Beyond the physical exhibit: Enhancing, showcasing and safeguarding fashion heritage with VR technologies

The collective body of significant clothes, accessories, and textiles that holds cultural, artistic, and historical value constitutes, today, an important part of museum collections and a Heritage, whose value progressively increases due to the more and more pervasiveness of fashion in our daily life. However, exhibiting this Heritage poses significant challenges due to its fragility and the difficult nature of showcasing garment that cannot simply be presented in a static manner from a singular perspective, as with paintings. Instead, clothes must be experienced in motion, when worn, facilitating the observation of their details as a complete entity, within the cultural and environmental context in which they were originally conceived. Among the different technologies that are being introduced in the field, this paper explores the integration of Virtual Reality (VR) as a solution to address the challenges in exhibiting aged and historical clothes. The adoption of VR brings about novel approaches in studying Fashion Heritage to help researchers, historians, and fashion enthusiasts to gain insights into the dynamic identities and preferences of past generations, thus contributing to a profound understanding of Heritage and its relevance to the contemporary fashion trends. Five different possible solutions are presented to solve common issues in showcasing garments: among these, a case study focused on the Museo della Moda e del Costume at Palazzo Pitti in Florence is detailed and elaborated, in collaboration with Le Gallerie degli Uffizi.