Design archives

[Jonathan]

Interesting article about how today's designers keep an archive. This is a new thing -- used to be that few designers kept anything other than sketches.
http://www.businessoffashion.com/20...fashion-archives-can-be-a-powerful-asset.html

 

[cmpollack]

Thanks for posting, Jonathan--it's interesting indeed! (And will make dating designer/couture pieces much easier in decades to come, I'd think).

I have a lot of stuff that was apparently from Vera Maxwell's personal archive (before she donated it to the Brooklyn Museum), with garments dated to the year. Don't know how comprehensive her archive was.

For a designer archiving decades of collections, it's a huge undertaking!

 

[Jonathan]

Bonnie Cashin donated her first archives to Brooklyn in 1964 and then rebuilt another archives after that. I thought the Met's dumping of these archives was reckless and shows poor curatorial decisions. As archive collections they should have been offered to institutions that would have kept the collections intact. I suspect FIT or FIDM would have taken those archival collections. The Bonnie Cashin Foundation certainly would have taken the Cashin items.