What is the meaning of an Archive?

Definition of archive

- Collection of documents produced or otherwise acquired during the course of activities by a

judiciary, state organizations and offices, public bodies and private institutions by families,
collectives and individuals.
- There is always a producing subject given an archive

Archives: a peculiar sector of cultural heritage

- Archives are cultural property

- Archives, and the organization of archives in various aspects, however, are distinct from other
areas of cultural heritage
- Archives do not originate as cultural heritage
(although through their formation are considered cultural goods)
- Archives are defined by their transversality that makes them both cultural goods and
instruments of legal, administrative and operational efficiency

The dual dimension of archives

- Legal, "political" and economic value of archives

- Historical value

Archives = Power?
- A logical and scientific opinion suggests the word archive (...) originate from the noun α̉ρχειο̃ ν,
which indicates the magistrate's palace, the curia: where it was natural that, next to the άρχων, i.e.
the one who holds power, their documents were kept

MEMORY AND THE PRESENT

- Archives also preserve the memory of the present

- Certificates, degrees, identity cards, passports, contracts: all documents without which our lives
would be impossible or difficult
- Archives are places where important tools for our daily lives are produced, managed and
preserved
The archive as a resource and legal obligation

• The archive is not a warehouse, but it is a service and as such, should be organized and
managed from its inception.

• Regardless of the legal profile of the producing entity and regulatory requirements, the
archive must be considered as a resource and a measure of efficiency of the entity that
produces and uses it.

Records culture and institutional culture

- The culture of records management and archives is contemporaneous with the culture of
institutions, evidence of an awareness of being part of a system that may be able to rely on
efficient records systems for its operation over time
Memory and History
- All the events of the past, the actions of people and the large and small facts of history represent
our HISTORICAL MEMORY
- Through the sources preserved in archives, it is possible to gather elements for a more holistic and
comprehensive historical reconstruction
- For this reason, archives are considered a component of cultural heritage of the community and
everyone has the right (and the duty...) to consult them

ARCHIVE as Discipline

Archival science is an articulated discipline that requires grafting highly specialized skills onto a
background knowledge base and precisely dependent upon the areas of application

- Current archives/historical archives

- Analog archives/computer archives/hybrid archives
- Internal articulations
- Historical archives
- Information management (record management)
- Approaches - "Internal" (archivist)
- "External" (user) - User: a term not liked?
The categories of users: internal and external; Definition of archivalism

• Archivalism is a science whose task is to develop the criteria that oversee the proper
preservation of records, their description and retrieval for both legal and administrative as
well as historical and cultural purposes

• The spread of archives consisting of computerized documents redefines and in part updates
and modifies the constituent elements of the discipline

• Two aspects coexist in the document and the archive, one legal/administrative and one
cultural.
• Documents and with them archives are put in place as a response to precise legal and
administrative needs and not initially as "sources," even though from the moment the
document comes into being, there is a need to ensure its preservation also as a source.

• Theoretically, problems with archivistics are called upon to identify and solve have a
strong and immediate feedback on practical levels, a fact that limits considering the
archival discipline as a science modeled on a contemplative study of the processes of
transformation of archives

The birth of archival science as a scientific discipline

• Between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, tthere are radical
changes in the conception of archives

• Foundations are laid for the development of an archival science as a scientific discipline.

• Rupture not only at the institutional and political levels but also at the archival level

• Break in the production/use/preservation relationship.

• Very long maturation time. The "rupture" of 1794 - This rupture can be traced back to 1794
when in France the principle of the publicity of archives was enshrined
Sorting methods

- By subject

- During the nineteenth century, a different method of sorting was developed that was antithetical
to organizing the archive simply by subject. This method was determined according to the
principle of provenance or the historical method.

- Bonaini named the method adopted “historical” not by that it could benefit history but because it
was founded in and inspired by notions of history.

- The final consecration of the historical method and of approaches to archival science came with
Giorgio Cencetti, who identified the historical method as the only reliable archival method.

- Since the end of the 1970s, however, there have been new instances that allow us to rethink the
archival discipline and its contents while shifting our attention to problems related to the future of
memory

Transformations

- The electronic document, information systems, the new focus on communication...

- This is true even when looking at the archive from a strictly cultural perspective

Mainframe
- Between the 1940s and 1950s some large companies and government agencies introduced the
first automated systems geared toward processing statistical data or serial calculations. - At this
stage, only print outputs were used and, more importantly, cost and performance of the technology
were still insurmountable obstacles to the spread of such tools.
- During the 1960s, there are the first significant steps toward concerns about the future of memory
in relation to the obsolescence of PC information systems
- A momentous change occurs in the 1980s with the introduction of personal computers available to
the private market and the associated spread of increasingly handy and relatively inexpensive
software. This results in a rapid increase in the use of these tools but also an equally rapid loss of
control over document production, which becomes increasingly decentralized. The risks of
dispersion and incompatibility are thus accentuated
- The increasing proliferation of digital technology in all aspects of life has resulted in a kind of
splitting in the generically understood documentary universe involving continuous intersections
and overlaps between the analog and digital spheres - Consequences of the evolutionary process
- Consequences at the global level and at the same time, impacts on daily life
- Consequences at the archival level: - Strong complexity of information systems and the need to
adapt tools and training paths to changed needs - the archivist mediator of knowledge is on the
way to becoming a manager of information

The definition of new levels of archival users

- The “classic” users

- The new users: information management - companies - public agencies
The families of the archival species
- "Institutional" archivists (central offices, state archives, superintendencies)
- Academic archivists
- Archivists of public bodies (municipalities, regions, provincial governments, universities)
- Freelance archivists
- Cooperatives, associations, companies

The skills of the knowledge broker

- In-depth knowledge of the mechanisms necessary to reconstruct a posteriori preservation

strategies and the use of documents for essentially cultural purposes.
- Possible distinctions according to document type (paleography, Latin, institutional history)
- Preserving, ordering, describing

Historical archivalism is characterized by the need for a posteriori intervention among those
records oriented toward the use of records for cultural purposes.

A New Perspective: Archival Science as Information Management

- Recuperation of the ancient role of the archivist

- Respect for the coexistence of the legal and cultural purposes of the document

- Responses to needs other than preservation

- Representing different perspectives from just a reorganization of records; Archivalism understood

as information management that must redefine its tools and orient itself to preventive interventions
of organization in order to "design" the archive and optimize its management.
The knowledge broker becomes "the architect of information"

- Answers to problems of - administrative transparency - optimization of time, space, cost

optimization of the use of the information resource

- Programming needs

The role of the new professional figure

- Establishing management criteria

- Establishing filing systems
- Establishing (new) procedures
- Preliminary analyses for the adoption of appropriate technological solutions; The problem of
training
- The training tools of historical archivists: established methods and institutions.

University programs. The archival schools.

- The training of new professionals: the role of universities and local authorities.
- The problem of training perspectives: a compromise between theory and practice. The profession
of archivist—how, who and where to practice it
- State Archivist
- Archival superintendencies -Public agencies
- Businesses
- Liberal profession(s)
- Companies, corporations

Toward a new professionalism: archival science as a business opportunity

- The choice between "market" and "science"

- The creation of an archival business
- Ability to operate in the marketplace
- Need for multidisciplinary skills: knowledge of archival science may not be enough;

The goals:

- Archival specialization
- Rejection of generic cultural heritage-oriented solutions
- Creation of solutions through integrated approaches
- Archival analysis in the service of the design of technological models; Specialization
- Identification of two market segments - Historical archives - Information management
- Utilization of specific professional skills within each segment

What is the archive from the perspective of postproduction?

Objects in an archive not only tell their own story but are also vectors to other possible
narratives, available to be reinterpreted by different actors. Indeed, the archive, in addition to its
purposeful and conscious use, also has an entropic character that makes it an ideal inspiration to be
used in postproduction. Postproduction is a practice well known to contemporary art and
particularly to fashion, where the need to scan present time often passes through a use of past
forms.

Notes on postproduction

The exhibition Christian Lacroix: Histoires de mode (Les Arts Décoratifs, Musée de la Mode et
du Textile, Paris, 2007-2008), which involved couturier Christian Lacroix himself as curator and
Olivier Saillard, former director of Palais Galliera, Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris,
exemplifies this concept well. As Gabriele Monti notes, "Lacroix acted as a kind of reverse
curator, through a collage of materials that chronologically 'could not' be approached but
shared formal and structural similarities."

"Portal of Fashion Archives"

In Italy, initiatives aimed at promoting Italian fashion archives have been developed over the past
decade. This is the case of the "Portal of Fashion Archives," which was created as part of the
SAN, Sistema Archivistico Nazionale, to share the results of the project Archivi della moda del
'900, elaborated by ANAI, Associazione Nazionale Archivistica Italiana and promoted by the
General Directorate for Archives, in collaboration with the General Directorate for Libraries,
Cultural Institutes and Copyright and the General Directorate for Organization, General Affairs,
Innovation, Budget and Personnel of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities. The aim is
to discover, enhance and make usable a wide range of sources of archival, bibliographic,
iconographic and audiovisual heritage related to Italian fashion.

Presented in Florence on Jan. 12, 2009, in the Sala Bianca of Palazzo Pitti, on the occasion of
Pitti Immagine Uomo 75, the project consists of a census of the sources, cataloguing and
digitizing the materials contained in the archives and organizing seminars and study
conferences.
The Fashion Archives Portal allows access to different contents, from the description of the
company archives to the visualization of the materials contained in them (products, designs,
sketches, photos and, administrative and accounting records), as well as in-depth studies on the
history of twentieth-century fashion in Italy.

(CSAC) of Parma

An interesting case on the study of archives is the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione
(CSAC), a research center of the University of Parma, founded by Professor Arturo Carlo
Quintavalle in 1968, with the aim of establishing a collection of art, photography, architecture,
design, fashion and graphic design drawings. Since 2007 it has been based at the Abbey of
Valserena, a few kilometers from Parma, and is structured in five sections - Art, Photography,
Media, Design, Entertainment - for the collection, preservation, cataloguing and promotion of
cultural heritage, also carrying out scientific consultancy, educational support, research and
exhibition planning. As of May 2015, the CSAC Archive-Museum is presented as a
multifunctional space, where the Museum areas are integrated with the existing areas of the
Archive and the Research and Education Center. The experience of the CSAC represents a
pioneering example of the desire to build, already in the 1970s, a public collection of
documentation of Italian design culture, through a reconnaissance of materials recovered from the
studios of designers and architects operating in those years. Regarding the materials of the design
culture of fashion, the work of acquiring funds continued throughout the 1980s and also in the
following decade led to the organization of about 70,000 pieces including drawings, sketches,
clothes, magazines.

Europeana

In the international arena, the experience of the European project "Europeana Fashion"(2012)
and the digital platform "Europeana Fashion Portal" [migrated to the portal europeana.eu and
became "Europeana Collections" in May 2016], managed since 2015 by the international
association EFHA, (Europeana Fashion International Association) with the aim of collecting
and sharing digital objects of "cultural heritage" of fashion, integrating collections of public
museums with private archives, in the perspective of enhancing content with high cultural,
historical and scientific value, as recognized by UNESCO ("Convention Concerning the
Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage," General Conference of UNESCO,
November 16, 1972).

The Potentials of the Archive

The potential of the archive, in terms of storytelling, communication, and celebrating the work
of designers, has also emerged from major international retrospectives of recent years, which
have showcased the archives of fashion designers, couturiers, maisons, and brands in
spectacular format. Among exhibitions that have garnered great media attention and popular
acclaim, as analyzed in the articles "The Growing Popularity of Fashion Exhibitions," by Olivia
Pinnock (Forbes, March 14, 2019) or in "The Most Iconic Fashion Exhibits Of All Time: Is Fashion
Truly Museum Art? ", by Vienna Vernose (CR Fashion Book, March 28, 2019). To name a few:
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, first at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York (2011) and then at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2015 or the major
Dior exhibitions, Christian Dior: Couturier du rêve, hosted at the Musée des Art Décoratifs in 2017
(on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Maison) and Christian Dior:
Designer of Dreams, at the V&A (2019) and the very recent Thierry Mugler: Couturissime
(Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, MMFA, 2019 - Kunsthalle, Rotterdam, 2020)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Brands

Some major Italian and international brands have launched policies to valorize the archive,
monumentalizing it in the perspective of brand heritage strategies, in which marketing and
communication activities coexist with projects in the form of displays that insist on aesthetic codes,
on the imaginaries constructed by the brand and on its craft traditions, between historical truths and
corporate mythologies es. Dior

VALENTINO

The economic implications of these operations exists in which the archive is also enhanced at the
patrimonial level as well as in the cultural dimension. Let us recall, for example, the Valentino
Garavani Virtual Museum, inaugurated in December 2011, as a permanent exhibition in a
digital environment, a virtual museum of the history of Valentino, navigable through a
downloadable desktop application (valentino-garavani-archives.org), linked to a database with 3D
technology. These included more than three hundred dresses from the Valentino archives, along
with original sketches, photos and photo shoots published in fashion magazines, images of
personalities photographed on the red carpet. The "media gallery" features more than five
thousand images and ninety-five lmages from fashion shows, a kind of evolution of the exhibition
"Valentino in Rome: 45 Years of Style," that was held at the Ara Pacis in Rome in 2007.

ARMANI

In the case of Armani, which on April 30, 2015, opened its museum-foundation, Armani / Silos,
at 40 Via Bergognone in Milan, to celebrate its 40-year career. Here, a large exhibition space of
4.500 square meters spread over four floors, in which collections from the early 1980s to the
present day are displayed in a non-chronological arrangement, but one that proceeds by
transversal themes to collections of different years and seasons, as well as an in-depth look at the
materials through navigation stations of the digital archive, accessible only inside the museum.

GUCCI GARDEN

On January 10, 2018, Gucci inaugurated Gucci Garden, a new incarnation of the 2011 Gucci
Museum, inside the historic Palazzo della Mercanzia in Florence's Piazza della Signoria,
transformed by the vision of Gucci's creative director Alessandro Michele. The space houses a
boutique with limited-edition products, a bookstore with a careful selection of research
publications, chef Massimo Bottura's "Gucci Osteria" restaurant, and the "Galleria"
exhibition area curated by Maria Luisa Frisa, composed of several thematic rooms, paying
homage to the Gucci archive through a display of historical objects in dialogue with
contemporary collections. Here, the archive invades the rooms, whose names, "Guccication,"
"Paraphernalia," "Cosmorama," "De Rerum Natura," and "Ephemera" allude to a critical
reading of the company's codes and the crossing of the archive itself, and its materials,
reinterpreted and reorganized into themes through the curator's (and designer’s) gaze.

When the private archive becomes a museum

Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Paris

The Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Paris, which opened on Oct. 3, 2017, and celebrates the work of
the French couturier through the installation of a permanent selection of clothes, accessories,
drawings, photographs, videos, and temporary thematic exhibitions. Located in the legendary
hôtel particulier , the home of Saint Laurent's studio and atelier from 1974 to 2002, the Musée is
home to the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent, which has been recognized as a public
museum from a private foundation, thanks to the great effort of collecting, organizing, studying,
cataloging, preserving, and enhancing the archive of the couturier's creations. Access to the
collections is also implemented thanks to a digital archive that can be browsed in the "La
Collection" section of the museum's website and that recounts the great project of recovering
Yves Saint Laurent's creative legacy by Pierre Bergé.

Alaia Foundation

A very interesting case concerns the archive of more than 10.000 haute couture gowns from the
personal collection of couturier Azzedine Alaïa (who passed away in November 2017), which saw
the Association Azzedine Alaïa ( which became Fondation Azzedine Alaïa on Feb. 28, 2020) and
Carla Sozzani, co-founder of the association, muse and mentor of Alaïa, come into play in synergy
with The New School Parsons Paris and the Costume Institute team at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York. Carla Sozzani together with Jessica Glasscock, research associate at the Costume
Institute, initiated a project to study and catalog the collection, with students from the "Archiving
Fashion" course taught by Marco Pecorari, director of the Master in Fashion Studies, using the
cataloguing guidelines of the MET (July 1-18, 2019), with a view to recovering the "memory" of
fashion, as reiterated by Olivier Saillard, director of Fondation Alaïa. In the article, “Late Designer
Azzedine Alaïa's Personal Couture Archive Revealed - to Students,” by Fleur Burlet, in WWD, July
19, 2019.
Archive and Memory
The relationships between fashion and time, and those between different temporal dimensions,
are central to addressing research on a fashion company's archive, in which clothes and images
re-emerge from the past to be continually re-edited in design practices.

It is no coincidence that, in a context where the creative use of the archive proves to be highly
topical, the Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Andrew
Bolton, Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute, have chosen to dedicate the fashion exhibition
About Time: Fashion and Duration (May 7-September 7, 2020, postponed to fall 2020) to
"Time." Starting with philosopher Henri Bergson's concept of duration (la durée) (1889) and
suggestions from Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando (1928), the project reflects on a selection of
clothes from 1870 to the present, and in which objects belonging to different eras are installed
together and put in relation to highlight references to the past in more recent creations, and identify
forms that somehow "resist" and survive the passage of time. Fashion turns out to be a field in
which these dynamics of survival of the past are even more evident, so as to become its own
specificity, requiring specific analyses and readings, as the research conducted here aims to
demonstrate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7B-xr346JU

The confrontation with the immateriality of fashion.

The realm of material culture, does not cover the entire spectrum of archival and fashion-related
issues. As Yuniya Kawamura writes, "Fashion is not the visible clothes, but it is the invisible
elements included in the clothes. "The first declination of immaterial has general significance has
already emerged in the roundup of studies cited in the previous paragraph: material culture almost
automatically carries with it its alter-ego, the immaterial. Despite appearances, the two fields are far
from being in opposition: they refer to each other.

Anthropological disciplines have always been concerned with understanding how and why certain
objects are chosen to be charged with a significate that has nothing to do with utilitarian function.
The most striking cases are those of sacred objects and artistic objects, which represent the climax
of the process of attributing a cultural and symbolic value that transfigures its material qualities.

This reference to the person/clothing brings us to the second declension of the term immaterial,
even more connected to fashion, namely its reference to a performative dimension. Clothing is alive
when it is worn. And this behavior in turn triggers new relationships with the dress and the wearer
whose "agency" bounces from one subject to another.

On the one hand, therefore, the body is measured, replicated; on the other, this same body is also a
projection, a character, a role. Which the dress embodies, creates, devises, constructs. And which it
can make freely interchangeable. Dress stands at degree zero of the process of identity construction
and represents the first and most immediate mediating operation between man and the external
environment. It is the first act of delimitation between a me and an outside me. Giuliana Bruno
brings dress into the sphere of "emotions," defining it "a liminal expression of our affective dress."

And so we have arrived at the last sense in which we can understand the term immaterial, referring
to the field of the transitory that conducts in a production of "alternative materiality," made not of
objects in the strict sense, all that constellation of elements , in very close connection with visual
culture, that contribute to constructing the imaginary that revolves around fashion, that feed its
seductive power.

I am referring to the design practices parallel to dress, such as styling, photography and the
construction of images and imagery in fashion design, but also to the digital dimension of objects
and images and the increasingly so technological tools, which on the one hand would seem to solve
the great issues inherent in any archive, namely the perishability of objects and limited space, and
on the other hand, completely transform the modes of fruition and construction, triggering research
modes that are all yet to be discovered.

Methodological consideration

The theme of the archive is, as a place where different temporal dimensions coexist seamlessly,
and simultaneously available for the use of creative individuals for the historical and theoretical
analyses of the historian and scholar. Confronting this dimension of simultaneity is necessary for
those who undertake the study of a fashion archive, as is the development and assertion of a
method that takes into account the heterogeneity of the materials that comprise it.

The first approach is an "intuitive" one, in which direct relationships are established with the
objects in the archive by letting them "speak." This subjective approach to the study of design
has always been kept at the margins of the Academy, as not adhering to criteria of objectivity
required for a scientific study. The subjectivity of the viewer is an interesting aspect of the archive.
However, such an internal perspective on the study of the archive should be framed within a
holistic methodological horizon, where idea(s) of the archive as living heritage, and of material
and immaterial culture, takes on a broader significance.

Materiality and immateriality. Tangible and Intangible heritage

The concepts of materiality and immateriality are intimately linked. In addition to fashion,
considerations including Heritage, are a strand of studies that have entered various disciplinary
discussions in recent years.

The Convention for the Protection of the Cultural and Natural Heritage approved by the
UNESCO General Conference in 1972 defines cultural heritage as monuments-that is, works of
architecture, sculpture or painting-archaeological features or structures, inscriptions, caves and
groups of features that have exceptional value from the point of view of history, art, or science. The
definition gradually has included other types of sites or artifacts, until in 2003 when the
organization also recognized "Intangible Heritage". This is defined as: The practices,
representations, expressions, knowledge, know-how-as well as the tools, objects, artifacts and
cultural spaces associated with them-that communities, groups and in some cases individuals
recognize as part of their cultural heritage.

Intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by

communities and groups in response to their environment(s), their interaction with nature, and
their histor(ies), and gives them a sense of identity and continuity, thereby promoting respect
for cultural diversity and human creativity.

The Italian word patrimonio and heritage

It is worthwhile, however, to consider the remarks of Giorgia Aquilar who points out the difference
in terminology among languages between Italian (along with French and Spanish) with
"patrimonio" as opposed to English “heritage.” Although referring to the same semantic field,
the two terms do not mean exactly the same thing. They suggest two different methodological
approaches and symbolic horizons.

In the Latin etymology of the two terms, a different matrix is present: hereditas refers more
specifically to the process of inheriting, while patrimonium comes after the acceptance of
inheritance, alluding more to economic value.

In this sense, while the term heritage, being more vague, allows one to maintain a series
inheritances from the past," it also suggests a certain kind of "mobile" relationship with the
present, a relationship that need not be one-way.

Heritage, in fact, is a practice, not a fact. As Laurajane Smith says, heritage "does not exist."
Heritage is first and foremost a mindset, a way of seeing, and is therefore in some ways,
immaterial. By tying itself to the idea of "typical," "authentic," national and cultural identity,
heritage becomes a product, subject to the same laws of construction and manipulation by
industry.

The archive, on one hand, bears witness to an important piece of visual culture, consumption
practices, and the construction of the imaginary. While on the other, the archive functions as a
mirror of self-representation, which reworks its own history in an economic, as well as symbolic,
mode. The concept of heritage takes different forms depending on the specificity of the context

It is crucial therefore that heritage, in synergy with the archives, documents the past to guide
the future.
The study of objects and the analysis of fashion materiality

A seminal text from a methodological point of view is Lou Taylor's The Study of Dress History
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) in which various research methods in the study
of fashion are analyzed, ranging from the "artifact-based approach," to social and economic
history, via material culture, cultural studies to ethnographic approaches and oral history. In
particular, the "object-based" approach is made explicit in a series of examples of "good practice
in artifact-based historical dress research."

Among the studies of Valerie Steele, by comparison, denounces the academic habit of neglecting
objects, emphasizing the important role they can play in the development of fashion
knowledge. Published as part of an issue of "Fashion Theory" titled Methodologies, Steele states
"A Fashion Museum is more than a Clothes-Bag," an article that emphasizes the importance of
comparing and interpreting objects for the study of fashion, referring precisely to what Lou
Taylor describes as "The Great Divide”: the rift that exists between "object-based and cultural
approaches."

This debate developed among different areas of material culture. In the case of fashion studies, it
has been characterized by differences in disciplinary affiliations (e.g., museums vs. academia)
and, most importantly, regarding the use of objects in the construction of fashion knowledge.

"Many scholars tend to ignore the important role that objects can play in the creation of
knowledge. [...] Yet of all the methodologies used to study fashion industry, one of the most
valuable is the interpretation of objects."

While the "object-based" approach initially focuses more on the visual and material
characteristics of objects (especially clothes) in reconstructing the histories of the evolution of
dress forms and styles; the cultural approach moves beyond the object, using it primarily as
evidence for theoretical speculations on issues such as gender, social identities and the body.

Here we can also recall the work of Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects (1986) and Arjun
Appadurai, The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective (1986). In these
studies, the object is not studied for its material and aesthetic qualities, but exclusively in its cultural
context(s) as a manifestation of production and consumption practices. Precisely in reaction to these
academic trends, Valerie Steele calls attention to the study of objects and the analysis of materiality
in fashion

The comparison with the object

Alexandra Palmer argues that "a close examination of fashion objects can shift and deepen our
understanding of the meaning of fashion."

Valerie Steele takes up a three-step model suggested by Jules Prown, which originates from art
history and material culture . The model consists of:

"description, recording the internal evidence of the object itself;

to deduction, interpreting the interaction between the object and the perceiver;

to speculation, framing hypotheses and questions which lead out from the object to external
evidence for testing and resolution."

Prown cites another model of object study proposed by E. McClung Fleming: "The operations are
as follows: 1. Identification (factual description); 2. Evaluation (judgement); 3. Cultural
analysis (relationship of the artifact to its culture); and 4. Interpretation (significance). "Thus,
the process involves moving from an initial description of the material characteristics of the
object to a "sensory" perception of it, and then arriving at the final stage of speculation and
elaboration of hypotheses and theoretical questions to be verified with external sources, and
developing a research program "from analysis of internal evidence to the search for and
investigation of external evidence. "

Palmer also emphasizes the importance of approaching an object of clothing in order to interpret it
in the right way, also suggesting that direct comparison with it is not entirely neutral or passive,
even in practices seemingly only descriptive of characteristics related to size, length and fabric of
manufacture, to name a few.

Objects are not considered exclusively as mere evidence but their role as activators of
theoretical thought in the fields of historical research or material and visual culture as discussed.
What all the above studies have in common is the idea of being able to extrapolate knowledge
from an object or image, while also problematizing the nature of direct confrontation with the
object. Jules Prown questions how information can be derived "from dumb objects. " Bruno
Latour, taking to extremes the concept of habitus, already treated by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu,
speaks of an "agency" of objects that involves a capacity to participate in social actions through
their qualities and functions.32

Latour has suggested the idea of the capacity of objects to relate and participate, conditioning
human actions and behaviors through interaction with them, mediating experiences,
transforming perceptions and interpretations, and influencing the way humans come into
contact with reality. Latour's discourse, however, seems to be more interested in revealing
connections, relationships and "networks" rather than focusing on the properties, especially
aesthetic properties, of objects. Considering, however, the idea of this "agency of objects," one can
appeal to studies in visual culture and art history that recognize objects and images as having an
active role and the capacity to act through their material and visual characteristics.

The reading of archival objects implies an interpretive participation that precedes from the
original fruition of these materials. If we think of press kits, or advertising catalogs, as well as
look books of late, their original function and audience are something other than the
researcher and the scholar's gaze. Those who critically analyze them to derive interpretations and
theoretical elaborations from them, suggest that times of transition from the context of the fashion
industry to the dimension of the archive (through the gaze).
The confrontation with the immateriality of fashion.

The realm of material culture, however, does not cover the entire spectrum of archival and
fashion-related issues. As Yuniya Kawamura puts it, "Fashion is not the visible clothes, but it is
the invisible elements included in the clothes. "The first declination of immaterial has general
significance has already emerged in the roundup of studies cited in the previous paragraph:
material culture almost automatically carries with it its alter-ego, the immaterial. Despite
appearances, the two fields are far from being in opposition: they refer to each other.”

Anthropological disciplines have always been concerned with understanding how and why certain
objects are chosen to be charged with significance that has nothing to do with utilitarian function.
The most striking cases are those of sacred objects and artistic objects, which represent the
climax of the process of attributing a cultural and symbolic value that transfigures its material
qualities:

The reference to a person/clothing brings us to the second declension of the term immaterial, even
more connected to fashion, namely its reference to a performative dimension. Clothing is alive
when it is worn. And this behavior triggers new relationships with the dress and the wearer
whose "agency" responds from one subject to another.

The body is measured, reproduced by an object, while this same body is also a projection, a
character, a role. Dress embodies, creates, devises, constructs. And which it can make freely
interchangeable. Dress stands at degree zero of the process of identity construction and represents
the first and most immediate mediating operation between persons and the external
environment. It is the first act of delimitation between a me and an outside me. Giuliana Bruno
brings dress into the sphere of "emotions," "a liminal expression of our affective dress."

And so we have arrived at the last sense in which we can understand the term immaterial
referring to the field of the transitory in a production of an "alternative materiality," made not of
objects, but a constellation of elements, represented in very close connection with the production
of visual culture, that contribute to constructing the imaginary that revolves around fashion, that
feeds its seductive power.

I am referring to the design practices parallel to dress, such as styling, photography and the
construction of images and imagery in fashion design, but also to the digital dimension of
objects and images and the increasingly sophisticated technological tools. These seem to solve
the great questions present in an archive, namely the perishability of objects and limited space, and
completely transform the modes of fruition and construction, triggering research modes that are all
yet to be discovered.
Cataloging fashion in relation to its disciplinary specificity

The basis of any archival operation is classification. In order to make a document available, it is
necessary to index it in order to properly identify and place it. Fashion, due to its complex and
hybrid nature, requires specific classificatory modes that reconstruct its multidimensionality.

Language

Because fashion refers to multiple semantic fields, it is important that the terminology be precise,
as was clear to Roland Barthes as early as the 1970s. The heterogeneity of materials of which a
fashion archive is composed (clothes, accessories, drawings, illustrations, photographs and
editorials) also needs the right vocabulary: even the word, in fact, is a "dress" and the dictionary is
a "uniform."

The exhibition The Concise Dictionary of the Dress, curated by Judith Clark and Stephen
Williams, problematizes precisely the relationship between dictionaries, archives, and fashion
displays, playing on the evocative power that words have and how their meaning crystallized by the
dictionary blocks a personal imaginative use, which is, however, reactivated through installation
and an evocative deployment of the word.

Cataloging

Currently the standard in scientific cataloging is the ICCD lemmary, which intervenes to support
and supplement the already existing VeAC (ancient and contemporary dressings) sheet, dedicated
to the filing of clothing and accessories by definition, sartorial type, and historical/commercial
name.

The lemmary works primarily on the need for normalization of the terms to be used: an exact
vocabulary that would identify in a concise but comprehensive manner all possible morphologies,
techniques of execution, fabrics, decorative motifs. It also describes the dating, cultural
definition, technical data, and history of the garment. the lemmary is still unsatisfactory,
primarily due to a lack of correspondence with other languages.

Absolute and definitive standardization, is most likely impossible. Because fashion is constantly
changing according to contexts, and contaminating itself with other areas of material culture, art
and consumption. Each exhibition creates its own vocabulary, such as the Piccolo Dizionario
dell'Alta Moda Italiana edited by Vittoria Caterina Caratozzolo on the occasion of the exhibition
Bellissima.
The advent of digital has led to a total reconfiguration of the concept of archives.

The digital produces a transformation of the status of the archived object and ways of archiving,
plus it also presupposes different ways of relating objects and varying ways of consultation. The
digital also opens up the possibility of archiving materials for everyone, without any limitation of
space, virtually rejecting the principle of selection. Digital technologies produce "virtual" objects
that translate the materiality of the object into numerical codes, which then return some of its
characters on a screen. In fact, a different, dematerialized object is created, which becomes pure
memory.

The digital exacerbates mobile conceptions of the archive, disproportionately increasing its
fragmentary dimension and its "combinability." The digital archive is an extremely flexible
system whose content is constantly recontextualized: it is a dynamic and ever-changing
existence. There is no longer a separation between document and its infrastructure: "once the
archive is based on the circulation of data its emphatic form dissolves into the superficies of coding
and protocol, into electronic circuits of data use." The relationship with time and space also
changes. Time for sedimentation of material, time for research, but also time for consultation. In
this sense, the dual nature of the archive leans more toward the generative rather than the
preservation component.

The digital also changes the nature of the archivist: among some digital archiving platforms,
everyone can upload their material and everyone can access it, also transforming the foucauldian
conception of the archive as a place of power.

Digital archiving technologies solve one of the archivist's main worries: lack of space. This leads to
an absolutely unprecedented possibility: the possibility of archiving everything. It is much easier
to preserve than to erase. It wears out, however, the infrastructure that houses it, which is subject
to rapid obsolescence. This requires constant updating of technologies to prevent memory from
being lost.

As Caroline Evans points out, the advent of the digital age changed the way fashion functioned:
since the second half of the 1990s, fashion began to be more image than object, as a result of new
networks and new communications.

Examples

modemuze.nl is an online platform for fashion and costume that experiments with ways of
integrating an audience of amateurs with the physical museum, functioning as a hub that gathers the
contribution of different points of view (insiders and amateurs), according to participatory models
of knowledge production.

The V&A has created a web application that expands the participatory mode of visitors in relation
to the collection, adopting the sharing logic typical of social media and integrating them into the
exhibitions. Pioneering in this regard was the 2004 exhibition on Ossie Clark, for example, in the
pre-social media era. On that occasion, the site launched a campaign asking visitors to supplement
the content of the exhibition with stories of their own individual relationships with the designer's
clothes.
For the Vivienne Westwood exhibition, too. The digital archive is generative, dynamic. Much more
than the sico archive. Around this consideration moves the SHOWstudio website project, launched
in 2000 and directed by photographer Nick Knight. The platform is a dynamic container of events,
projects, functioning as an open studio of creative practices capable of generating new material.

Open Fashion, Momu's digital platform, was created in 2010-2011 in collaboration with the
fashion department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp as part of a larger research
project called "Semantic Depot." The platform functions as an aggregator of digital objects from the
different archives involved (library, museum, collections, student work), etc., relating them and
highlighting connections between different creative fields.

Open Fashion connects the different layers that compose the complexity of the fashion system
while exponentially increasing the reachability of the museum's heritage.

Momu's model has been adopted on a larger scale by the "Europeana Fashion" project, co-funded
by the European Commission. Here, heritage moves out of local and national connections and is
taken to a European scale. The project, started in 2012, is concerned with creating a repository of
fashion-related digital content, including materials from both public and private archives, as well as
from European museums.

The materials featured are as diverse as clothing and accessories, contemporary design, photos,
drawings, sketches, magazines, catalogs, and videos. Currently the portal brings together material
shared by 40 institutions from 30 countries, including both thematic fashion museums and fashion
collections within traditional museums, as well as business archives, such as the Missoni archive,
but also cultural institutions that collect and preserve private collections

Created as an outgrowth of Armani/Silos, an exhibition space showing a selection of the designer's

creations from 1980 to 2015, divided by themes that identify and characterize Armani's "style," the
digital archive collects all of the museum's output, but also a series of looks from the Armani Privé
collections that were shown at the opening of the space. They contain visual and textual
information. Each garment is presented with three images showing it from the front, from behind,
and from the side) and is accompanied by an explanation of its technical realization. In addition, it
also offers references on the conceptual and visual inspirations behind each garment.

Armani's digital archive is not meant to be browsed on its own: it exists and works only in
association with the display of the actual garments.