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.
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.
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.
