Restaging Fashion

Digital Contextualization of Vestimentary Sources

2020 — 2023

The interdisciplinary research and digitalisation project Restaging Fashion. Visualisation of Vestimentary Sources (ReFa) crosscuts disciplines of art history, information science, and interface design to elaborate new perspectives on the cultural history of clothing, its appearance and symbolism. The visualisation of two collection’s holdings enables cross-source and multidisciplinary research of vestimentary sources in the digital realm.

The aim of the project is to develop explorative approaches to the cultural collections Modebild – Lipperheide Costume Library (Berlin Art Library) and Fabrics (Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg), focused on historical dress.

The starting point is the painting collection of 600 works donated by the Berlin publishing couple Franz and Frieda von Lipperheide in 1899, which documents fashion, costume and dress from the late Middle Ages to the 19th century. The paintings are complemented by 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. The fragile historical clothing items of the Nuremberg textile collection expand the pictorial and textual information with the objecthood and materiality itself.

Images from the Lipperheidesche Kostümbibliothek, Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (CC-BY-NC-SA).

As the materials were conserved, digitised and cataloged as part of the project, data modelling and creation could take place in parallel and close conjunction with design and prototyping. The team tested experimental methods of collection presentation by means of visualisations, which served both as an aid to content exploration and a tool for interpretation. Image and metadata were visualised and made available in an iterative and collaborative design process.

The chosen form of collection presentation includes an introduction through narrative elements, contextualisation and free exploration of the holdings. The result is the ReFa-Reader, an interactive web application, made available under an open source license for reuse with other digitized collections. The concept of the framework is to allow for the linear perusal of the essays and the lateral exploration of associated artifacts and entities.

Screen recording of the exploration of an article in the ReFa Reader.

The detailed, three-dimensional reproduction of 15 historical clothing ensembles and accessories from the Nuremberg collection is the object of the related project 3D Stories.

Funding

Restaging Fashion has been a three-year research project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) and a cooperation with the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg.

Related Publications

Related Activities

Conference Talk ● 11 Nov 2024

Approaches to Textiles

At the conference Approaches to Textiles – Scientific, Curatorial and Digital Perspectives (University of Münster), Sabine de Günther presents Restaging Fashion in the larger context of the presentation of garments in the digital realm.

Talk ● 8 Nov 2024

Digitale Hochschule Brandenburg

Sabine de Günther presents Restaging Fashion at the Jahrestagung 2024: Digitale Hochschule Brandenburg (Center of the Brandenburg Universities for Digital Transformation).

Conference Talk ● 1 Dec 2023

EVA

Sabine de Günther and Ilias Kyriazis present at the Electronic Media & Visual Arts (EVA) Conference in Berlin the results of the three year digitization and research project Restaging Fashion .

Conference Talk ● 27 Nov 2023

EFHA

At the international conference of European Fashion Heritage Association (EFHA) in Utrecht, Sabine de Günther of the Restaging Fashion team shared the prototype ReFa Reader, which combines narration with exploration.

Conference Talk ● 10–13 Oct 2023

EuropeanaTech

Ilias Kyriazis presents Restaging Fashion at EuropeanaTech and will take part in the Linked.Art meeting at the Rijksmuseum.

Talks ● 18–20 May 2023

netzwerk-mode-textil

Sabine de Günther gives a talk about »Curation and contextualisation through data visualization« as well as a talk on  achievements and goals of the Project Restaging Fashion at the Annual Members’ Meeting of the fashion network »netzwerk-mode-textil«.

Invited Talk ● 1 Jun 2022

Close up

Sabine de Günther gives a talk about the »Rediscovery of a Fashion Cosmos« and the Restaging Fashion project at the Kunstbibliothek Berlin in the context of the Close up event series.

Workshop ● 31 May 2022

Kunstbibliothek Berlin

Sabine de Günther conducts a co-creation workshop at Kunstbibliothek Berlin in the context of the Restaging Fashion project with an input from Linda Freyberg, followed by hands-on sessions, where participants engaged with the collection.

Conference Talk ● 24 Mar 2022

Kunsthistorikertag

Sabine de Günther and Lindy Freyberg presented at the Digital Art History section of this years Kunsthistorikertag in Stuttgart Digitale Kontextualisierung und visuelle Reinszenierung vestimentärer Quellen (Digital contextualisation and visual restaging of vestimentary sources).

Conference Talks ● 1 Mar 2022

DHd

We participate in DHd 2022 to present our latest digital humanities research from the projects Restaging Fashion, A visual exploration of two museum collections, and SoNAR (IDH).