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Europe's Fashion History, Just a Click AwayAlessandro CiampiAmong the images that will be available on Europeana Fashion: the Yojhi Yamamoto exhibit "Correspondences" at the 2005 Pitti Uomo fair in Florence.By LIZA FOREMAN, February 17, 2013An ambitious fashion archive is being readied for its debut May 2, when Europeana Fashion will go online with about 100,000 digital elements from 22 European museums and institutions — a gallery ranging from a 1921 embroidered dress by Madeleine Vionnet to a Diana Vreeland letter to the designer Emilio Pucci.The project’s goal is to have a total of 700,000 fashion-related elements in digital form and online by March 2015, helping to preserve European fashion history for future generations.“This is the first attempt to assemble such an important collection of fashion content from both private and public archives and museums,” said Alessandra Arezzi Boza, a freelance fashion curator based in Florence who oversees the site’s content and communications. “And it is surely one of the great challenges of the project as, until now, fashion content was scattered online and not easily searchable.”The project is an offshoot of Europeana, the five-year-old online digital library that showcases images of about 24 million cultural artifacts, including the Mona Lisa and the Gutenberg Bible.For now, those who go to www.europeanafashion.eu will find details about the project, a blog about its development, a social corner with Twitter feed and Facebook posts, and a list of fashion-related events around Europe.Once the site is fully ready, organizers say, users will be able to search the archives by date, designer, item or keyword. A click on a particular image will bring up a detailed view and more information, as well as more images, if available.Items will include images from fashion shows, catwalks, museum exhibitions and installations in fashion fairs; videos; biographies; blogs; documentation like show invitations, which might be considered works of art in themselves; and articles from newspapers and magazines dating from the 18th century.Beyond the Web, Europeana Fashion is planning a series of conferences, beginning with “Fashion Industry and the GLAM Community” on April 17 and 18 in Florence, and organizers are considering virtual exhibitions, showcases and a cooperative arrangement with Wikimedia events.Mrs. Arezzi Boza and Marco Rendina, a researcher and new-media expert at Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale, a Italian nonprofit organization, came up with the idea for Europeana Fashion a couple of years ago when they realized the limits of the original site.“If you search for ‘fashion’ on Europeana, you can find 5,935 digital items, which is nothing compared to the 24 million digital objects” that eventually will be on Europeana Fashion, Mrs. Arezzi Boza said.It turned out that ModeMuseum in Antwerp, Belgium, was working on a similar idea, so the two groups joined forces.Museums in Asia and the United States have begun similar efforts to preserve their fashion collections online, but not in such a comprehensive way, Mrs. Arezzi Boza said.The Fondazione, located in Florence, is coordinating the project. Its secretary, Marco Rufino, is Europeana Fashion’s general coordinator while Mr. Rendina is serving as its technical director.The European Commission provided 80 percent of the total €3.3 million, or $4.4 million, budget through 2015, with the partners’ providing the remainder. The partners have agreed to create a Europeana Fashion Foundation to administer the site and update content after 2015.Participants come from 12 European countries and include institutions like Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris; ModeMuseum Antwerp, which will provide 100,000 elements; and the Victoria &#38; Albert Museum in London. The Victoria &#38; Albert Museum intends to contribute about 8,000 catalog records and images, including pictures of a corset constructed of red sateen, yellow leather and whalebone from 1883 and a silk day dress made around 1873 that was donated by the Marchioness of Bristol. The intense purple color of the dress illustrates the kind of vivid dyes popular at the time.“Europeana will create a portal which fashion designers, along with anyone else who is interested in fashion, can use as a ‘one-stop shop,”’ said Heather Caven, head of collections management and resource planning at the Victoria &#38; Albert Museum, which also is helping to develop a multilingual Fashion Thesaurus for the site.Other partners include small museums like the RossiModa Shoe Museum near Venice, which is providing 12,000 images of shoes; photo agencies like Catwalk Pictures of Brussels; fashion schools; and fashion houses including Missoni and Emilio Pucci.“Fashion is today part of a general collective system and part of Europe’s cultural profile,” said Laudomia Pucci di Barsento, vice president and image director of Emilio Pucci and owner of the Fondazione Archivio Emilio Pucci, which began digitizing its archive 10 years ago.“A serious reflection on fashion culture and history on a specialized portal has become a must.”http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/fashion/18iht-feur18.html?_r=1&#38;