I.

This issue of ZoneModa Journal includes a series of contributions and reflections that substantially show the complexity and articulation of the theme of fashion and cultural heritage, both nationally and internationally. Through specific skills and multiple research approaches, the authors of the essays highlight how it doesn’t exist only one type of cultural heritage, but how different types of research, multiple methods, and multifaceted documentation contribute to creating an articulated and complex vision of fashion heritage, as shown on epistemological-gnoseological level. In this direction, in fact, it can be said that in order to speak significantly about the cultural heritage of fashion it is necessary to assume multiple perspective visions, and at the same time a direction of thought where the proteiformity of the fashion phenomenon is recognized as a fundamental trait, as Malcom Barnard has well summarized:

There is no one set of ideas or no single conceptual framework with which fashion might be defined, analysed and critically explained. … Rather, there are theories about fashion or, to put it another way, there are fashion theories. What one finds is that various and diverse academic disciplines apply themselves or are applied to the practices, institutions, personnel and objects that constitute fashion. … There are many academic disciplines, then, that take an interest in the history, analysis, and critical explanation of fashion. Each discipline will have its own idea, or theory, of what fashion is and of what sorts of activities count as analysis and explanation.¹

In fact, the orientation to heterogeneity and the multifaceted phenomenology of fashion constitutes precisely the thematic structure around which the philosophy of fashion is consolidated in terms of heritage, since, in the first place, the very definition of cultural heritage, in turn, is far from univocal:

Cultural heritage consists of cultural and environmental heritage. The cultural heritage is represented by immovable and movable things that present artistic, historical, archaeological, ethno-anthropological, archival and bibliographic … interest and the other things identified by law or according to the law as testimonies having value of civilization (Art. 2).²

Secondly, the orientation to history and to cultural phenomena, as a founding cornerstone of the philosophy of fashion in terms of heritage, calls into question, among other things, the very relationship between history and fashion.³ A relationship that basically consists of a wide variety of historical research classifications, whose documentation includes, among other things, also types of unconventional materials.⁴ In this regard, it must be emphasized that the materiality of fashion documents leads us to go beyond the conventional diversification of archival, library and museum materials.⁵ With regard to all this issues, Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, in general, notes that:

In the field of different kinds of history, the history of fashion encounters obstacles to establishing itself and sharing rules of prestige. The reflection on fashion has been for a long time the prerogative of art historians who, apart from some laudable exceptions, have indeed “discovered” the dress within the pictorial representation, but have not dived in it, they have not extracted it from the picture and placed on the table as an object of scientific study placing it completely in its history category and striving to question or also only calling into question other sources.⁶

Also because, in fact, Muzzarelli explains:

A dress is not just a dress but the intersection of a series of trajectories, just like a historical event, small or big. The dress (or the accessory or the jewel) is “something” that materializes at a given moment for a series of circumstances. It is a matter of reconstructing as much as possible using different methodologies of sources and under the grazing fire of numerous questions. It is a matter of overcoming descriptivism and of giving the idea of perspective and context, it is a matter of inserting fashion into history, of using fashion to capture changes, to use it as a mirror reflecting social, economic and political conditions.⁷

In this direction, the central point is that the history of fashion is not only the history of clothing and accessories, that is, the history of material objects in and of itself. But it is also and above all, the set of social, theoretical and practical suggestions linked to fashion phenomena, which are transmitted from one society to another, in a specific historical context.⁸ These studies related to the fashion phenomena, simultaneously include laws, institutions, trades, consumption, markets, aesthetics, economic productions. And in this respect, similar studies and similar historical analyzes require the simultaneous consultation of heterogeneous documentary complexes, often conceptually and physically distant from each other.⁹ Moreover, in the current state of historical studies of social history of contemporary fashion, for example, a corpus of structurally organized data and knowledge, either in paper form, or through the application of new technologies for the human sciences, does not exist at national level.¹⁰

II.

Not only. All this is affected by a series of problems concerning the more general reflection on the description of cultural heritage.¹¹ In this sense, conservative practices, methodologies of description, inventorying and cataloging of cultural heritage, with the introduction of the computer and Internet, as Stefano Vitali observes, have experienced a simple and pure transposition in a digital environment.¹² A transposition, therefore, that has not contemplated radical innovations.¹³ Specifically, since at least 20 years, explains Vitali, in the archives world, for example, there are discussions about the possibilities “of convergence between different methodologies and different approaches to cataloging, inventorying and describing cultural heritage from different professions dealing with this heritage.”¹⁴ These reflections have met, and vice versa clashed, with similar reflections or initiatives undertaken in the field of libraries, and with less force, even in that of museums or other sectors. In this sense, the need to question ourselves is increasingly becoming more common in order to verify the possibility of combining practices and knowledge developed in other sectors. And this above all because we are dealing with a “cultural heritages of a new type (or of an ancient type re-emerging with the crisis of modernity)”, which show how:

The boundary lines are increasingly jagged, uncertain while the use of traditional disciplinary approaches, even when transposed in a digital environment, recalls the need to problematize the foundation of rigid separateness, to explore new paths, to carry out exchanges and contaminations.¹⁵

In this context, further, the need to clarify the difference between descriptive archival web and communicative archival web, as Federico Valacchi underlines.¹⁶ And here the basic question that Valacchi himself expresses is: “On what aspects should communication aimed at valorization insist?.”¹⁷ The archives are transversal informative entities, which enjoin to consider multiple purposes.¹⁸ Moreover, underlines Valacchi:

The value of the archives lies in their informal transversality, in the kaleidoscopic range of opportunities for the use and interpretation of their contents. [...] The archive is an instrument of memory and of a memory that becomes as articulated as the curiosity of the users who approach it.¹⁹

In Italy, the three-year project “Fashion Archives of the 1900s”, aimed at recovering and enhancing the heritage of Italian fashion preserved in the twentieth century archives, assume a specific relevance in terms of fashion heritage.²⁰ Elaborated by the Italian National Archives Association, which coordinates it, the project is carried out in collaboration with the Directorate General for the Archives of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and the copyright of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities.²¹ By involving numerous institutions, the project becomes the “spokesperson” of a cognitive and conservative need towards an inheritance, and an identity, at risk of dispersion, but a fundamental element today for the promotion and innovation of the made in Italy.²²

Because of this, the central point of the project is represented by the “Archives of fashion in the twentieth century” portal, promoted by the Directorate General of the Archives of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, officially inaugurated on November 14, 2011, at the State Archives of Rome.²³ The Work in progress portal, divided into 8 sections, is intended to be implemented through the contribution of an increasing number of archival complexes and producers, even if a systematic exploration of fashion archives has led, and inevitably leads to results that are not uniformly distributed on the national territory.²⁴ On the other hand, at international level, for example, the Europeana Fashion: Discover Europe’s Fashion Heritage project takes on significance; a project started in March 2012, a network of 22 partners from 12 European countries, representing numerous fashion institutions and collections, such as Victoria & Albert Museum (UK), Les Arts Décoratifs (FR), Emilio Pucci Archive (IT), Museo del Traje (ES).²⁵ Nonetheless, the project We wear culture assumes specific importance, an online project of Google Arts & Culture, available on app for iOS and Android, from June 2017.²⁶ A digital archive with over 30 thousand clothing items, the project is carried out by over 180 cultural and fashion institutions, and among the Italian institutions involved are Fondazione Ferrè, Fondazione Micol Fontana, Museo Ferragamo, Museo del tessuto di Prato.²⁷ Last but not least, along this line, with a significant impact, in national historiographical context, the lack of studies on the historical and cultural significance that has characterized, and founded as well, the concept and the concepts of the historical and cultural heritage of fashion in contemporary age, from the early nineteenth century until today.²⁸ And yet, in the social dimension, also the fashion heritage concerns primarily the legacy that is transmitted from one generation to the next: it is the set of principles and values that give meaning to everyday life, to the daily way of dressing. Also because heritage is, above all, a fundamental part of the historical sense, whose meaning consists, as Hans Georg Gadamer states, in the act of:

Thinking expressly on the historical horizon that is coextensive with the life we live and that we have lived …. Everything brings living tradition, on the one hand, and historical research on the other, eventually forms an effective unity that can not be analyzed, if not as a plot of reciprocal actions.²⁹

Hence, on this basis, within the strong heterogeneous phenomenology that characterizes the theme of fashion and cultural heritage, in this issue of the Journal, there is a threefold thematic subdivision of the essays, which starts from reflections on the traditional places par excellence for the preservation of fashion documentation, as well as for its enhancement, such as the archives and public and private foundations (N. Fadigati, M. Soldi, B. Niccoli, S. Mazzotta). Further examining, the relationship between the conception of the formation of the perspective that each nation conceives of its own heritage and the study of the binomial heritage-creativity, some fundamental implications are analyzed, between past and future, as well as the economic exploitation of the fashion heritage itself (L.N. Garcia, O.K. Pistilli, P. Maddaluno). Moreover, the historical reconstruction of some national and international case studies, developed in the chronological period between the modern age and the contemporary age, contribute to the configuration of the protean nature of the elements that help to found, essentially, the theme of the cultural heritage of fashion (P. Urbani, Musella Guida, M. Franceschini, I. Papushina, R. Abramov, R. Fratton Noronha).

I.

In the hyper-competitive world of the 21^st century global economy, cultural contents, including the enhancement of historical heritage, are by now considered fundamental for the generation of economic value. If the quality of the products remains an important element for consumers, the perception of quality as well is linked to the narration of quality itself rather than to an objective perception of it.³⁰ The cultural element becomes significant above all for the so-called “creative” industries, that is, those that respond in the first instance to non-cultural functional imperatives, but for which cultural contents have represented - and are increasingly representing - a relevant segment in the creation of the value chain. Although we can define the fashion industry as a “sui generis” creative industry, because creativity combines with all the processes of the textile-clothing production chain,³¹ fashion, as well as design, is fully part of the cultural industries.³²

For fashion companies creativity is associated both with cultural capital, fruit of the creativity of past generations, and with the artistic production of present generations, but also with the sphere of material culture, an expression of territory and communities. The fashion system is based on a historical experience, on the accumulation of knowledge through different generations of creatives and on district industrial systems.³³ For the production of goods with “high symbolic value”, which include the products of the most renowned fashion brands, the company cultural heritage is thus a fundamental part of what marketing defines as product concept, that is the totality of the tangible and intangible contributions, where the latter contemplate direct values such as the immediate conferral of status linked to the asset, but also indirect values that the company is able to communicate to the consumer through brand policy.³⁴ In the latter case, a key role is played by the heritage that constitutes for the fashion companies an emotional bond with its customers as through experience and tradition the quality of the product, its value and its positioning in historical key are recognized.³⁵ This is why the storytelling, and therefore the adoption of a precise historical placement, is an integral part of modern branding and companies with a strong cultural heritage shed positive light on their present and their future.³⁶

II.

The tools available to evoke the company historical heritage are the historical archive of the company and the museum of the company. In Italy the first historical archives and company museums were created in the eighties of the last century, and they increased in the following two decades. According to Istat data, in 2011 the company museums - or industrial ones - present in Italy amounted to 85 over the total number of 3,800 museums in the country.³⁷ Among them, there are many museums of fashion companies where, thanks to the conservation and enhancement of documents, iconographic materials, objects, products and machinery, we can find the story of the company and its protagonists. The museum is therefore not only a form of communication of the brand, but it becomes a real form of celebration of what the tradition of the brand represents: exploiting tradition to create “depth”, bypassing the pure commercial sphere, and strengthening the affinity with the public and enhancing its own image.³⁸ Two emblematic cases, in this sense, are the Ferragamo Museum, inaugurated in 1995 and housed in the medieval Palazzo Spini Feroni, in the historic headquarters of the company in Florence, and the Gucci Museum, opened in 2016, also in Florence, in Piazza della Signoria.

Some of the company museums and archives belong to the Museimpresa association, promoted by Assolombarda and Confindustria. The Museimpresa Associates are museums and archives of large, medium and small Italian companies that have decided to invest in the enhancement of their industrial heritage, making it available to the community.³⁹ In fact, an important aspect of company archives and museums is that they represent also a place of conservation and dissemination of an intrinsic cultural heritage in the history of the territory where the companies have arisen, operated, or still operate.⁴⁰ Company archives and museums, as active witnesses of a specific economic and social fabric, belong therefore to the category of cultural heritage understood as a heterogeneous set of historical memory, works and traditions, which represent a tool to define the profile of cultural wealth and knowledge of a territory and, more generally, of a country.⁴¹

III.

Regarding specifically the company archives, the documentation in the fashion industry is certainly more varied and widespread than the already well-structured company archives tout court. In addition to the specific sources kept by the companies, it is necessary to consider the sources present in other places such as cinematographic or photographic ones, kept in the audiovisual archives and film libraries.⁴² Moreover, company archives often convey more archives derived from the confluence of several producers, caused by various factors of legal transformation such as mergers, acquisitions, etc., which also cover rather limited time frames and control different producers.⁴³ This peculiarity requires a complex archival reading that takes into account the entrepreneurial path of the company itself.

An important channel for information on the historical heritage of companies in the digital age is the use of internet. In the field of fashion and textile industry there are several websites of some importance, among which we mention: Gucci, which presents a timeline of the company from its origins to today; Salvatore Ferragamo, which offers a company history and a section dedicated to the museum, with the collection of his creations; Missoni, which contains a section dedicated to the company’s fifty years of activity, with videos and photographs; Gianfranco Ferré, who proposes a virtual museum of his collections, with images and videos; Benetton, which includes a “timeline” and some movies, dedicated to the company’s forty years of activity; Ermenegildo Zegna, which describes the history of the company and of the woolen mill, with texts and related photo galleries.⁴⁴

From the point of view of historical research, a problem linked to the documentary use preserved in company archives and museums that belong to companies that are still active is that the fate of their historical, and therefore documental heritage, is strongly linked to any changes related to circumstantial crisis, corporate restructuring or acquisitions, which may suspend, even if temporarily, the museum or archival activity.

IV.

The historical heritage of the companies of the Italian fashion system is also characterized by the presence in several regions of abandoned textile factories, often of nineteenth-century origin, which do not tell only the story of a single company, but the story of an entire territory and of different generations that helped to create the productive fabric. Many of these factories, thanks to the success of industrial archeology, have now become (or are becoming) sites of considerable historical-cultural importance in many Italian regions. In fact, industrial archeology was among the first scientific disciplines to deal with the tangible and intangible heritage of companies. Born in the fifties and sixties of the last century in England, in order to protect the industrial heritage as a bearer of significant evidence of economic and social history, it began to take hold in Italy from the seventies,⁴⁵ finding a central role in the conservation, management and enhancement of cultural heritage. The recovery of industrial heritage has allowed the enhancement of sites of extraordinary historical and documentary value, which are also centers of initiatives and exhibitions of historical and artistic interest. Among all, the former woolen mill Pria di Biella which preserves also a valuable historical archive and, also in the Biella district, the “Fabbrica della ruota” (former Zingone woolen mill) in Pray that, in addition to the various restored and operational textile machinery, hosts the Documentation Center of Textile Industry which includes a rich specialized library and an archive consisting of 58 funds of industrial origin.⁴⁶ Finally, the Museo del Tessuto di Prato, today one of the major European institutions dedicated to the enhancement of the ancient and contemporary fabric (the heritage documents the art of the fabric from the early Christian era to the present day), which since 2003 has its headquarters in the ancient “Cimatoria Campolmi Leopoldo e C.”, a large nineteenth-century factory inside the medieval walls of the city.⁴⁷

V.

Finally, another important aspect of the cultural heritage of a company is represented by its foundations. Created by many large luxury groups, the foundations go beyond the promotion of their corporate culture, with investments and broader initiatives in the artistic and cultural field in the context of Corporate Social Responsibility. They also contribute to the protection and enhancement of the artistic heritage of a country, fostering synergies with the community and the territory and promoting cultural initiatives:⁴⁸ like the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, created on the initiative of Bernard Arnault (LVMH group) in 2006,⁴⁹ and the Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent, inaugurated in 2002;⁵⁰ or the Fondazione Prada in Italy, active since 1993,⁵¹ to name just a few. Many foundations are in fact real company museums and archives. For example, the Fondazione Micol Fontana which preserves the great heritage left by the Roman Atelier of the Sorelle Fontana, consisting of over 200 dresses ranging from 1940 to 1990, from sketches, embroidery and accessories. There is also a library, a newspaper library and a photographic fund. The Archive of the Foundation is a memory of the past, put at the service of future generations through the organization of visits, seminars, exhibitions and cultural meetings. An example instead of a foundation linked to the cultural promotion of the territory and the preservation of its historical heritage is the Fondazione Famiglia Legler, a company that has operated in the province of Bergamo since 1875, creating and leading the most important textile industry of the province. The Fondazione Legler, in addition to maintaining an important historical company archive of the Legler cotton mill, holds also other historical archives of textile companies, institutions, and private archives, and promotes initiatives for the development of culture and training. It was flanked by another important Foundation already operating in the area: the Foundation for the economic and social history of Bergamo, constituted by the Chamber of Commerce and by the major banks and industries of the Province. This has led to an integration between study and historical research activities of the Foundation for the economic and social history of Bergamo and the educational and cultural initiatives of the Fondazione Famiglia Legler.⁵²

The fashion system, in all its facets of the supply chain, therefore represents a cultural heritage that contains a historical, sociological, economic and, of course, artistic dimension that must be protected and put at the service of the territory and research.⁵³

Web Sites

https://www.museimpresa.com.

http://cultura.biella.it/on-line/Welcomepage/EcomuseodelBiellese/Celluleeistituzioni/FabbricadellaRuota-Pray.html.

http://www.museodeltessuto.it.

http://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr.

https://museeyslparis.com.

http://www.fondazioneprada.org.

http://www.ffl.it/archivio.asp.

http://www.ffl.it/.

http://www.lombardiabeniculturali.it/archivi/soggetti-conservatori/MIAA000CFA.