The Archive as a Design Tool for Digital Innovation

The body of tangible and intangible knowledge growth from the sets of historical and cultural practices fashion embeds feeds into what is defined as fashion heritage, serving as the outcome and activation of production and consumption processes of goods and services within the fashion system.¹ As an intersection of past, present, and future practices, the archive arises from the fundamental urge to preserve fashion heritage as memories of a person, a social group, a location, or an organisation. Indeed, culture-intensive objects, fashion ephemera, industrial processes and traditional fashion practices become heritage when preserved and collected in archives and serve as study objects and triggers for dissemination activities, meaning and behavioural innovation.² Overtime, research practices revolving around the archive have been made possible thanks to a wide range of fashion archives scattered among companies, museums, foundations, universities, and special private collections, based on the type of objects and information architecture they enclose, representing one of the largest patrimonies worldwide in the field of Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI). According to the Sistema Archivistico Sistema Informativo Unificato per le Soprintendenze Archivistiche (SIUSA)³ and the Portale degli Archivi della Moda del Novecento,⁴ Italy only, on its own, has more than 540 fashion archival complexes partaking in defining the national identities, both connected to Italian manufacturing history and its contemporary production system.
The collection of artefacts preserved in a fashion archive usually includes a wide range of documentation related to design inspirations, studies on shapes and functionality, illustrations and sketches, paper patterns and prototypes, research on materials and development of colour variants, studies for the development of fashion design details, patents, collection of advertising campaigns, photographic artwork, and press releases. Nevertheless, over time archives, serving as places for meticulous preservation, have been governed by elitist and exclusive ideals, distant from the general public,⁵ where direct access continues to be obstructed.⁶ Digitalisation in the field has profoundly changed the means of access to archival content since it is ontologically tied to immateriality and ideas of free access, sharing, the democratisation of knowledge, and participation. Indeed, the agencies of digital technologies have brought the urgency to connect physical repositories to virtual platforms in which such memory is guarded and preserved.⁷ Within this context, educators, students, designers, and industry members can tell stories about fashion using resources from multi-vocal archival materials.⁸ Interpreted as such, an archive becomes an instrument of symbolic innovation⁹ that, through an orientation and understanding of the possibilities derived from digital media, can set the material and production culture of an enterprise, becoming “a transformative/generative tool which focuses not only on shaping logical perceptive processes of reinterpretation of documentation and artefacts, but also profoundly influences how actions and relationships between artefacts, stimuli, inspirations and contemporaneity are conceived, designed and planned”.¹⁰ Going in-depth, the digitisation of collections impacts a wide range of contexts and approaches concerning the acquisition and representation of fashion heritage. It implies a complete and necessary redefinition of archives as digital repositories¹¹ such as (i) incorporating technological solutions to reorganise archival methods and acquisition practices, (ii) rethinking fashion curatorial practices with new modes that expand and hybridise the physical and digital dimensions of fashion cultural heritage, and (iii) introducing digital apparatuses and devices to stage artefacts of a heterogeneous and ephemeral nature.
Traditionally, curatorial approaches have always focused mainly on representing knowledge belonging to historical collections through the medium of the exhibition,¹² placing the artifact at the centre of a chronological perspective and keeping it as the starting and ending point of their narrations. Consequently, the intangible and tacit knowledge that shapes and belongs to the object itself has often been overlooked and not thoroughly represented and narrated, as well as the transversal interconnections that the object has thanks to its situatedness in a wider socio-cultural, historic context. Considering these concerns, traditional curatorial approaches need to take into consideration the multimodal affordances enabled by digital technologies, that can empower users to go in depth into object’s tacit knowledge and to unveil interconnections with external facts and other bodies of cultural data, with the goal of providing them with immersive and extended experiences.¹³ On the other hand, what is defined as “digital curation”¹⁴ is aimed at preserving, managing and adding value to digital archival data throughout its lifecycle and overtime for current and future generations of users, to generate new sources of continuous and immediate information and knowledge dissemination.¹⁵ This approach introduces an intriguing perspective regarding the transformative impact of technological media on the very essence of knowledge. With the digital, knowledge permeates every aspect of our lives, becomes universally accessible, allowing for an expansive realm of information to be explored. Therefore, the challenge of fashion curation is to merge these essential dimensions to provide holistic experiences where digital records interact in unique and innovative ways within the physical realm to provide innovation directions in cultural and creative domains. This view moves beyond the traditional technocratic belief that considers innovation as distanced from the past and different from the present. It also favours temporality and historical and cultural stratifications as tools required to design the future we desire and make it present. Within this context, the archive undergoes a transformative process, liberating itself from its conventional perception as a static and antiquated entity. Instead, it evolves into a dynamic system of design practices, serving a dual purpose. Firstly, it enables the reinterpretation of fashion heritage from multiple perspectives and facilitates its dissemination through augmented fruition dynamics, all while safeguarding its authentic identifying codes. Simultaneously, it paves the way for the development of new design pathways, capitalizing on contemporary production potentials to reexamine and bring to life historical and cultural practices. Consequently, the archive transcends its traditional boundaries, assuming the form of an animated or mixed reality archive.¹⁶ As a potent design tool, it establishes a comprehensive framework for the creation, transfer, and preservation of diverse values, employing various tools, media, and levels of engagement.

Dealing with Objects. Digital Media and Close Readings of Archival Objects

Archival heritage has typically been activated in curatorial practices through approaches related to preserving, improving, and promoting its tangible components.¹⁷ These methods and techniques usually appear conservative and traditional in how they approach museums’ displaying phase. Approaches that are also reflected online through websites that serve as digital research platforms showcasing a juxtaposition of objects or descriptions, primarily devoid of contextual elements and reciprocal relations that are not entirely extrinsic and based on elements that are not always meaningful, without an effective integration of the various disciplinary fields involved in and for a fashion artefact.¹⁸ Furthermore, the inner knowledge inherently linked to Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) concerning techniques, processes, sociocultural narratives and meanings stayed permanently implicit in artefacts and preserved within archives and collections because it is challenging to display and access by public audiences. Traditional curatorial approaches lack a close reading of the fashion historical object¹⁹ that enables to grasp tacit dimensions that remain unfold whether the object is seen as static behind a vitrine in a museum or through an image picturing its bidimensional silhouette. One of the crucial aspects that remains unexplored is the concept of movement. Within the realm of fashion design, movement holds significant importance as it serves as a focal point for studying the interplay between garments, accessories, and the human body. This exploration involves the careful selection of textiles, fabric choices, and the intricate process of pattern-making and draping. Currently, extensive research in both the fashion industry and the field of human-computer interaction concentrates on rediscovering knowledge pertaining to how clothing items can adapt and respond to the body’s movements. The objective is to amplify self-expression by reintroducing the dynamic element into fashion design,²⁰ transcending the limitations of physical form and preservation requirements. Indeed, software and interfaces can escape the screen’s bidimensional surface and implement a “virtual depth”²¹ through an augmented implementation and perception of immaterial content like movement. This could be a precious source of knowledge for digital curatorial practices, although little is explored from a “representation” point of view.²² Indeed, users could live an extraordinary experience seeing the garment in motion and interacting with it through insights that often stay unfolded and invisible, especially to non-professional users. Online platforms like the Virtual Fashion Archive²³ or the Central Saint Martin project Exploding Fashion²⁴ are undertaking the innovative trajectory enabling kinetic from the archival artefact, leveraging on the opportunities derived by virtual prototyping software like CLO3D²⁵ to study objects through reverse engineering methods²⁶ and reconstruct them into animated digital doubles that closely mirror the original form. The clothes may now be seen and enjoyed regardless of where the physical item may be, at any time, by making the collection available online. Following the reality-virtuality continuum theorised by Milgram and Kishino,²⁷ the motion dimension could be enhanced and further explored when applying Mixed Reality technologies to the archival digital twin. Indeed, virtual projections like holograms could directly appear in the physical space allowing users to live futuristic performances just by wearing head-mounted displays. Despite still not being explored and employed within fashion contexts, museums like the Victoria & Albert in London are starting to reflect on these possibilities. SONZAI, designed and implemented by Dimension Studio in the museum, is a mixed-reality dance performance employing the avatar of the performer Maëva Berthelot in a stunning audio-visual live experience perceived through visors.²⁸
Along with motion, another dimension that by nature belongs to fashion artefacts is the materiality of textiles and materials, tightly linked to the sense of touch. The preservation and collection of costumes and other textiles in museums do not symbolise the apex for disseminating the cultural heritage of textiles.²⁹ As anticipated, fashion archival objects witness material culture, especially in the Italian landscape, reflected in heterogeneous artisanal know-how and industrial predisposition toward endless manufacturing innovation. Indeed, fashion heritage encompassed a wide variety of textiles derived from various raw materials and characterised by craftsmanship techniques in weaving and assembling as well as embroidery, embellishments and post-production processing which can only be observed translated on an object in a museum or through a photograph and narrated by a textual description. Moreover, ICH is in danger of disappearing due to socio-cultural, economic, and technological barriers that lead to outsourcing, homologation and depauperate. In this context, digital technologies could preserve, revive, transmit and valorise ICH’s “creative acts” by encoding data, information, and knowledge.³⁰ Modern software applications can expand our understanding of the complexity and variety of artefacts, their creation, and the evolution of different craft traditions, providing fresh insights and viewpoints relevant to traditional crafts and ancient societies. Digital curatorial practices aimed at unfolding craft techniques belonging to textiles and fabrication can manage the integration of virtual experiences involving the sense of touch, even if a screen mediates physicality, be it a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop device. Indeed, haptic devices and low-tech haptic visuality films could be applied to give a hand or finger tactile input in virtual reality, and hyper-sense encoded data for memory elicitation. By delivering “perceptual cues in the form of forces, displacements, electrical, thermal, or other signals delivered to the skin and body”,³¹ haptic interfaces for human-computer interaction, virtual reality, and human-robot interaction may improve the sense of touch that is crucial to perceive the materiality of the fashion artefact completely. This is the objective of Wint Design Lab’s XYZ | Sensomotoric Interplay of Glass and Body,³² a research project which delivers visual and material reinterpretations of the craftsman’s specific movements and the physical resonance within a glass-blown piece. Another best practice belonging to the artistic field that experiments with the translation of human perceptual cues to machines are the Mutations of Presence performance by the artist and researcher Sougwen Chung,³³ investigating creative co-creation through collaborative improvisational drawing with a collaborative robot trained on the artist’s movement when drawing. The exploration and initial endeavors at the intersection of Cultural Heritage and HCI domains contribute to the emergence of novel design frameworks that prioritize the production aspect of fashion items. These efforts shed light on the potential that arises from the accessibility of various technologies, ranging from 3D printing, a digital manufacturing technique, to cutting-edge collaborative robotics. Presently, these applications are primarily being pioneered in artistic and engineering settings, opening new possibilities and opportunities.

Dealing with Data. Algorithms and Distant Readings of Archival Collections

While there has been extensive academic research on fashion curatorial practices³⁴ and the digitalization of fashion domains,³⁵ the conversation surrounding the digital’s impact on archives and museums has predominantly been confined to disciplines such as library science, museum studies, and digital humanities practices,³⁶ with the result that what is often lacking is a true valorisation and sharing of knowledge from the specific domain to a more general sphere that gives rise to new forms or new levels of knowledge from their intertwining and integration. The fashion cultural heritage is still fragmented in preservation and distribution, failing to convey the complexity of knowledge, forms, and methodologies. As Calanca describes, there is a need to integrate and make digital descriptions and reproductions interact with broader knowledge, a knowledge that refers to the overall contexts in which those objects were brought into being and then subsequently preserved, used and interpreted.³⁷ In this context, the discipline of design, knowing about “the artificial world of artefacts”,³⁸ and being by nature the result of the encounter between techno-scientific and socio-cultural domains, offer deep reasoning on the possibility of using digital technologies to integrate explorations around heritage objects (as explored in the previous section) with methods derived from information science and visualisation aimed at unfolding knowledge from heterogeneous networks of data arising from fashion collections. Indeed, “if online digitalised collections can become resources for designers and professionals, they are today becoming central design tools for fashion scholars and researchers as well”³⁹ who need to reflect on and hybridise with the languages underlying data and information visualisation, and the criteria to apply when curating archival collections online to glean information and knowledge from digital records. Visualisation, a distinctive feature of the digital humanities,⁴⁰ involves by nature computational methods like algorithmic reading to expand the scope and capacity of visual and textual analysis that can be applied to an archival collection involving large amounts of data. Also referred to as “digital visualisations”,⁴¹ they are the result of computational methods applied to cultural data⁴² that analyse thousands of data and characters within text and file metadata, thus enabling a new kind of language and narrative based on distant reading. In fact, unlike close human reading, which deals with a canonical reading of a few objects examined in detail, distance reading requires the digital processing of vast corpora, made up of much smaller units but much more substantial in terms of content. A human cannot do this, and it fundamentally alters the purpose of reading. It shifts from a “document-centered” approach, which involves in-depth analysis of an object or text while maintaining its structure, to a focus on generating an abstract view that visualizes the overall characteristics of one or multiple texts.⁴³ Algorithms identify patterns, which are then transformed into spatial configurations using reduction and similarity as visual translation and schematization parameters that generates knowledge through interaction with users. This approach also presents an opportunity for the necessary systemic innovation of the fragmented fashion heritage landscape. It involves connecting the collection to a wide range of other evidence, creating a “scopic view”⁴⁴ that goes beyond a single entity. This overview of data highlights potentially interesting patterns and hyperlinks,⁴⁵ allowing for research queries, skimming, keyword filtering, and a scalable drill-down approach to further explore the presented patterns. By combining data-driven interdisciplinary approaches and material culture analysis, fashion can be viewed both as an object-focused topic and something that can be meaningfully reflected in digital archive records. This integrated approach offers a more nuanced understanding of the socio-cultural and socio-economic contexts related to the visual and heritage aspects of fashion.⁴⁶ Although best practices using computational analysis are still rare and not meaningful within the fashion field, the virtual archive IN-COMMON provides an engaging experiential narrative of performing arts in Italy based on algorithmic pattern recognition that highlights the connections of materials across time and space, artists and events, geographies, and specific metadata of textual documentation.⁴⁷ In these narratives, humans engage with visualized data, enabled by algorithmic contributions that offer new modalities and possibilities. As Esposito notes, algorithms are unique in their “noisy” nature, identifying patterns and connections that elude human observers, thereby shaping interpretive readings and raising fresh questions.⁴⁸ The machine assumes the role of a partner, suggesting new directions for interpretation. This notion of hyper reading extends to what Hayles terms “machine reading”⁴⁹ where artificial intelligence utilizes data mining techniques to autonomously generate new artifacts, either from human input or through unsupervised approaches. This trajectory of linguistic innovation embeds AI agency in cultural production, intimately understanding human aesthetic preferences and merging with various fields like modelling, gaming, adaptation, translation, rendering, and simulation. The boundary between human interpretation and autonomous recognition becomes blurred and permeable. As a computer technology mirroring human behavior, AI has already made significant strides in the fashion industry making the boundary between human interpretation and autonomous recognition undefined and porous. As a computer technology that acts as a tool to mirror human behaviour,⁵⁰ AI has already paved its way in the fashion industry. To date, the advent of text-to-image, drawing-to-image, and image-to-3d AI-powered platforms such as Midjourney⁵¹ or Dreamstudio⁵² act as self-learning machines by processing significant quantities of information and analysing that information to create new inspirations and outputs useful in fashion ideation processes.

Conclusions and Discussion

The Interpretive Framework: The Design Orienting Scenario Approach

The context described in the previous sections makes it possible to apply a scenario design approach as a fundamental methodology for defining and describing an environment within which a project will be placed and for identifying experiential design trajectories to be followed.
According to the directions and assumptions provided in the previous sections based on the literature review and evidence observations, as well as on the informed perspective concerning the archive as a catalyst for symbolic innovation in the fashion field both from a cultural and technological dimension, the proposed innovation trajectories are based on a Design Orienting Scenarios (DOS) approach.⁵³ DOS were developed outside future studies and strategic planning to involve the world of design closely, thanks to narrative and visual representations of trends and contexts. They are fundamental results for describing an environment within which a project will be placed and for identifying design trajectories to follow.⁵⁴ Following DOS, four trajectories are described and developed following the 2X2 Matrix Technique based on a four quadrants scheme defined by two pairs of variables.⁵⁵ Each variable ranges along two polarities to understand the nature of potential design directions in fashion culture and new media technologies. On the drivers of the highest importance axis, the variables represent the nature of artefacts within an archive ranging from object-driven immersion, with tangible artefacts as the subject of analysis, to data-driven immersion, considering digital archival records the starting point for new narratives. On this axis, immersion in cultural pieces and works of art as the modern model of sensory perception makes the experiential aspect prevail over the aesthetic one.⁵⁶ On the other axis, the variables related to the driver of the highest uncertainty represent the dimensions that technology’s agency could impact within fashion environments, ranging from augmented fruition through the act of dematerialisation — as an object or data breakdown in order to access tacit knowledge dimensions — to augmented production thanks to the capabilities of new technologies to rematerialise cultural artefacts through human-computer interactions, translating the techniques and know-how implicit in archival objects for advocacy and preservation.

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