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