After a period of hopeful, but also speculative conversations about digital fashion, there is a need for concrete answers. What can we do soon in the phygital world, the interface between digital and real life, to move the industry forward. A remarkably quick response comes from the cultural sector: digital fashion offers opportunities to better preserve, study and present heritage to the public.
Due to the misconception that digital fashion is only for online environments, opportunities for museums are often overlooked. According to Anne-Karlijn van Kesteren, there is a lot of ground to be gained there. She is a curator at the Design Museum Den Bosch, where digital jewelry was exhibited this year for the first time in the Netherlands. “We designed ‘Screenwear’ in such a way that the screens came at you from all sides. This makes it seem as if the objects are right in front of you.” The lack of tactility was largely made up for by smart mirrors, which allowed visitors to ‘wear’ those objects. Van Kesteren calls the experience “almost physical”. She sees the future of the heritage sector in the immersive experience of digital works.
From virtual exhibition to phygital experience
The first step towards digital fashion heritage in the Netherlands was taken in 2008, art historian Bianca du Mortier tells FashionUnited, when she decided to exhibit 250 masterpieces online in the Rijksmuseum. “It went like clockwork. The visitor received an object description, including dating, material and technical data. If that wasn’t enough, you could go one level deeper.” It earned the government a Dutch Design Award, because you could zoom in further than in a real museum with the naked eye. “It seems as if the visitor has these vulnerable materials in his own hands,” was the jury’s verdict.
Fifteen years later, Du Mortier, now retired, is involved in the next stage of Dutch digital heritage through the ‘Unlocking Fashion Heritage’ (ULFH) project. It is an initiative of Modemuze, a network of museums and experts that has been working since 2015 to make fashion collections digitally accessible. Coordinator Mila Ernst. “With ULFH we aim to capture and present one hundred special objects in 3D. Hopefully it will feel like you are in the depot from your own living room. We focus on the possibilities to capture the fabric expression and shape of garments and accessories as best as possible and to scale up this form of digitalization.”
An old Victorian dress digitized. Credits: Dylan
Eno
Accurate still or dynamic replica
According to Suzanne Mulder, fashion innovation coordinator at the Centraal Museum and co-founder of 3D studio PMS, there are roughly three technologies that museums are experimenting with, each with its pros and cons. A scanned, static 3D model is an ‘object’ that you can integrate into different environments, such as the outdoors or a candlelit ballroom. In contrast, 360-degree photography, the most accessible for museums because it simply takes place in a photo studio, is tied to a certain computer format. “You can zoom in and look at the garment from all sides, but we cannot use an avatar, for example, because we have no information about the pattern parts or the fabrics,” says Mulder. This is the case with a 3D model, the third type, where you draw a physical garment with computer software. “You draw it out manually – just like you would do when making a garment – and then ‘sew’ the piece together digitally. This means that you can also make those flat pattern parts transparent and give the piece a kind of eternal life, because it can always be recreated. Because you can integrate additional information about the fabric, for example, into such a model, you can also make the piece dynamic and generate a representation of human movement.” In this way, 18 pieces from the Utrecht fashion collection have already been brought to life. They are not truthful, “they are replicas”.
Fashion heritage under the microscope, together and remotely
In order to pass on our legacy, there are several reasons to experiment with digital fashion as a museum sector. Mila Ernst: “I think the value of 3D is twofold. On the one hand, it concerns the documentation of museum objects. This is now in 2D, so you can never properly see the sides, back, sleeve insert and overall shape. I don’t see digital reconstruction of pattern parts as a possibility for historical fashion, but such a 3D model does offer the opportunity to investigate how a piece was put together in combination with pattern books. Moreover, 3D offers the opportunity to view and examine objects in detail from a distance worldwide. In this way, knowledge about fashion heritage from researchers, makers, wearers, collectors and source communities can be brought together and given a new dynamic.” According to Ernst, the imperfect digital versions that we can already see in the museum also serve a function. “Then it is mainly about what everyone wants to do and what is normally not possible due to vulnerability: touching, attracting, getting close and seeing it in a historical context or otherwise.”
Expectations regarding vulnerable collection items are particularly high. For example, curators can ‘digitally restore’ these using 3D models, says Centraal Museum curator Ninke Bloemberg. The exhibition ‘From Fit to Polygon’, for example, contained a fragile dress from 1892 that was only allowed to lie flat in a display case. Suzanne Mulder and her colleagues at PMS have reconstructed this using 3D modeling: “In the exhibition you can first see it on a body, then in a fashion show and finally you see how designers have responded to this.” It is difficult to estimate how many historical pieces can still be brought into clear light in a timely manner. Bloemberg calls the case 5 to 10 percent – a very rough estimate: “Sometimes a dress with slips is found in the box, affected by the metal in the silk fabric. And in practice it is not possible to check all the boxes, that is per project.”
3D technology for fashion is not yet mature
Another example of such a ‘rescued dress’ is the green dress in ‘To Die For’, the graduation film by 3D designer Dylan Eno. In collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, he created a moving representation of a Victorian dress dyed with the toxic material arsenic. He took more than three thousand photographs using photogrammetry. “It is still rarely used in the museum world,” says the young designer about the technique, “and I have not seen it at all in fashion houses.” According to Eno, this also has a financial explanation: “Converting to a 3D model still costs so much computing power that you are talking about enormous waiting times.” Through intensive data use, he also questions whether digital heritage can be sustainable. He makes a distinction between data traffic and data storage. “Data storage can be online on servers, but also offline on disks that do not require a constant energy source. The data traffic itself requires a lot of servers that always send the data from the host to the consumer. Data centers are being constructed for this purpose, which are not environmentally friendly places. That’s why we need to keep 3D files on the Internet as small as possible without compromising quality. That requires smart optimization tricks and that is still an issue.”
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The application of digital fashion developments to museum heritage also requires a special, critical approach. For example, the fit is important for a truthful representation, says Bianca du Mortier. “Most of the clothes in the Rijksmuseum are custom-made, so if you digitize you have to make sure that the body you are photographing is correct.” And that body changes over time. Du Mortier gives the 18th century corset as an example. As a result, women had a very straight back, breasts were higher than now and a dress therefore also fell differently. For this reason, some museums work with different dolls for each period or ‘fill in’ them for the 3D scans of those specimens. Du Mortier knows from experience at the Rijksmuseum how time-consuming that is: “It often took us a whole day with two people to put one costume on the doll.”
Next steps towards digital heritage
In this sense, people, not technology, are the biggest challenge in scaling up digital fashion heritage. Mila Ernst. “Time and manpower are needed to prepare vulnerable collections for digitization: assessing the condition of the garment, possibly preserving it and putting it on the doll in a historically correct manner. If you think about the size of the fashion collections of museums in the Netherlands and Flanders, we can already predict that 3D will not be used on a large scale in the near future.” The Centraal Museum alone has ten thousand fashion objects.
There is also a need for manpower in the field of education. Suzanne Mulder experiences it this way at the academies she works with. “The people who have an ideological drive to bring this out often do not become teachers, but go to work at fashion houses, for example.” She also hopes that cultural institutions will grant more access to their collections, so that students can also learn to examine vulnerable pieces and historical pattern parts for digitization.
Digital heritage as it is now can be better, more sustainable, more precise and further research is essential, but there is also a degree of urgency in scaling it up quickly. For example, following yet another serious theft, the British Museum decided that the entire collection must be digitized. With today’s technology, that would take five years and – even if those museum pieces don’t go anywhere – it could be faster.
2023-11-21 06:43:29
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