Dressing up in the collections? Digital dressing and the future of fashion history

As exhibitions like Fashion City make clear, fashion exhibitions can be extremely immersive experiences, creating a multi-layered sensorial experience for visitors. This paper explores how digital technology could help to further elevate the experience of fashion in museums. It questions how digital can help to offer more engaging and immersive experiences with fashion- potentially including the opportunity to digitally ‘dress up’ in pieces from museum collections.

Using Made in Code: Reimagining the Experience of Fashion (March 2023)- a prototype installation presenting a state-of-the-art creative and technical collaboration at the V&A- as a starting point, this paper explores current technological capabilities and what skills and resources are needed to drive forward truly compelling digitally enhanced fashion experiences. Alongside this it considers how digital technology could help to alter visitor perception of garments and potentially open up collections to new audiences.