The study distinguishes between two fundamentally different types of digital archives: digitised archives, which are converted from physical materials, and born-digital archives, which are created natively in digital form. This distinction highlights the heterogeneous nature of contemporary fashion archiving practices and the challenges they pose in terms of materiality, preservation, and curation in the digital age. The researchers argue that these challenges cannot be understood through technology alone, but must be examined through the lens of the invisible labour involved in digital content production.

Through a semi-structured interview with Cecilia Botta and Nicoletta Esposito from Promemoria, the paper presents the premises and practices of digitising fashion archives today, exploring the specific techniques of curation, mediation, and storytelling developed by this agency. The findings reveal how technological infrastructures and human labour together shape the construction, accessibility, and perception of fashion heritage in the digital age.

One of the most striking revelations concerns the strategic challenges that fashion companies face when digitising their archives. Promemoria’s work involves not only the technical conversion of materials but also the development of interfaces that allow users to navigate vast collections of fashion heritage. The company acts as a mediator between fashion houses and their own histories, translating physical garments, sketches, and photographs into digital assets that can be searched, curated, and repurposed for contemporary collections.

The research also sheds light on the invisible labour behind this transformation. Digitising a fashion archive requires a multidisciplinary team of photographers, cataloguers, curators, and software developers who must make countless decisions about how to represent physical materials in digital form. These decisions are far from neutral: they shape what becomes visible, what remains hidden, and how fashion history is perceived by future generations.

The study also explores the storytelling dimension of digital fashion archives. Promemoria develops specific techniques of curation and mediation that go beyond simple preservation, creating narratives that connect fashion heritage to contemporary culture. This storytelling function transforms the archive from a static repository into a dynamic platform for cultural production, one that can inspire new collections, exhibitions, and research.

The findings have important implications for the field of cultural management and policy. As fashion heritage becomes increasingly digital, the role of specialised agencies like Promemoria raises questions about who controls access to fashion history and how the labour of digitisation is valued. The researchers argue that these questions must be addressed through policies that recognise the complex interplay between technology, labour, and cultural heritage.

Ultimately, the study reveals that the digitisation of fashion archives is not merely a technical process but a deeply cultural one, shaped by human decisions, labour, and creativity. As fashion houses continue to invest in digital heritage, the invisible workforce behind these transformations deserves recognition, not only for its contribution to preservation but also for its role in shaping how fashion history is constructed, accessed, and perceived in the digital age.

The theoretical grounding of the study draws heavily on critical heritage studies, particularly Laurajane Smith’s influential argument that heritage is not a fixed object to be discovered but a cultural and social practice that is actively produced. According to this view, the management and conservation techniques undertaken by heritage professionals are never neutral operations; they function as meaning-making practices shaped by, and in turn reinforcing, the discourses in which they are embedded. Applied to fashion, this framework suggests that every act of digitisation, from the selection of garments to be photographed to the design of metadata fields and search interfaces, participates in constructing what counts as fashion heritage in the first place. The archive is therefore not simply a mirror of the past but an active agent in shaping how that past is understood, valued, and transmitted.

The Italian context provides a particularly rich setting for examining these dynamics. State-funded initiatives have progressively recognised fashion archives as part of the national cultural patrimony. The Sistema Informativo Unificato per le Soprintendenze Archivistiche, launched in 2005 by the Direzione Generale Archivi in collaboration with the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, offers centralised access to data on non-state public and private archival holdings preserved outside the State Archives. In the fashion field specifically, the Associazione Nazionale Archivistica Italiana developed the Portale degli Archivi della Moda del Novecento in 2011 as part of the Sistema Archivistico Nazionale, with the aim of gathering and making accessible a wide array of archival, bibliographic, iconographic, and audiovisual sources related to Italian fashion. These projects signal a growing institutional recognition that Italian fashion heritage possesses both cultural and economic significance, and that digitisation has become a fundamental engine of its reassessment.

At the same time, the broader landscape of fashion digitisation is characterised by a dense ecology in which public and private interests intertwine. Major institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art now offer expansive, browsable online collections that make decades of material culture discoverable to wide publics. Heritage is also mobilised as a political and identity-making resource, visible in initiatives such as the European Heritage Days or the Italian Notte degli Archivi, while simultaneously being absorbed into commercial logics, most visibly within the luxury sector. Public museums and libraries continue to digitise their collections, while private fashion houses invest in the continuous institutionalisation of their own pasts through dedicated heritage departments and blockbuster exhibitions. Examples include the Armani/ARCHIVIO platform, the opening of La Galerie Dior, and the Mugler and Schiaparelli exhibitions at MAD Paris, as well as maison-driven access days such as LVMH’s Journées Particulières. In this environment, copyright and brand protection sit alongside curatorial labour and creative strategies, raising urgent questions about access, authorship, and the balance between public value and private control.

The distinction between digitised and born-digital archives carries significant consequences for preservation and curation. Digitised archives inherit the fragility of their physical originals, requiring careful handling of garments, sketches, photographs, and documents during capture, while born-digital archives face entirely different challenges, including format obsolescence, software dependency, and the rapid evolution of storage technologies. The researchers note that the nature and purpose of these diverse archives are constantly being rethought and reimagined as brands invest in digital internal systems for archiving data. This constant evolution means that the conceptual boundaries between archive types are not settled but remain under active negotiation by practitioners, institutions, and scholars alike.

The methodological approach of the study, based on a semi-structured interview with practitioners at Promemoria Group, reflects a broader scholarly effort to foreground the voices of those who perform archival labour. Founded in Turin in 2011 by Andrea Montorio and Gisella Riva, Promemoria has become a leading group in the organisation, digitisation, preservation, and valorisation of major private and public archives across various fields. By focusing on this company, the authors are able to examine how archival practices are systematised in the digital domain, how labour and metadata are structured, and how the conceptualisation of interface design shapes access to and meaning of archival materials. The case study approach reveals the premises, schemes, and systematised methods that underpin the industry of digitising archives, an industry that has largely escaped systematic scholarly analysis despite its growing economic and cultural weight.

The research builds on earlier observations by Pecorari, who highlighted how fashion institutions worldwide have opened towards digitisation initiatives, from public museums publishing their collections online to private publishing companies such as Vogue US and Harper’s Bazaar sharing their digital issues through online library servers like ProQuest or Bloomsbury Fashion Central. Pecorari identified a lack of scholarly attention to this tendency and stressed the necessity of reflecting on the practices of digitisation of archives and museum collections, the use of the digital in curatorial practices, the politics of online archives, and the role of digital archives in academic research. The present study takes up this invitation, addressing questions about what practices define a digital fashion archive today, how their interfaces, structures, and cultural meaning can be systematically understood, what new professional figures are emerging in the field, and how labour, curation, and technology interact in shaping them.

For scholars and practitioners in cultural management, the study’s emphasis on invisible labour offers a timely corrective to narratives that frame digitisation as a purely technological achievement. The emergence of new professional figures, including specialised cataloguers, digital curators, and interface designers, suggests that the field of fashion archiving is undergoing a professionalisation that deserves recognition in training programmes, labour policies, and funding frameworks. As fashion heritage becomes increasingly central to brand identity, communication strategies, and public engagement, understanding the human infrastructures that sustain digital archives becomes essential for anyone concerned with the sustainable stewardship of cultural memory in the digital age.

Subject of Research: Digitising fashion archives: methodologies, labour and interfaces through the case of promemoria group

Article Title: Digitising fashion archives: methodologies, labour and interfaces through the case of promemoria group

Article References: Trame, I., & Pecorari, M. (2026). Digitising fashion archives: methodologies, labour and interfaces through the case of promemoria group. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 15, Article 15268. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2025.15268

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2025.15268

Keywords: Digitising, fashion, archives, methodologies, labour, interfaces, case, promemoria, group, scientific research

The mystery began with a short report published in Nature describing a very intense magnetic disturbance on 18 October 1841. According to that account, the disturbance interfered with train signals and delayed the 10:05 p.m. departure from Exeter by sixteen minutes. If true, the event would predate the famous Carrington Event of 1859 by nearly two decades and would stand as the first documented case of solar activity disrupting critical infrastructure. Generations of space weather researchers have cited the episode as a historical curiosity, but no one had systematically checked whether the story could actually have happened when the anonymous author claimed it did.

That is precisely what a team led by Lancaster University set out to do, working with scientists from RMIT University, the British Geological Survey, Natural Resources Canada, Baylor University and the United Kingdom’s national space laboratory, RAL Space. Their investigation, published in the American Geophysical Union journal Space Weather, combined an unusually broad set of evidence: railway timetables, historical newspaper reports, records of solar observations, accounts of auroral displays and digitised geomagnetic measurements. The approach treated the question less like a routine literature review and more like a historical detective case, in which every document had to be cross-checked against the physical reality of the railway network in the 1840s.

The critical clue turned out to be startlingly simple. As RMIT University space weather expert Associate Professor Brett Carter explained, the railway line referenced in the Nature account did not even exist at the time of the alleged incident. The Exeter to Starcross line, which the report described, did not open until 1846, almost five years after the supposed 1841 event. In other words, the celebrated first space weather impact on technology rested on what was almost certainly a typographical error in a paper published in 1871. A single wrong digit in a date had propagated through the historical record for more than 150 years.

With the 1841 date debunked, the team turned to the archival record to establish when the Exeter delay actually occurred. By matching the available evidence from timetables, newspapers and geomagnetic data, they concluded that the incident most likely took place on 18 October 1848 rather than 1841. The corrected date changes the historical significance of the event. The Exeter delay remains one of the earliest well-documented examples of space weather disrupting technology, but it can no longer claim to be the first. That distinction currently belongs to an earlier episode: interference with telegraph systems on the Midland Railway in March 1847, which is now the earliest credible report known to researchers.

To understand why the 1840s matter so much, it helps to recall what was happening in the world of technology at the time. The first electric telegraph networks were being constructed during that decade, and telegraph operators quickly began to experience unexplained electrical effects caused by disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field. Solar activity can induce currents in long conductors on the ground, and the expanding web of telegraph wires criss-crossing Britain and other countries provided exactly the kind of infrastructure that geomagnetic disturbances could disturb. The 1840s, Carter noted, marked a crossing point of no return in the relationship between electronic technology and space weather, a natural phenomenon that has always existed but had never before had human systems to affect. Since that line was crossed, he observed, humans have not looked back.

The most famous early demonstration of that vulnerability came just over a decade later. A massive solar flare and coronal mass ejection in 1859, now known as the Carrington Event, produced aurora borealis as far south as Hawaii and Central America. The displays were so bright that people could read newspapers by their light, and gold miners in the Americas mistook the glow for dawn and began cooking breakfast shortly after midnight. Telegraph systems around the world failed. Sparking lines gave electrical shocks to operators and even caught fire, and some systems continued operating without batteries, driven only by the geomagnetic currents induced in the wires themselves. The Carrington Event remains the benchmark against which extreme space weather is measured, but the newly corrected Exeter story shows that the encounter between solar storms and technology began well before 1859.

Study lead author Professor Jim Wild of Lancaster University said the research challenges the assumption that space weather is a purely modern concern. What the work highlights, he explained, is that space weather is not a new threat but a long-standing natural hazard, and that society has been experiencing its effects on technology for almost as long as electrical technologies have existed. The Exeter train delay, he noted, is fascinating precisely because it sits at the point where emerging technologies first began to encounter the realities of the space environment. By combining historical archives with scientific observations, the team was able to show that the event almost certainly happened in 1848 rather than 1841. Although that means it is not the earliest recorded space weather impact, it remains one of the first clear examples of solar activity disrupting critical infrastructure, and the study demonstrates the value of combining scientific records with contemporary newspaper reports and archival documents when reconstructing historic space weather events.

Dr Mike Hapgood, visiting scientist and space weather expert at RAL Space, described the investigation as feeling like a detective story. He emphasised that the work underscores the importance of preserving older records, which provide the evidence base researchers need to interpret past events and strengthen future predictions. The point is not merely historical. Nearly two centuries after the Exeter delay, railways and other critical infrastructure remain vulnerable to space weather, although through very different technologies, including power systems, signalling equipment, satellite navigation and communications networks. Hapgood cautioned that while today’s space weather capabilities are far more advanced than anything available in the 1800s, the modern technologies society depends on are also much more vulnerable to solar storms, making a deep understanding of past events essential for preparing for and mitigating future impacts, especially as a new solar cycle arrives in the 2030s.

The corrected story of the 10:05 p.m. train from Exeter is a reminder of how easily errors can become embedded in the scientific record, and of how archival work can set that record straight. A typo in an anonymous 1871 Nature report turned a real 1848 incident into a phantom 1841 event, obscuring the true chronology of humanity’s first encounters with space weather for generations. The real history is arguably more compelling than the myth: within a few years of the first telegraph lines being strung across the countryside, the Sun was already reaching out to disrupt them, delaying trains and confusing signals. The study, published in Space Weather under the title asking whether space weather delayed the 10:05 p.m. train departure from Exeter on 18 October 1841, answers its own question with a definitive no, and in doing so gives the technological age a more accurate account of its first stormy meeting with the Sun.

Subject of Research: Historical reconstruction of an 1840s geomagnetic disturbance that disrupted railway telegraph signals in Exeter, England

Article Title: 1840s space weather mystery finally solved

Article References: 1840s space weather mystery finally solved. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: space weather, geomagnetic disturbance, telegraph, railway history, Exeter, Carrington Event, solar storms, Nature 1871, archives, Midland Railway, aurora, Space Weather journal