ReFa: Restaging Fashion - Digital Contextualisation of Fashion Sources

The interdisciplinary research and digitisation project “Restaging Fashion. Visualisation of Fashion Sources” (ReFa) has developed exploratory approaches to collections held by the Kunstbibliothek Berlin – specifically its “Modebild – Lipperheide Costume Library” collection – and the Textiles Collection of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.

Gemäldecollage aus der Sammlung-Modebild, Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin © CC-BY-NC-SA

Project status:

finalised

Period:

30/11/2020 – 29/11/2023

Type:

Research project

Profile:

Digital Space – Data, Interaction, Knowledge

Organisational Unit:

Course:

Interface Design (BA)

Cooperation partners:

Germanisches Nationalmuseum Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Project participants:

Marian Dörk Linda Freyberg Sabine Günther Ilias Kyriazis Giacomo Nanni

The Restaging Fashion project (11.2020 - 11.2023; https://uclab.fh-potsdam.de/projects/restaging-fashion/), funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and based at the UCLAB of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, is dedicated to the cultural history of clothing, its appearance and symbolism. The visualisation of the collection's holdings brings together vestimentary sources in the digital realm and enables cross-source and multidisciplinary research on the objects. The starting point is the painting collection of 600 works donated by the Berlin publishing couple Franz and Frieda von Lipperheide in 1899. It documents fashion, costume and dress from the late Middle Ages to the 19th century. To complement the paintings, 1,000 prints and hand drawings from Lipperheide's costume library as well as text sources, such as archival documents on the history of the collection, have been added. However, the often fragile historical textiles provide decisive information; they expand the pictorial and textual information with the objecthood and materiality itself. Using 3D scanning and photogrammetry, the detailed, three-dimensional reproduction of 15 historical clothing ensembles and accessories from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum was trialled.
The UCLAB (Urban Complexity Lab) of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, project initiator with many years of experience in the visualisation of cultural data, tested experimental methods of collection presentation by means of visualisations, which are used on the one hand as an aid to content exploration and on the other as a tool for interpretation. In the Restaging Fashion project, image and metadata were visualised and made available in an iterative and collaborative design process. The chosen form of collection presentation allows contextualisation, an introduction through narrative elements and free exploration of the holdings. The result is a freely reusable prototype, the ReFa-Reader https://refareader.fh-potsdam.de/