Keywords

1 Introduction

1.1 Toward a More Inclusive Idea of Cultural Heritage

Museums can be considered as a complex system which have in recent decades experienced numerous methodological revisions aimed at integrating the preservation and protection goals with an increasing attention to people fruition and experience and re-focusing activities and services on participation enhancement. The heritage preserved within a museum is both material and immaterial and consists of its collections and the knowledge of its scientific personnel who—as the well-known ICOM (International Council of Museums) definition states—acts in the interest of the community and its development by creating, preserving, and disseminating knowledge [1]. More precisely, intangible heritage was one of the crucial topics discussed within the Faro Convention in 2005, which defines it as a set of resources inherited from the past that a group of people identify with, regardless of who owns them, because they reflect and express values, beliefs, knowledge, and traditions that are constantly evolving. In other words, intangible heritage includes all those environmental aspects produced from the interaction between people and places over time [2]. In addition, in 2018 ICOM defined museums as permanent non-profit institutions serving society and its development. As such, they are open to the public and not only research the tangible and intangible evidence of humankind and its environment, but acquire, preserve, communicate and specifically exhibit it for study, education, and enjoyment purposes [3]. This definition, along with the ratification of the Faro Convention by the Italian Parliament (September 23, 2023), has contributed to further relaunch the debate on the nature of cultural heritage that must be understood as a collective and shared good as well as a legacy. Moreover, this perspective has concomitantly provided new impetus to the development of more theories and approaches to the social role of cultural places. According to these premises, the process of sharing culture, knowledge, and skills, is now considered the starting point of the consumer’s experience of heritage, while the end point is precisely its preservation.

1.2 The Cultural Heritage of Fashion

Starting from the enhanced definition of cultural heritage we have mentioned above and inflecting it on fashion—in addition to arts, cinema, theater, dance, music, ritual and festive events—unsurprisingly, we can now include within its borders all those skills and practices of local crafts, involving the concept of fashion in its broadest sense so as to consider its relationship with social customs, etiquette, and habits of a given society. As emphasized by Salvatore Nastasi, focusing the attention to intangible cultural heritage could therefore provide the possibility of promoting cultural diversity as well as recognizing social expressions as an inclusive cultural asset, encompassing the expressions of everyday life, transferable as a country’s cultural identity [4]. Thus, even content and experiences of fashion need to be recognized as valuable within each specific country’s cultural heritage.

The challenge then is to radically improve the conditions of accessibility and experience of those who intend to enjoy the fashion system cultural heritage through the recognition and enhancement of both cultural pluralism and local traditions, as well as by improving the quality of products and services dedicated to them [5]. Thus, the benefits of this approach have to be framed within two complementary perspectives: on the one hand, we have to consider the systemic level, relying on an idea of archives that is oriented towards the valorization of both tangible and intangible heritage; on the other hand, we have to pay attention to the consumer level by making these resources accessible to anyone who wants to become aware and familiarize with them. In this sense, fashion in its own complexity could play a key role of these identity narratives as it is made up of moments, memories, imagination, practices and materiality. Fashion is definitely a heritage of objects, stories, memories, places and architectures, of material documents and oral traditions, whose persistence must be safeguarded and shared.

To achieve these goals of preservation, sharing and enhancement, we must consider and manage a multitude of data, objects, and places, all of which are interconnected. For this reason we think that a solution based on a unique museum of fashion is insufficient, while a series of trajectories between museums, objects, data, and experiences could work efficiently. The idea, then, is not to focus on a simple place, but to think of many and diversified exhibition spaces dedicated to an itinerant and ongoing presentation and representation of heritage. The focus would not be on one archive per se, but on a network of archives, both physical and digital, that have to be digitally connected in order to allow whoever accesses them to go through them thematically, as well as according to specific experiential paths.

The aim is to build in this way a transmedia universe in which each element of the narrative contributes to give back the complexity of the fashion objects, as well as that of the fashion experiences, enhancing the potentialities of the musealization of material and immaterial heritage beyond those traditional forms of storytelling that are typical of the museum experience and beyond the use of written texts and images. Reinforced by digital and immersive technologies, this approach is expected to open up to the use of audiovisual sounds and music, olfactory and tactile sensations, together with new spaces, movements and lights management.

As a matter of fact the rich transversality of fashion heritage and the general complexity of the fashion system configuration needs a methodology that can adequately collect, share, and make accessible all the objects, contents and experiences. Considering this expanded and multidimensional archive, made of multiple connections between different typologies of archives, seems to be the solution that can best achieve these goals. In fact, the value of archives lies in their potentiality in terms of being transversal while containing information of different levels and in the ease of access that allows the contents to be easily enjoyed and interpreted [6].

2 On the Need for a Fashion Expanded Archive

2.1 Beyond the Idea of “Fashion as Art”

Fashion has struggled a lot to find a space of visibility within the academic context as much as in the museum context where it was initially accepted under the umbrella label of art and/or art history [7, 8] within the frame of these disciplines and through their specific methodologies. Moreover, the industrial dimension, the triviality of use, and the clear emphasis on the monetary value of fashion products have contributed to place the entire system out of the boundaries of the field of art. Although even contemporary art—from Pop Art onward—has challenged such criticisms based on the economic aspects of objects and their mundanity, as underlined by Bourdieu’s brilliant essay “Haute couture, Haute culture” [9], where the scholar highlighted the overlapping between the field of art and that of fashion to legitimate fashion as an object of study, it is still evident how, unlike decorative arts which are capable of creating independent ensembles, those arts that are considered minor, such as fashion, jewelry and ceramics, are still dependent on the context in which they are found.

Fashion objects have thus become museum objects only by virtue of the legitimacy that art gives to them, to the aesthetic-formal qualities of their production and the actors involved in their creation or validation. Going even further into this issue, as the art-historical frame tends to prevail, it only tells part of fashion’s heritage, which is very often linked to the concept of costume. Thus, the result is the perception of that grim atmosphere that pervades a costume museum, as pointed out by Elizabeth Wilson [10]—one of the most influential scholars within the field of fashion studies—who pointed out how clothes enclosed in glass cases are motionless, deprived of the vitality and dynamism that connect them to individuals’ lives and experiences with their bodies. The static nature of the fashion object thus becomes even more disturbing than that of other art objects.

The idea of fashion objects that have to be lived instead of just shown is perfectly consistent with the most recent reflections on the new aesthetic experience: museums are nowadays starting to overcome the idea of the experience of the object to enhance the idea of the experience with the object [11]. The aim then is to propose a new fashion storytelling that can restore the pervasive power of its aesthetics, the complexity of experiences related to the body and its uses, all of which are characterized by a communicability and shareability that implies cooperation and collectivity.

2.2 Museifying the Italian Fashion System

The relevance of knowledge and the know-how in the field of fashion is now quite evident in the companies and brands identity strategies as well as in the cultural policies of different countries. As a matter of fact, within fashion companies, creativity is the result of a cultural capital that has been transferred, shared, and sedimented among different generations; but it is also the expression of a material sphere that reflects specific territories and communities. In other words: fashion creativity is not the product of an isolated genius, but is the result of an intense exchange between past and present experiences: the accumulation of knowledge among generations and the productive specificities of industrial system districts [12]. This concept of creativity is precisely positioned at the very center of the reflection about intangible cultural heritage and its preservation, maintenance, and sharing. This approach is able to explain why fashion brands are now investing in business museums and archives with the aim of accompanying the economic-productive and industrial dimensions of fashion through the celebration of tradition and business experience. We may refer, for example, to the textile museum in Prato, or we can consider the Italian experiences of industrial archaeology that are connected to the numerous factories up to the 20th century: i.e. the Textile Industry Documentation Center; the former Pria Wool Mill in Biella which preserves a precious historical archive; the former Zingone Wool Mill—now the “Wheel Factory”—where restored textile machinery are preserved and presented to visitors.

Within this frame, the museum itself becomes a fashion object, a luxury item with its own memory through which its own knowledge and history are displayed and told. This complexity made of intangible values and practices strongly connected to the territories makes the Italian fashion system an expression of a unique and recognizable artisanal and stylistic heritage, whose origins have been known since 1528 when Baldassarre Castiglione wrote his famous essay “Il cortegiano”. Even now, however, how to enhance this multifaceted essence and cultural heterogeneity is still under discussion. In this sense, it is worth noting that there are still no experiences of a fashion museum in Italy based on the assumptions we have highlighted so far. We can certainly not underestimate the proposals provided by the Museum of Fashion and Costume in Florence—better known as the “Galleria del Costume,” located in the Palazzina della Meridiana in the southern wing of Palazzo Pitti—as well as consider Palazzo Morando. Costume Moda Immagine in Milan. Moreover, the ambition to create a national fashion museum is still alive and its last proposal, dated summer 2022, referring to a project that is going to start in 2023 with the aim of building a fashion museum in Milan, specifically inside Palazzo Dugnani.

Finally, from an archival perspective, we can also refer to “Archivi della moda del ‘900”, a comprehensive project aimed at recovering and enhancing the heritage of Italian fashion with the purpose of relaunching the so-called Made in Italy. The project, coordinated by the Italian National Archival Association, was carried out in collaboration with the General Directorate for Archives of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities. It is essentially a portal divided into eight sections, which is expected to be expanded through the collaboration of a number of different archives, at both the public and private level.

Even if all these examples testify to a strong interest in fashion musealization, all the results seem to be lacking in some way.

2.3 An Italian Fashion Archive Between Plurality and Sharing

We are clearly aware that this brief premise is inadequate to reconstruct the tortuous path of the legitimization of fashion and its world; however, it can still be useful in understanding the reasons behind the challenges and limits to the creation of a standalone fashion museum.

When analyzing the limitations of the projects discussed above, for example, they perfectly reflect a structural problem that is inherent at the basis of imagining a fashion museum/archive in Italy: namely the heterogeneity of customs, traditions, and practices linked to different territories, as well as the historical, artistic, cultural and political implications of fashion and of its representations. Then the main problem would be understanding what to archive and what to tell; moreover, how to figure it out and how to do it.

Actually, in the initiatives above we can notice a certain lack of overview, capable of removing fashion from the academic and museum ghettoization to which it has historically been relegated. Moreover, the plurality of content, materials, practices and memories that we have previously mentioned requires an idea of a fashion museum that should be as shared as possible, open to the contribution of different sources and agents, and able to bring the multiple perspectives of fashion into a positive and productive dialogue which can be constantly enriched also by the people who access the museums and their heritages.

Even if a multidisciplinary approach has been hard to concretely reach due to fashion’s difficulties in being validated as a scientific object, if not a field of study, the lack of dialogue between diverse approaches and, at the same time, the prevalence of a specific perspective to justify fashion beyond the trivial economic view can certainly be a starting point in rethinking fashion’s musealization.

Finally, while sketching new shapes and functions of fashion museum experiences within the PNRR project “Cultural heritage active innovation for next-gen sustainable society”, we cannot but consider that we are facing an era of uncertainty and great change in which traditional social systems are giving way to more fluid and inclusive societies. Within this scenario, also cultural offerings have to adapt to the new challenges that society demands, rethinking the approaches to heritage in order to better meet the current needs of citizens for a broader, innovative, and more conscious democratization of culture.

Maybe the perfect opportunity to experiment a broader approach to Italian culture and its representations could precisely be the experience of fashion lived through museums and archives in all its complexity and richness.

3 Digital is for Fashion

The relationship between museums and digital technologies has slowly been strengthening [13, 14] in the last decades, even if for a long time digital technologies have been considered more as a tool to be directed toward conservation, preservation, restoration and cataloguing, rather than developing other potentialities. During the pandemic, also museums experienced a strong acceleration in the use of new technologies as a support and an opportunity to enhance communication and narrative activities.

The new approaches to the museum experience developed in this sense could play a fundamental role in enhancing the new fashion storytelling discussed above in terms of both tangible and intangible heritage. Virtual exhibitions or immersive tours, for example, represent a possible vehicle that can build a fashion narrative which is definitely sensitive to the multilevel readings fashion itself requires, thus generating an expanded and multisensorial experience. In addition, digital tools (from QR codes on) can provide the possibility of expanding the narrative of the pieces of work [15], which in the case of fashion products would be really effective in conveying all the information related to objects. At the same time, the digital design of a more engaging visitor experience through the construction of an ever-evolving narrative journey [16, 17] could be able to overcome the physical and cultural barriers reported as an impediment by the so-called audience development approach discussed by Kawashima in the early 2000s [18].

To summarize the digitalization process applied to the cultural heritage of fashion may work at two different levels: on the one hand, the digitalization works in networking different typologies of archives in which all the historical, artistic, socio-cultural and productive information of the material and immaterial heritage are contained and systematized; on the other hand, the construction of diverse immersive experiences in multiple spaces of fruition can convey a narrative of the practices where the visitor can be immersed and finally access the intangible culture.

3.1 The Digitalization of Fashion Archives

Online access to cultural heritage is certainly a practice that facilitates and accelerates information retrieval especially in the case of fashion-related products which are generally scattered in museums, archives, and foundations dispersed throughout a territory and without any adequate mapping of the potential connections. Moreover, the virtual access to archives can also be an opportunity to innovate and create new forms of fruition and enhancement of fashion-related heritage. Digital tools could lead to a breakthrough that would allow a complete fruition of the numerous and multifaceted productions linked to the fashion system that are usually hidden to the public: we are here referring to the countless material goods that a fashion museums (but also museums where fashion is only a small part of bigger collections) should contain: fabrics, clothes, accessories, jewelry, machinery, and so on. The Fashion Research Italy Foundation’s project represents a first step in this direction. The Foundation has built a digital archive that collects a vast amount of textile—or related—material ranging from the 19th to the 21st century. The archive consists of three main sections: the Renzo Brandone Fund, the Emmanuel Schvili Fund, and the Fashion Photography Archive. The Brandone Fund represents the heart of the archive and collects 30.000 textile designs whose vastness perfectly illustrates the multitude of styles that have come and gone over three centuries. The Emmanuel Schvili Fund, the result of an important donation, collects the embroideries the brand itself has produced since the 1970s, highlighting the evolution of embroidery techniques. Finally, the Fashion Photography Archive is a wide-ranging archival project aimed at collecting visual materials, such as campaigns and catalogs, that can tell the story of fashion companies and brands in the region.

It is quite evident to notice how the impetus of digitization could turn such projects into the core of a national network that would collect, preserve, sort, present, and disseminate all the material proofs of Italian fashion, merging the tangible and intangible, and consolidating the identity of individual local communities. Networks like this—if wisely constructed and also physically connected—could provide a complete frame to local and national history, developing a center devoted to the cultural elaboration and analysis of the fashion system where it would be preserved, studied, researched, communicated, and disseminated. In this way, digitization would clearly enable an integrated and intelligent use of numerous data, fostering innovative paths and in-depth study through appropriate search engines. This extraordinary material, wisely collected and managed, could naturally open up spaces of great relevance and interest not only for study and scientific research, but also for information, teaching, training, and the proposal of more attractive content for visiting, even remotely, thus becoming a tool for tourist-cultural attraction.

All this could be made even more efficient by technologies such as augmented reality applications, which can create semantic tagging of the content of collections and archives in order to facilitate the enjoyment of the content. Digital technologies should therefore be exploited not to dismiss the existing but, if anything, to emphasize it, as stated by the Italian Osservatorio Innovazione Digitale nei Beni e Attività Culturali: artificial intelligence, blockchain, chatbots, and other applications can create benefits in terms of audience development, cataloging, and digitization of the collection without affecting the current system of fruition [19, 20].

3.2 Virtual and In-Person: Hybridizing the Museum Experience with Fashion

As already anticipated in the previous paragraphs, the pandemic accelerated the digitization process of the experience in museum spaces; indeed, museums, art and cultural institutions have answered the challenge of the crisis by developing very rich and innovative online programs and initiatives such as dedicated projects, conversations, and virtual tours [21]. Once the pandemic emergency passed, virtual tour and remote access to collections do not have to represent an alternative to in situ experiences; rather, they can help in overcoming a series of limitations that are related to the cultural products of the fashion system identity and visibility. As we mentioned above, as the huge heritage of the Italian fashion system suffers from being isolated or hidden to visitors, scholars and curious people within the traditional museums, making these experiences accessible through their digitalization makes the same museums or institutions, also at a local level, able to spread their heritage widely, promoting activities of dissemination and sharing their patrimony among territories and communities.

In addition, digital technologies would offer the possibility to take advantage of the opportunities provided by digital storytelling so as to transform fashion museums into participatory and immersive environments in which that sense of “lugubriousness” mentioned by Elizabeth Wilson could finally be eliminated. The audience/consumer engagement through storytelling is not a novelty within the frame of the media studies, but it can be an important asset to develop within the museum. The engagement can effectively be reached through the combination of different media to enhance the experience of the visitor, from audiovisual contributions, virtual reality, augmented reality or artificial intelligence, that can integrate the in-person visit through immersive digital experience. Augmented reality applications, for example, enable the enjoyment of stories, narratives, and insights, through virtual models and information superimposed on live video streams. Moreover these technologies and media, integrated within each museum, can be networked creating opportunities to overcome the physical boundaries of the museum, to create trajectories to go through combining in presence and online experience. The virtual tour format represents an important opportunity for the musealized fashion world because it allows people to view collections located in different places, creating a new cultural experience based on the hybrid relationship between virtual and physical available to different audiences [22], breaking down those issues of economic, geographic, and cultural access that still characterize museum institutions.

Rethinking the cultural offerings can also mean using 3D modeling to enhance the personalized fruition of objects. In Italy, 3D modeling has already been experimented and applied to fashion, such as in the case of the 3D-printed reconstructions of the jewelry found in Merit’s tomb, where visitors were given the opportunity to explore the jewelry in three dimensions [23]. The use of technologies, in this case, is an integral part of a wider cultural project that sees digitization as another opportunity to create engaging narratives within museums.

The wide range of digital applications available today thus provides numerous possibilities that museums, foundations, archives, and collections can exploit for the purpose of making the cultural heritage of fashion visible, in terms of creative expression, production, and experiences related to the historical, social, relational, political, and economic context.

The following are just some examples that could be useful to understand how to rethink museum experiences and fashion-related archives.

  • the creation of 360° virtual tours that allow visitors to move among the items and which can be enriched with audio narratives and/or extra content [24];

  • the use of haptic technologies to restore the tactile perception of precious objects and textiles;

  • the application of T-SNE (t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding) to aggregate images and objects by similarity, composition, color, theme, setting;

  • the use of VR (virtual reality) to operate textile production machinery so as to deliver the experience of fabric production to the visitor;

  • the installation of smart mirrors—already developed for the in-store experience—through which visitors can see themself wearing the clothing displayed in the museum;

  • the construction of metaverses dedicated to different periods and historical contexts, in which the visitors’ avatars can use the objects displayed in the museum as tools for the construction of their own digital identity and later interact with other visitors in that environment.

It is quite evident that digital technologies stand as a fundamental tool for the construction of a new model of fruition and enhancement: a kind of loom on which to weave the fabric of a new history, stitched together from the many fragments that the territory delivers to us.

4 Mapping the Trajectories Through Archives and Museums

All the aspects that we have considered above, whose knowledge represents the necessary premise to the PNRR project we are working within, acquire sense if we think about the experience with the fashion archives and museums from the perspectives of the people who will access them. The starting question of every kind of project has to be: who is the target of the project and what kind of experience will he expect to find? What we are discussing here then depends on the considerations that no experience will be the same because, thanks to digitalization, people are now more demanding in terms of the personalization of their experience which has to be the result of pull and push processes.

The idea, then, is to think about the usability of the different archives and museum spaces simulating the crossing trajectories of the users of the archives and museums themselves, imagining traversal maps that can answer different needs and different goals. The same archive or museum can be accessed by a fashion scholar, a designer, an expert of fibers and fabrics, a craftsman, the curious visitor. This variability explains why we need an interconnected system of archives and museum instead of one museum dedicated to fashion. What the user needs to find are potential paths, made available through the combination of virtual and in-person experience, the accessibility to material and immaterial knowledge, the potentiality of experience instead of data. From the initial need, through several steps until the goal is achieved, only in this way can archives and museums not only become memory repositories, but an intense experience of building and sharing knowledge.