Restaging Fashion – Digital Contextualisation of Vestimental Sources

The project "Restaging Fashion" is dedicated to the cultural history of clothing, its appearance and symbolism, and brings together vestimentary sources in the digital to enable cross-source and multidisciplinary research on the objects. The starting point is the collection of paintings donated by the Berlin publisher couple Franz and Frieda von Lipperheide in 1899. It documents fashion, costume and traditional dress from the late Middle Ages to the 19th century. The paintings are supplemented by graphics and hand drawings from the Lipperheide costume library as well as historical documents, such as luxury laws. However, the often fragile historical textiles provide decisive information; they expand the pictorial and textual information by the object-like nature and materiality itself. The aim is therefore to use 3D scans to test procedures for the detailed three-dimensional reproduction of historical clothing. In this way, previously unpublished holdings of the Lipperheide Costume Library (Art Library of the National Museums in Berlin - Prussian Cultural Heritage) will be combined with textile originals from the Textiles, Clothing and Jewellery Collection of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum (Nuremberg).

These project results are iteratively developed and made available with innovative research tools that use visualisation as a means of knowledge. The UCLAB (Urban Complexity Lab) of the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, project initiator with many years of experience in the visualisation of cultural data, is testing experimental methods of presentation by means of visualisations, which are used on the one hand as an aid to content indexing and on the other hand as a tool for interpretation. As a result, the barriers of the materiality of the artefacts are to be overcome in the immateriality of the digital, in the sense that they are placed on an equal footing for research, especially for analysis and interpretation.