As a project, a digital fashion collection believes in the importance of preserving and documenting fashion as cultural heritage. However, existing methods for archiving and preserving garments rely heavily on protecting them from material decay, which severely limits the accessibility and viewing of the fabrics in storage or in motion. Approaches to documentation, whether in the form of video, images, text or 3D scans, can only visualise the characteristics of clothing to a limited extent, as they often lack dimensionality or dynamic components. 

A digital fashion approach, on the other hand, could make it possible to visualise clothing data and thus aspects of fashion in animatable, multi-layered objects. Within the project, the medium is therefore seen as an opportunity to balance out shortcomings on both sides, that of preservation and that of documentation. The project a digital fashion collection proposes a workflow from 2D patterns (which serve as construction drawings for the original garments) to dynamic 3D models and transformed the patterns published by ShowStudio into digital fashion objects using Marvelous Designer. The animations and simulations of the materiality of the fabrics were further realised with Marvelous Designer and Blender. By simulating clothing construction, the translatability in a virtual environment is subsequently assessed in order to evaluate how digital fashion can be integrated into the documentation of cultural heritage. 

The website and its images show some of the results of the project. The 3D files and original patterns are not included due to legal restrictions.