design students physical object research skills and discuss how they are positioned in relation to creative tools and strategies they use to produce outcomes such as they own collections and design responses. Findings and conclusions are drawn from projects concerned with the development and use of physical and virtual archives and inform the methodology used. Traditional methods and tools within higher education are discussed together with students increased use of digital resources and innovative ways to engage students. The academic challenge of supporting student engagement in archival research across digital and physical dimensions is explored. The papers findings indicate a need for further research considering the impact of digital technology on students’ physical integration with archives and the need for more structured support surrounding student physical and digital research investigations.

Arquivos, arquivismo e design de moda: uma experiência didática

Os arquivos da moda são um tema central que permite o encontro entre os campos da comunicação, da pesquisa, da indústria e da moda. Este artigo analisa como, no início do século XXI, o arquivo influenciou a moda em sua representação, sua compreensão histórica e na própria elaboração projetual do design. Esta análise será baseada em duas experiências de pesquisa em ensino realizadas pela autora na Itália entre 2008 e 2012. A primeira experiência, denominada Dress Redux, foi realizada na Universidade de Bolonha; a segunda, Under the Cover, realizada na Universidade de Veneza (IUAV).

Researching fashion in New York libraries and beyond

By the 1990s, fashion studies’ relegation to the marginalia of art historical discourse had greatly diminished. During the same period, US fashion itself emerged from European domination, with the action centring on New York City. Conveniently, New York’s art, design and fashion libraries, archives and special collections were already the most wide-ranging anywhere and, propelled by multi-disciplinary-, multi-media-driven interests, they have continued to expand their collections in all areas of fashion research and design, as well as in fashion’s innumerable contiguous fields. While discussing the multiple research resources available to New York-based historians of dress, fashion designers and clothing industry affiliates, this article examines issues of choice and magical serendipity in the context of an at-times overwhelming plethora of information.