The research, conducted by Chiara Colombi of Politecnico di Milano and Marcella Martin of New York University, takes its title from a deliberately provocative phrase: fashion archive abilities. Rather than treating digitization as a simple act of scanning documents and uploading images, the authors systematize the ways digital tools augment what a fashion archive can actually do. Drawing on qualitative case studies of three landmark exhibitions—the Met’s Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion in 2024, Gucci Cosmos launched in Shanghai in 2023, and Homo Faber: Fashion Inside and Out in Venice in 2018—the study proposes an original three-level interpretative framework called the Augmented Fashion Archive Abilities Model. Its levels describe how digital technologies can recover missing or fragile archive materials, unlock brand identity through immersive experiences, and preserve the craft knowledge embedded in the making of fashion itself.

The stakes are considerable. Fashion heritage embodies a collective memory held in garments, accessories, images, and the know-how behind them, yet conserving these artifacts is complicated by their material fragility and by the fact that much of fashion’s impact lies in intangible qualities. Marco Pecorari’s work on fashion ephemera—lookbooks, casting photos, show invitations—has shown how these supposedly disposable traces actually tick in time with the clock of fashion, embodying the zeitgeist and integrating the meaning of garments. Archives, the new study argues, should be understood not as static repositories but as dynamic knowledge reservoirs supporting a complex, multidimensional understanding of fashion and its relations with culture, society, and publics. Digital technologies work synergically with these reservoirs, creating new forms of access, interpretation, and preservation while enabling the identity and value of the archives themselves to continuously evolve.

The most technically ambitious case study is Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, organized by the Costume Institute in 2024. The exhibition highlighted fifteen historical treasures kept dormant in the Met’s fashion archive, rarely displayed due to their delicate craftsmanship and progressive decay, alongside more than two hundred additional pieces from four centuries. The show’s emblematic achievement was the digital resurrection of a ball gown by Charles Frederick Worth dated around 1887. The garment showed severe deterioration in the vertical warp threads of its pale green silk satin, while the sturdier horizontal weft threads and the ivory silk satin used as a second fabric remained practically intact. Conservators identified this as an inherent vice—an intrinsic characteristic causing the very damage of the piece. Because the deterioration could not be remediated or stabilized, the gown was laid flat in a glass display cabinet, offering visitors neither a full view nor any sense of how it looked when worn.

To awaken the gown, the curators deployed a complex combined protocol of digital technologies. The dress was analyzed and reconstructed as a full-scale model, then transferred onto a grid-marked paper pattern to create a digital render worn by a digital avatar. To show the ball gown at the maximum of its expression—worn while dancing—the team motion captured the movement of a professional dancer and transferred it to the avatar. The result was presented as a holographic illusion technically named Pepper’s ghost, in which a flat-image projection appears as a three-dimensional object fluctuating in space. The multi-sensory data extraction went further still. Norwegian scent artist Sissel Tolaas used a filtering and pumping system to capture molecules from historical garments, which were analyzed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and reproduced through tubes, diffusing scents derived from dresses by Yves Saint Laurent for Dior and Jeanne Lanvin. In another gallery, a recording of the rustling sound of a 1750s–60s robe à la française, captured in an echo-free chamber at Binghamton University, activated for visitors the notion that fashion is a living experience inseparable from bodies and space. In the Mermaid Bride gallery, visitors scanned a QR code to converse with a custom chatbot developed by OpenAI and modeled after the New York socialite Natalie Potter, trained on a curated dataset of letters, newspaper articles, and historical documents.

The second ability, Accessing Brand Identity, is illustrated by Gucci Cosmos, a traveling exhibition launched in 2023 to celebrate the house’s 102-year history. Curated by Maria Luisa Frisa with set design by Es Devlin, the exhibition brought pieces from the Gucci Archive in Florence’s Palazzo Settimanni to Shanghai, London, and Kyoto, recreating the archive with blue-lacquered cabinets and mirrored surfaces suggesting an infinite source of content. Devlin described her approach bluntly: instead of visitors learning the Gucci story in their minds when they read the words, she wanted them to feel it in their gut when they experienced the sense of colour, music, and emotion. In the Portals section, video screens behind two-way mirrors simulated the ascension and descent of The Ascending Room, the Savoy Hotel lift in London where a young Guccio Gucci worked as a porter and developed the idea of luggage as luxury symbol. In Zoetrope, a pre-film optical illusion placed visitors at the center of a circular room whose screens played the gallop of a horse in a loop, synchronized with a soundtrack of hooves and a flashing strobe light, materializing the brand’s equestrian codes.

The phygital strategy extended into virtual realms. In the Kyoto edition, a room dedicated to the Bamboo Bag was elevated through a VR journey developed with the studio Monogrid, transporting visitors from a bamboo forest to the Florence atelier where the bag’s artisanal manufacturing takes place. Francesco Bernabei, CEO of Monogrid, explained that the immersive power of VR does more than inform—it transports audiences into the heart of the story, so that visitors are experiencing Gucci’s craftsmanship up close and personally. In conjunction with the Shanghai and London exhibitions, Gucci dropped a limited-edition collection of four Marsper dolls on its WeChat MiniProgram, dressed in archival pieces including Tom Ford’s 1996 red velvet suit, targeting Chinese Gen-Z consumers. The London exhibition was then mirrored on the blockchain-based gaming platform Sandbox as Gucci Cosmos Land, where players solved quests and the first hundred received exclusive avatars dressed in Gucci outfits, including one from Sabato De Sarno’s debut collection. On Tencent’s cloud-based Super GG Show platform, visitors with custom avatars explored a virtual vintage shop, purchased digital-only items, and learned manufacturing processes in a digital atelier—producing personalized content rather than passively consuming brand history.

The third ability, Unveiling the Making of, addresses the intersection of fashion heritage and craftsmanship, aligning with UNESCO’s concept of Intangible Cultural Heritage: the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, and skills that communities recognize as part of their cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation and constantly recreated. The case study is Homo Faber, the biennial initiative organized by the Michelangelo Foundation in Venice. Its inaugural 2018 edition featured VR experiences immersing visitors in the world of artisans. In the Singular Talents section, a giant digital guide called The Colossus of Venice carried the public into the internal mechanisms of robots, the chemical bonding of colors in enamels, and the combination of hard stones in mosaics. Visitors wearing goggles stood before immersive videos of twelve unique craftsmen’s ateliers, including a London-based feather-maker, and interacted with virtual tools to make virtual objects. In the section curated by the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation, VR videos made it possible to enter secluded artisans’ workshops across Europe, stepping into both the physical space where crafts are made and the personal creative dimension of the masters. In 2020, Homo Faber launched a digital platform mapping and connecting artisans worldwide, organized in three chapters—Artisans, Experiences, and Destinations—encouraging direct contact to commission masterpieces and, through its NextGen component, nurturing fellowship programs for young artisans.

The study also examines the Italian case as a cautionary counterpoint. Despite Italy’s early regulation of cultural property and the international relevance of its fashion, digitization has progressed slowly. The archives of Giovanni Battista Giorgini, organizer of Italy’s first major fashion shows in the early 1950s, are held by the State Archives in Florence and remain undigitized, requiring family authorization for access. As Lucrezia Palandri writes, Italy has long set the standard for other nations, but when it comes to digitization it has been slow to adopt the trend. The integration of digital technology into Italian archives is regulated by Articles 107 and 108 of the Code of Cultural Heritage, which historically prevented physical and intellectual damage through reproductions and now govern digital reproductions, making authenticity and valorization central to digitization decisions. Exhibitions like La Sala Bianca: nascita della moda italiana at Palazzo Strozzi in 1992 inspired the creation of brand archives—Stefania Ricci, director of the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo, recalled that it exploded in the 1990s and 2000s when everyone thought of creating archives, though at the time it was very difficult to find them. During the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, Italian museums adopted online exhibitions and virtual tours, and Milan Fashion Week moved to a fully digital format, though the Ferragamo virtual exhibitions on Google Arts and Culture, reviewed five years later, revealed maintenance gaps and undated PDFs suggesting they originated in earlier formats.

The Augmented Fashion Archive Abilities Model carries implications that reach beyond fashion. Digital augmentation enables an experience conservation paradigm, where the aim is to conserve not just the object but the experience it embodies, bridging the tangible and intangible. Yet ensuring accuracy and authenticity in digital re-creations becomes a challenge, as these augmentations risk being speculative; curators and technologists must work closely with historians to ground them in research, making the exhibition itself a research project. Democratization via digital transformation poses issues related to accessibility, cultural colonization, and intellectual property—if mainly large brands or Western institutions with resources to digitize dominate digital fashion heritage, lesser-known or non-Western heritage might remain underrepresented. The convergence of heritage and branding produces positive synergies while raising ethical questions, as brand-led storytelling can become self-celebratory; collaborations between brands providing resources and public institutions providing curatorial rigor are necessary to maintain scholarly integrity. Digital preservation itself requires long-term investment to keep servers, software, and metadata updated and meaningful. The authors conclude that fashion, a fast-forward and future-oriented discipline, sees in the historical dimension of heritage its opportunity to be continuously reimagined, while heritage becomes more connected to the future than to the past thanks to digital engagement. In the near future, they suggest, the development and research of fashion heritage will be more accessible, more interactive, and more resilient as a result of digital augmentation practices.

Subject of Research: Fashion archive abilities. The impact of digital technologies on the development and research of fashion heritage

Article Title: Fashion archive abilities. The impact of digital technologies on the development and research of fashion heritage

Article References: Fashion archive abilities. The impact of digital technologies on the development and research of fashion heritage. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2025.15689

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2025.15689

Keywords: fashion heritage, digital archives, museums, technology, craftsmanship, Fashion, archive, abilities, impact, digital, technologies, development