Imagining Historic Fashion: Digital Tools for the Examination of Historic Dress

The mid-19th century saw the rise of institutional collections which brought together artifacts from cultures and industry around the world for the enlightenment and entertainment of the public, and to raise the standards of the products of the industrial age. Inexpensive digital imaging and the internet have radically changed how we disseminate these artifacts in the best way to the most people. A charge to digital humanities collections now is to make the quality and significance of the virtual representation meet or exceed that of the original object and to create user interactions which are "conducive to information foraging" [1]. This paper discusses an inter-disciplinary, multi-cultural project to develop a best practices digital archive for historic costume using advanced digital technology to realize new ways of interpreting, examining and contextualizing historic fashion and how these realizations translate into real world application and effective classroom tools.