The scientific debate on fashion heritage has acknowledged the sociocultural and historical memory value of archives as repositories of knowledge.1 Their role consists in understanding the evolution of styles, aesthetics, materials, and techniques.2 However, some scholars argue that corporate archives are not fully reliable historical sources, as the selection of items within them is influenced by an entrepreneurial perspective. This selective approach jeopardies presenting a narrow history of the brand, overlooking other social influences and realities that have contributed to the evolution of fashion.3 While corporate archives are often used as predictive tools to trace trends or develop new products, they are essential for understanding the relationship between fashion, culture, and production processes.4 Unlike other types of archives, the heterogeneity of documents and artifacts that embrace fashion grants the definition of production practices, aesthetic approaches, and cultural interactions. Therefore, the article intentions are to examine a company's heritage as cultural capital, offering a critical reflection on the role that corporate archives play within these companies as drivers and forecasters of research and studies.
Heritage Brand vs. Brand with a Heritage
In the current competitive landscape, companies that operate within industries characterized by high cultural significance,5 such as fashion and design, should engage in a profound paradigm shift in production systems. The conventional concept of the production of goods,6 embedded within the broader context of the knowledge economy,7 has transitioned progressively into a paradigm of “cultural object production.”8 This evolution involves the incorporation — from the initial stages of design and manufacturing — of intangible, symbolic, and evocative elements that are able to convey and fortify the company’s essence and value within its social and relational milieu.9
In the Creative and Cultural Industries (CCI), a company’s value is no longer perceived as a projection of the brand image.10 Instead, its value becomes significant with respect to the company’s heritage, which encompasses the tangible and intangible values that form the invaluable expertise to be preserved and passed down as part of its legacy.11
According to Urde et al.,12 there are two approaches that a company can take toward its heritage: brands with a heritage and heritage brands. On the one hand, scholars conceptualize a “brand with a heritage”13 as an aspect of a brand’s identity reflected in its historical performance, longevity, foundational values, symbolic representations, and particularly in the organization’s belief that its historical narrative holds significance. Therefore, brands with a heritage concentrate primarily on conserving, protecting, and highlighting the company’s historical values, traditions, and legacy. Brand legacy is a celebratory action that presents history through highlights and iconic productions, and cultural heritage supports marketing strategies focused on strengthening brand identity.
On the other hand, “heritage brands”14 are those in which the market positioning and value proposition are grounded in their heritage. These companies adapt and evolve the company’s heritage as a strategic asset that can drive continuous innovation and authentic value. From this perspective, cultural capital, cultural roots, and heritage become essential assets for a company, not only because they bring social, historical, or aesthetic values — as did brands with a heritage — but because they want to enhance the concept of authenticity and uniqueness associated with the brand identity. Heritage-based practices, grounded in tradition, reconfigure the facts and values that have defined, characterized, and authenticated design practices uniquely. Thus, products and practices gain cultural significance by recovering and integrating heritage into design strategies. This approach connects brands to future behaviors and lifestyles, embeds these values into future generations, and transforms heritage into a living cultural legacy.
Heritage brands distinguish themselves by embodying their historical legacy and the ongoing creation of history because “… heritage brands embrace three timeframes: the past; the present, and the future”.15 From this syncretism, the past is experienced not as a nostalgic memory but as a tool to sediment and systematize a current brand’s Cultural Heritage and to lay the groundwork for the future. There is ever-increasing attention given to preserving and valorizing all of those values, both material and immaterial, which have always been safeguarded meticulously in corporate archives and reinvested in the company. As Bodei16 argued:
[…] the greatest danger is that not only things but history itself will essentially be reduced to mere petrified objectivity, an accumulation of data and objects not mediated by knowledge and not illuminated by the interpretation and contextualization of their meaning. How will new generations understand the messages left in things by previous generations, rescuing them from the shipwreck of oblivion or the fate of insignificance and reconnecting them, with the necessary mediations, to their own experiences and sensitivities?
Therefore, the corporate archive should no longer be seen merely as a tool with which to catalogue and preserve “mere petrified objectivity”;17 instead, it becomes a cognitive mediator.18 Thus, the archive reconstructs and generates the company’s expertise, highlights the network of social, cultural, scientific, and productive relations, and transforms and redefines the concept of the archive itself, not as a static system, but as a dynamic device for brand knowledge.19
From the considerations outlined thus far, the article explores the concept of the corporate archive as a Living Cultural Heritage and investigates the various approaches emerging within heritage brands by taking advantage of the potential that their archives offer. The article presents and discusses a theoretical framework that examines current strategies to activate heritage strategies within corporate archives by analyzing relevant case studies and defining four scenarios. Thus, the archive’s unique value as a continuous system of knowledge rooted in the brand’s legacy becomes evident.20 Through the development of specific practices, archives are transformed from playing a traditional, static role of past custodians to a dynamic role as a generator of expertise and knowledge. Corporate archives can potentially educate a company’s material and productive experiences and have a significant effect on the way that actions and relations between artifacts, stimuli, and inspirations are conceived, designed, and planned in contemporary contexts.
Corporate Archives in Fashion
In corporate archives in CCI, and particularly in the fashion industry, archiving is necessary to remember and organize the fragments of history and collect content and information avidly. Archives constitute a heterogeneous documentary and material heritage of immense value but, above all, of great power because “… controlling archives means controlling memory.”21 This is a lesson that fashion companies and creative directors have learned powerfully: keeping archives inaccessible — until today — as if they were precious treasures to preserve the immense value of the culture they hold. In the book Archivi impossibili [Impossible Archives], Baldacci22 offered an extensive and detailed reflection on art archives, the concepts of which can be applied easily to fashion corporate archives. The scholar delineates three impossible forms of archives:23 the “anarchive,” in which classification criteria persist, albeit loosely; the “anti-archive,” which is utterly devoid of ordering criteria, and the “counter-archive,” as a subversion of the traditional archiving methods. Given this classification, Baldacci highlighted a new way of looking at the archive: not as an accumulation of documents or valuable objects, but as a critical tool that is able to regenerate the usual logic of the preservation, use, and dissemination of knowledge. What emerges from this classification, which involves all three categories, is the archive’s importance as a cognitive mediator and, therefore, as an active tool for rethinking and redesigning memory, making archive records full of meaning and values to reinvest in continuous interpretations. Thus, an archive is:
[…] an active agent that shapes personal identity and social and cultural memory. […] it is not a storage place but a processual device (the Foucauldian term is more than appropriate here) that, on the one hand, negotiates, contests, and validates social power and, on the other hand, continuously shapes and reshapes memory.24
Extending Baldacci’s definition to the fashion field, corporate archives are repositories of meta-knowledge where the learned skills involved in managing information and content are reprocessed through a system of understanding that rethinks, redesigns, and reconstructs relations and unexpected value systems in organizing creative and cultural archives.
Thus, fashion corporate archives are distinguished by their multifaceted organizational structure. On the one hand, they recount the company’s history as an institution and provide a historical, administrative, managerial, and legal feature related to a specific brand. These archives apply a conservative approach to chronologically and typologically organized memory that reflects the company’s production history primarily.25 Each document or object is inventoried and cataloged adequately in archival fonds and series and organized hierarchically. On the other hand, they also resemble a personal archive because of their semantic plurality that is amplified by the individual vision of the creative directors who have succeeded one another over the years. According to their definition, personal archives are “paper mirrors”;26 therefore, the producer’s individual and subjective activity result in personal archives that have very different characteristics compared to others. The documents preserved in it, their completeness and quantity, reflect not only the company, but also the vision and interests of the creative director who acts as a co-producer of the corporate archive itself. Creative directors become collectors and inevitably leave an indelible mark on the heritage’s interpretation, evolution, and understanding.
Some peculiar people have an insatiable desire to collect objects, often of considerable quality, sometimes beyond their means: objects connected by some relationship, kept in order or relatively significant disarray, which they enjoy whenever they have the time and opportunity. […] Around these objects, they recount anecdotes and reflections that often end up entangled in the vertigo of emotion or the infinity of understanding. They are the collectors.27
Therefore, in studying a corporate archive, it is necessary not to underestimate the individuals who contributed to its construction to identify biographical elements to understand and potentially order the collection and to integrate the repertoire of the works produced. By its very nature, the archive facilitates the reconstruction of the biography of archival objects through precise documentation of their history, including provenance, evolution, use, meaning over time, and the role of the company or suppliers who designed and developed them. This process, which Kopytoff defined as singularization,28 allows the archival object to lose its functional value and acquire a cultural one that makes it different, unique, and, therefore, singular. It is a process that characterizes the object’s biography indelibly and culturally, as it “… makes significant what would otherwise remain obscure”.29 Thus, the archive acquires a unilateral, strongly identifying representation of its producing subject,30 which is not only the company but also those who work in the company and contribute at different levels to the production of new artifacts, the experimentation with new processes, and the reinterpretation of past values that will always find their place in corporate archives and give them a cultural value.
This evolutionary approach is also reflected in the knowledge-archiving system. The fashion design system is oriented toward continuous innovation and transcends the conventional notion of innovation as merely a departure from historical precedents or a means to distinguish the present.31 Fashion supports a planned production chain that emphasizes an evolutionary dimension and progresses along a continuous temporal axis of socio-cultural meanings and values that inspire projects.32 Producing and testing experimental products, alternative ideas, and increasingly advanced technological processes constantly — even if they never reach the market — serve as evidence of the evolution of ideas. These elements will be archived and preserved as experiences of potential future innovation. In addition, the progressive accumulation of recurring elements that the market validated will establish the permanent design codes of a brand’s collections over the seasons and create an identity repository from which to draw that allows signs, symbols, iconic products, and processes to be rediscovered. What makes fashion archives unique is the coexistence of innumerable elements, ranging from sketches to technical drawings, from material research charts to prototypes or photographs that encompass physical and digital dimensions. Thus, archives arise “involuntarily” and consist not only of the collection of documents, but also of the network of relations among those documents.33 They reveal the tangible and intangible inspirations of the company’s legacy with respect to history, people, objects, expertise, and relations. Technology has increased archives’ breadth further today, which has necessitated the construction of new virtual storage spaces to house increasingly prevalent digital-born memories. Moreover, digitization processes have multiplied the records in archives to facilitate access through databases, which highlights the phenomenological definition related to copying, reproduction, and authenticity. Therefore, fashion archives embody the company’s identity and function as an open system that incorporates the abilities to (1) preserve and document records and digital data, (2) digitize and index information to make it more usable and accessible, (3) manage and acquire new content and information, (4) relate and connect implicit and intangible content to items and metadata, and (5) generate new cognitive abilities associated not only with learning from the existing archive, but also by projecting the information toward new possible configurations of meaning.
From this perspective, fashion archives act as Living Cultural Heritage where design culture is rooted in the broader cultural sphere and stimulates the creation of novelty by connecting, combining, and interpreting diverse elements and providing creative and productive continuity to the company legacy primarily because, as Halbwachs34 argued, “[…] each individual memory is only a point of view on collective memory”. The concept of memory is related to archives strictly and closely, which allows for various interpretations and stratifications. Memory is not merely what is preserved about artifacts; it represents the unveiling of design, creative, and research processes that document the brand’s journey and evolution. It is not a predefined time, but offers multiple temporalities of simultaneous coexistence — as Evans and Vaccari35 stated — that allows archival fashion to reinterpret itself, transform, reinvent continuously, and offer new and unprecedented knowledge. Archiving allows a semantic flood of memories because whenever a specific archival fashion arouses a new meaning, it tells and reminds us of all of the past meanings.36 Such meanings appear or hide behind multiple signs with which we are all surrounded in a cheeky, evident, shy, barely noticeable, or consciously hidden manner. To put it in Halbwachs’ terms:
[…] our memories remain in our souls as collective memories […] we are never alone. It is not essential that others are present or differ materially from us because each of us always bearers with them and within ourselves several distinct people.37
Theoretical Framework
Consistent with this discussion, this article proposes a theoretical framework to codify the different approaches to Living Cultural Heritage that fashion brands implement to preserve their legacy and reinvest archival cultural capital into design practices to generate continuous innovation. As Smith38 argued, heritage is a continuously evolving discursive construction that conveys immaterial content that social and cultural practices determine. Consequently, the archive is not a static location of preservation, but a dynamic practice where heritage is reinvested in techniques, processes, and preserving meanings and identities continually.
From a methodological perspective, the first important step was to identify and map the most significant fashion archives in Italy and worldwide that are related to fashion companies that still operate within the system and fit the heritage brand39 definition previously discussed. This initial systematization was necessary to focus the study on investigating heritage-based practices and strategies that companies employ to reinvest in their cultural heritage. The study is based upon an anthology of case studies40 collected over approximately ten years following studies and research that the author developed within the Fashion in Process research collective of the Design Department at Politecnico di Milano. Therefore, the theoretical framework presented here derives from a qualitative analysis of the case studies identified, which were explored through desk research, archive visits, and semi-structured interviews with archive directors and curators.41 This approach permits an in-depth exploration of the case studies selected to reveal the heritage-based strategies that the different brands implemented, contextual exploration to understand the context with respect to historical, social, cultural, and organizational aspects, and an inductive approach where new theories may emerge from actual data rather than being constrained by existing ones.
The theoretical framework (Fig. 1) is organized on two axes, each of which expresses a polarity to define the concept of Living Cultural Heritage better and the way that brand strategies implement values and attributes associated with their heritage.
The vertical axis defines the heritage-based strategies. It extends from considering heritage as an end, which emphasizes its symbolic dimension,42 to heritage as a means, which highlights the process dimension of heritage as a discursive practice.43 In the first polarity, heritage incorporates the symbolic dimension. It transfers cultural roots in products that convey recognition of, and fascination with, the brand, and become absolute icons because they combine brand identity in values and stylistic code. In the second polarity, heritage is presented through a company’s intrinsic expertise expressed in the bond with the brand’s area of origin and the direct connection with the manufacturing processes related to specific expertise. In this case, the values associated with the processes become predominant over the product’s aesthetics. They are legitimized by the continuous relation with industrial and artisanal skills that constitutes a differentiating factor from similar productions.44
The horizontal axis defines methods and tools to activate heritage-based strategies. The polarity is expressed from the enhancement of the material culture of design or practices45 to the enhancement of the experience and the intangible fruition of heritage that digital technology can activate and mediate.46 On the one hand, heritage accesses the cultural capital47 within the archive and explores the tangible reservoirs of knowledge and expertise. The locations of production — generally inaccessible — are explored to demonstrate the excellent manufacturing expertise behind the products, to reconstruct the supply chain, and to emphasize values such as transparency, competence, and authenticity. The brand’s values are showcased with strategies and processes of conservation, enhancement, and promotion, which revolve around iconic or exclusive production processes to strengthen the brand’s history and core values. On the other hand, heritage is transformed into augmented archives where digital technologies can bring a new dimension to the engagement and the digital exploration of those fashion resources by offering users an extraordinary experience in perceiving materiality, motion, interaction, and insights that often remain invisible. Then, archival fashions’ tangible and intangible meanings are explored and offer augmented participatory experiences to different audiences.
Four different scenarios emerged from the theoretical framework. They represent four distinct expressions of corporate archives’ Living Cultural Heritage, which describe the way that heritage brands invest strategically in the potential that their corporate archives offer: Heritage Narratives; Heritage-in-process; Immersive Heritage Experience, and Disruptive Heritage Model.
Heritage Narratives
Heritage Narratives propose a heritage strategy that emphasizes the iconic dimension of a brand’s production. It focuses on heritage marketing strategies48 that lead companies to celebrate themselves by designing accessible archives, corporate museums, and special events to increase brand recognition and emphasize the company’s history. These strategies’ underlying objective is to maintain constant continuity with the present and the future through a narrative of authenticity that has its roots in the past. In recent years, company archives have given rise to numerous corporate museums that strengthen the brand’s recognition with a self-celebratory approach by showcasing its history.49 These museums are established primarily for cultural communication and to enhance recognition of archival fashion through the iconic production process for which the company desires strong recognition. While Salvatore Ferragamo was one of the first Italian brands to invest in its corporate museum in 1995, other brands followed this approach. For instance, La Galerie Dior is located in the historic building at 30 in rue Montaigne in Paris and invites visitors to immerse themselves in the Maison Christian Dior. This exhibition celebrates the creative directors who have led the Maison and highlights the French laboratories’ artisanal expertise, whose savoir-faire has made the high-end collections priceless fashion treasures preserved in the archive. Armani Silos in Milan and the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Paris provide additional and valuable examples of the way to enhance a brand’s heritage through exhibition pathways designed to highlight unexpected performances using such media as photography and art.
Moreover, the continuous representation of the brand’s values through its permanent stylistic codes and iconic products in archives and museums underscores a constant recognition of the socio-cultural meanings and values that inspire design. According to this approach, capsule collections of re-editions of iconic products become limited and exclusive, such as “Ferragamo’s Creations”, an exclusive, restricted, and numbered line of shoes and bags that updates some of the brand’s most iconic products. All items are handmade using original techniques, leather, and shapes. This unique collection is available only in a limited number of selected Ferragamo boutiques worldwide, which highlights the allure of these iconic products’ exclusivity. The collection’s goal is to demonstrate the way that the brand’s heritage and iconic models remain relevant in the contemporary market. Again, for Prada, iconic materials like nylon serve as a foundation for narrating special projects that underscore the company’s commitment to environmental sustainability. This approach led to the Re-Nylon collection, a project that reimagines Prada’s iconic backpacks using ECONYL. This innovative and sustainable material reduces global warming significantly compared to traditional nylon. This project not only affirms Prada’s dedication to discovering innovative materials and technological solutions for more sustainable fashion, but also does so through one of the most iconic nylon backpacks in Prada’s history.
The Heritage Narratives scenario celebrates the brand primarily and emphasizes the testimonial aspect of its productions.50 The company’s history intertwines with its permanent stylistic codes that render artifacts iconic through a socio-cultural value connotation. Thus, the testimonial value is related closely to the brand’s identity, but its purposes are not historical or educational as in museum institutions; instead, it is functional for the company’s productive activity and brand recognition.
The Heritage-in-process
The Heritage-in-process approach revolves around a culture of creating.51 The master artisans’ skills and expertise and the manufacturing process are integrated continually into design and production and become more significant than the product’s aesthetics. Cultural heritage processes are rediscovered by enhancing the company’s material culture. The expertise reinvested continuously in production has defined its artisanal and exclusive value by codifying processes, methods, and plural languages able to modernize and reinterpret aesthetics, syntax, and applications without reproducing the memory of forms and style passively.52
Major fashion groups like LVMH invest in their top suppliers long-term and implement a development strategy focused on sourcing quality raw materials and enhancing the transmission of their savoir-faire: traditional; unique, and specialized knowledge. This dedication is celebrated annually through the Les Journées Particulières event, where factories and laboratories worldwide open their doors to visitors and showcase their artisans and experts’ skills and abilities. Another representative example in this context is Chanel, which controls and communicates its heritage by establishing a living archive of craftsmanship under Paraffection S.A. Founded in 1985, it is a subsidiary company dedicated to preserving and promoting highly qualified artisan workshops’ heritage, craft, and manufacturing skills. Each atelier supplies Chanel with its Métiers d’art collections while it remains independent and thus collaborates with other designers or fashion houses to ensure long-term profitability. By creating a network of highly specialized artisan manufacturers, Chanel generates a living cultural system of archives able to produce polysemic and experimental languages by hybridizing innovative techniques.53
This approach allows companies to enrich their design capabilities by drawing on historical knowledge and techniques and fostering innovation while preserving and promoting the heritage of the fashion and textile industries. It also demonstrates a commitment to sustainability and continuity in craftsmanship that ensures valuable skills and traditions are passed on to future generations. The use of heritage for production purposes is an increasingly significant trend, exemplified by companies such as Mantero Seta Spa, Antonio Ratti Foundation, the Ermenegildo Zegna Archive Group, and BAI Max Mara. These companies have recognized archives’ value and have acquired archival collections from businesses that have exited the fashion sector yet possess invaluable expertise that should be maintained. These acquired archives are examined, cataloged, and reorganized carefully, and become immensely valuable thereby as evidence of a cultural and industrial legacy and as resources that can be reinvested in developing new productions. These companies have exclusive archives that arise from the intersection between the company’s history and the surrounding production world. They consist of collections of clothes, fabric samples, and yarns that the company or other brands produced internally. They tell the story of a broader and more complex production system that allows researchers and curators to study fashion and its interpretation over time through different lifestyles. Further, they serve as helpful study materials for students and researchers alike.
The heritage-in-process scenario pays continuous attention to production processes. This active resource allows the archive to contribute new meanings to the intangible aspects of production contexts and showcases the creativity and expertise of ancient yet innovative techniques through this living cultural Heritage.
Immersive Heritage Experience
The Immersive Heritage Experience is focused on the role of technology, the purpose of which is to enable immersive visitor experiences to expand customer engagement online and offline. Engagement is a crucial aspect of the relation between heritage, archives, and knowledge creation that has significant effects on fashion retail or, more generally, places where consumers, visitors, or users can enjoy a brand’s heritage.
In fashion brands, the vast and valuable cultural heritage preserved within the archives is protected strictly and often difficult to access, particularly for professionals who are not involved in the field directly. The strategies implemented to narrate and disseminate cultural heritage thus far have been oriented frequently toward traditional, conservative, and outdated marketing strategies, and have focused primarily on promoting the sole tangible dimension of the artifacts presented through exhibitions or celebratory events. This heritage is now facing an incremental acceleration in developing and applying digital technologies that affect the entire framework of production, distribution, and access to the technical and material cultural heritage stored within corporate archives. In this context, compared to the techniques used traditionally to expedite data archiving and digitization, digital technologies now offer new potentials, approaches, and tools to enhance archival heritage and its associated knowledge processes.54 The paradigm of the augmented archive emerges, in which every authentic artifact is awarded immaterial and virtual insights that expand objects into processes and where the resulting narrative is interpreted through a set of multidisciplinary, multidimensional, and multichannel approaches.55 Valentino undertook one of the earliest and most significant examples of archive digitization in 2011 with the launch of the Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum. This project marked the first fashion archive to embrace a digital format rather than the traditional museography approach, which allowed a thematic and chronological exploration of fifty years of the designer’s career. Further, Valentino Archive experimented an open-source online database that uses 3D technology and photogrammetry to explore iconic ensembles enriched by the entire documentary archive related to them: inspirational themes; collections references, exceptional testimonials, etc. Subsequently, other fashion archives have experimented with integrating digital technologies to improve their collections’ accessibility. For example, the Missoni Archive offers virtual tours of its collections and Ottavio Missoni’s chromatic studies through Virtual or Augmented reality (VR/AR) experiments with the goal to strengthen the archive’s communicative and narrative vocation, which today is a fundamental part of the company and the preservation of its historical memory.
Moreover, thanks to RFID technology, QR codes, IoT systems, or the implementation of VR/AR, brands are now able to create an immersive and deep learning experience for their consumers/visitors that allows them to interact with products, values, or brand heritage through smartphones and gives users an exciting experience by merging digital content with tangible and authentic products. Digital technologies strengthen the relation between heritage brands and contemporary production and emphasize the iconic dimension of archival objects, largely in retail spaces. As Vaccari et al. stated, “Digitally oriented fashion does not aim to ‘cannibalize physical fashion,’ but to offer ‘one more channel.’”56 Many of these digital experiences accelerated greatly during the pandemic, when technology was among the few factors that allowed the emergency to be addressed. The traditional luxury heritage brand models, based upon their reputation, historical legacy, and brand consistency, was questioned and prompted a reconsideration of new ways to explore and experience fashion. Among others, one of the successful experiences was the Lanvin Dialogues that Judith Clark curated for the company’s Instagram channel. It was an excellent example of envisioning the future by reactivating the brand’s legacy. Iconic and significant elements of the brand heritage were explored through in-depth and culturally relevant interviews with fashion industry experts that fostered significant reflection on cultural heritage.
The Immersive Heritage Experience develops a heritage-based strategy based upon digital technology, which allows the brand to build a solid social media presence to complement the users’ experience and catch the attention of mobile-obsessed Millennials and Gen-Zers, who are bombarded constantly with digital experiences that compete for their consideration. Further, integrating the brand’s legacy into retail allows brands to contextualize their production in a broader cultural panorama, which offers visitors a continuous phygital passage between the tangible and intangible dimensions, present, past, and future.57
Disruptive Heritage Model
The Disruptive Heritage Model focuses on redefining cultural heritage in relation not only to a company archive but to the entire ecosystem of actors and stakeholders who work in the heritage network. Constructing a disruptive scenario based upon heritage guarantees the historical continuity of the codes while it updates the heritage application by rendering it an essential knowledge tool with which to build new production models. At the same time, this symbolic practice strengthens the degree of emotional involvement between the company and its consumers toward a desirable lifestyle scenario. The cognitive approach to archival practices begins from the awareness that by its nature, the company archive is related inseparably to the company’s heritage. On the one hand, the archive serves as a repository of artifacts and processes that characterize visual culture, consumer practices, and brand imagery construction. On the other hand, it functions as a tool for the self-representation of the brand, which — through the archive — reinterprets and redesigns its cultural history from both a symbolic and economic perspective. Therefore, corporate archives in fashion emerge as a dynamic resource from which the brand can obtain new knowledge and insights. Its role transcends mere archival and preservation functions, as it plays a pivotal role as a cognitive intermediary that catalyzes the activation of the companies’ inherent values.
In recent years, luxury companies such as Cuccinelli, Zegna, LVMH, Gucci, Prada, and many others have turned to cultural entrepreneurship to return value and respect to the area and the community in which they have their roots from a perspective oriented toward social responsibility and cultural capital.58
These companies have expanded their cultural offerings by establishing corporate museums, art foundations, archives, academies of craftsmanship, and special projects to enhance their identity through their heritage values and corporate legacy. As demonstrated by recent studies, being rooted in a territory allows for community-based cultural and entrepreneurial initiatives that prove very effective for the companies that design them.59 Cultural regeneration projects guided by cultural heritage thrive within a vibrant, diversified cultural ecosystem that is able to attract different types of users and consumers in an increasingly inclusive manner.60
A paradigmatic example is the support of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs to give back to the territory and the community as part of the well-being generated for the company and to pay attention to crucial social inclusion, ethics, transparency, and equity. Gucci’s Equilibrium, Cuccinelli’s Humanistic Capitalism and Human Sustainability, and Prada’s Drivers for Change are just a few of the most exciting examples that have been able to combine the transmission of skills, knowledge, and experience in craftsmanship and production, which is essential for a heritage brand’s long-term sustainability. In this respect, archival heritage can serve as a genuine knowledge generator that fosters innovative processes and experiences.
The Disruptive Heritage Model scenario recognized immediately the solid cultural potential of heritage expressed by the manufacturing dimension, skills, and expertise preserved and protected in corporate archives. It built its identity and heritage-based model to maintain and generate the specific cultural capital as a brand legacy.
Limitation of the Living Cultural Heritage Study
The major limitation of the Living Cultural Heritage study is that it excludes essential collections and archives associated with fashion cultural institutions such as museums and universities, like the MoMu in Antwerp, the Museum at FIT, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, and the Museo del Tessuto in Prato. These institutions have distinguished themselves over the years by presenting experimental and innovative exhibitions on fashion or textiles from their archives. However, they have employed their cultural heritage in academic education or cultural dissemination primarily. Although most museums, historical archives, and foundations in the fashion field today apply obsolete and conservative strategies of cultural preservation and dissemination, MoMu, MET, FIT, Centraal Museum, and others have distinguished themselves by their extensive experience that has anticipated models with which to explore cultural heritage consistently by experimenting with sophisticated narration systems and cultural dissemination through new technologies. Based upon the assumption that fashion cultural heritage is configured as an inseparable set of material and immaterial values, the tangible component is more often generated traditionally by strategies and processes of conservation, enhancement, communication, and promotion. In contrast, the immaterial component, which is rooted in local expertise and consists of knowledge, techniques, methods, meanings, and values, is often invisible and not associated quickly with a broader community of users beyond the experts in the field.61 By applying digital technologies, these pioneering cultural institutions have experimented with approaches and tools to enhance archival heritage and its knowledge, which allows enjoyment to be diversified. One of the most significant experiences is the construction of digital twins of archival items. This reverse engineering process allows for an in-depth study of archival pieces, multidimensional exploration, and the simulation of fabric’s movement and the drape of objects in motion.62 Today, there are many “Sleeping Beauties” — to quote the expression used for the last exhibition of MET 2024 — that, because of their age and fragility, cannot be exhibited or accessed. However, projects like “From Pattern to Polygon” at Centraal Museum Utrecht with Studio PMS, “The Virtual Fashion Archive” by the Museum at FIT and the Superficial studio, the Historical Collection of MoMu with the digital design studio d_archive, just to mention a few, enable an entirely new digital exploration of archival objects and unlock implicit forms and knowledge preserved within these items, which can emerge through digital pathways and enhance new understanding in a way that would be impossible with historical garments.
Further, experiences with academic and university institutions such as “Exploding Fashion” at Central Saint Martins, UAL London, the Gianfranco Ferré Research Center at Politecnico di Milano, or “Prato Phygital” with the Museo del Tessuto in Prato have offered an additional perspective on research and innovation. They have facilitated the training of new professionals who integrate the interdisciplinary skills necessary to develop, manage, and coordinate projects in the context of digital heritage for cultural institutions and the entire fashion sector. Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 360° acquisitions, and 3D prototyping have become indispensable tools with which to create and transfer knowledge to a diverse audience. On the one hand, they encourage an increasingly broad audience’s participation through participatory, interactive, and inclusive learning experiences63 that transform archives from contexts of situated cultural production into immersive and augmented environments where virtual insights and detailed information enrich every component of an actual collection and amplify the context from object to process.64 On the other hand, they open research perspectives for new professional sectors, such as retail or fashion companies, and favor the development of open-source platforms designed for technical culture literacy in fashion for the CCI.
Conclusion and Discussion
Considering the reflections in this article, heritage brands have recognized the significant cultural potential inherent in heritage promptly, which encompass the manufacturing dimension, skills, and expertise.65 They have built cultural entrepreneurship around preserving and generating a specific heritage capital. Consistent with cultural sustainability,66 heritage brands amplify the heritage of their local territories, the artisanal skills preserved within them, and the communities with which they collaborate. Consequently, their products become narrative artifacts that embody a value system that belongs to the corporate archives and the region’s heritage. Thus, the corporate archive embodies its historical essence and functions as a cognitive artifact able to enrich material and productive cultural literacy. Through the revival of experimental works, innovative endeavors, insightful revelations, and curated content, the archive prompts a process of collective interpretation and engenders novel cognitive associations. This transformative interpretation positions the archive as a place of meta-knowledge that fosters reevaluating learning mechanisms inherent in information and content management.67 Thus, the archive is pivotal in reshaping knowledge transmission and production modalities within the corporate milieu and serves as a medium to regenerate intellectual discourse and innovation.
The theoretical framework presented in the article also offers a second interpretation (Fig. 2). When read along the horizontal axis, it highlights well-established and historical practices in applying corporate heritage in the left section (a material component of heritage). The tangible element in the company’s cultural heritage is emphasized, which is reinvested immediately in the design of new artifacts or exclusive and distinctive practices. This dimension of continuous and immediate innovation offers a regeneration of original, authentic, recognizable, and highly differentiated cultural content that represents the brand and promotes the continuous reinvestment of heritage into the company’s productions. Conversely, the right section of the framework (an experiential component of heritage) highlights new and contemporary reflections on heritage entrepreneurship. Thanks to new technologies that are becoming increasingly accessible and to the positive attitude of consumers who are more interested in the cultural expression of consumption, the intangible dimension of a company’s cultural heritage is revealed as a driver that generates new languages, experiences, or applications of the archive itself. By transcending archival fashion’s tangible boundaries, the corporate archive becomes a living and augmented reality that begins in the past and re-emerges in the present through codes that aspire to the future, even without realizing it immediately. Conceptualized as Living Cultural Heritage, the archive emphasizes the intrinsically relational nature of its contents and clarifies the intricate network of social, cultural, scientific, and productive interconnections that redefine its essence continually. Therefore, departing from a static paradigm, the archive evolves into a dynamic corporate heritage knowledge dissemination device. The concept of Living Cultural Heritage is an active resource that, if integrated properly and continuously into the managerial, design, and production processes, contributes to the construction of the company’s identity through different directions that make heritage a true asset for the company’s uniqueness and authenticity.
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Fornaciari.↩︎
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Alessandra Vaccari, Paolo Franzo and Giulia Tonucci.↩︎
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Elena Borin and Edwin Juno Delgado “The value of cultural and regional identity: an exploratory study of the viewpoints of funders and cultural and creative entrepreneurs,” Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, Vol. 8, no. 1 (2018): 16–29.↩︎
Elena Borin and Fabio Donato “Unlocking the potential of IC in Italian cultural ecosystems,” Journal of Intellectual Capital, Vol. 16, no. 2 (2015): 285–304.↩︎
Vacca, Bertola and Colombi.↩︎
Federica Vacca and Angelica Vandi, “Fashion Archive as Metamedium. Unfolding design knowledge through digital technologies” in Cumulus Antwerp 2023. Connectivity and Creativity in Times of Conflict, eds. Kristof Vaes et al. (Gent: Academia Press, 2023), 379–383.↩︎
Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital humanities (Milano: EGEA, 2015)↩︎
John Kuo Wei Tchen, “Creating a Dialogic Museum: The Chinatown History Museum Experiment” in Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, eds. Ivan Karp et al. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 285–326.↩︎
Sass Brown and Federica Vacca, “Cultural Sustainability in Fashion: Reflections on Craft and Sustainable Development Models,” Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, Vol. 18, no. 1 (2022): 590–600.↩︎
Paola Demartini et al., Cultural Initiatives for Sustainable Development (Cham, Springer International Publishing, 2021)↩︎
Giannachi.↩︎