Back to the Future : The critical role of fashion archives in preserving, curating and narrating fashion stories

Fashion items and artifacts were once considered unworthy of placement in museums and archives on account of their perishable nature or material impermanence, in addition to their association with the shallow pleasures and pursuits of low culture. However, this perception has changed dramatically as the fragile nature of fashion garments and associated objects has highlighted their value as something worth saving and curating. This awareness of the high social, cultural, economic and historic value of physical fashion relics has resulted in a new trend for fashion designers, brands and museums to start collating, creating and managing fashion archives of their past collections and associated documentation. Hence, fashion archives are increasingly regarded as a critical source of creative inspiration for new collections and in endorsing fashion brand heritage narratives, or in celebrating their longevity and creative DNA. The presentation will analyze the importance for the industry and consumer of preserving, storing and accessing fashion collections, accessories, photographs and documentary materials in both digital and traditional ways. It will highlight the benefits of collating a more holistic and multi-modal archive combining material and textual cultural objects to portray and contextualize the lived social experience and disseminating them across suitable platforms. This will be done using a case study analysis of selected fashion archives and the creation and analysis of a typology depicting the differing types of fashion archives, public and private, commercial and non-commercial. The conceptual framework will map their unifying principles on the one hand and their different purposes and needs for various creators and users on the other. Finally, it will critically evaluate the fashion archive’s role from the perspective of archivist and user and associated contested issues, such as commercialization, curatorial objectivity or controlled access, while evaluating future directions for the digital fashion archive as the ultimate style repository