The overcoming of outdated values embedded within the system of fashion requires a complete revamping of its very foundation toward a concept of cultural sustainability and preservation of material culture. Discussion about cultural sustainability and heritage preservation requires conservation and regeneration of the cultural beliefs and symbolic meanings embedded within the traditional processes and practices of craft. With meaning tied to place, and the evolution of ideas, attitudes, and practices, local knowledge of traditional handcrafts can be considered as a sustainable repository of culture. The purpose of this study is to interpret the most developed craft-based strategies in the field of fashion to promote positive and sustainable change and to disassociate from the practice of cultural appropriation. Through the presentation of selected case studies in the fields of fashion, design, and craftsmanship, this article provides an interpretative model for cultural sustainability through traditional craft. With a focus on the incorporation and valorization of material practices and knowledge in fashion, the proposition for design to act as a promoter of innovative processes and the nurturing and retaining of craft can ensue. This speculative model is built on case studies on cultural sustainability through traditional craft. It is focused on experimentation, innovation, and sustainability through the design and creative process expressed through cultural heritage strategies. The result is a range of possible outcomes, aligned with existing craft practices, that highlight opportunities for design to support traditional craft through innovative processes while maintaining their embedded codes.

Purpose: By considering the role of technology in museum archives and exhibitions, as well as company archives and production, this paper aims to present that digital technologies offer new approaches and tools to consider fashion know-how, traditions and memories.Design/methodology/approach: Through an extensive literature review and a close consideration of multiple sources, this paper analyzes fashion, tradition and knowledge creation through the lens of museum and company archives. A section on museum archives analyzes the role of fashion in the museum and the use of technology in cataloging, online resources and exhibitions for knowledge transfer of fashion history. The second half of the paper considers the relationship between heritage, company archives and technology in branding and consumer engagement.Findings: The paper summarizes recent scholarship in the fields of fashion archives and demonstrates the still current importance of heritage in generating new design and exhibition practices. Despite having its roots in the past, heritage demonstrates continuity with the present and looks to the future with the same devotion and commitment, thus guaranteeing quality and authenticity for both museum collections and company productions.Originality/value: Through a case study methodology, this paper presents how digital technologies can offer new approaches and tools in museum archives and exhibitions, as well as in company archives and collection development, to reconsider and translate fashion know-how, traditions and memories in the digital era.

Design, as discipline and practice, is referred to as the interpretation of contemporary culture, both in its tangible and intangible expressions. The design practice acts as an agent that can detect cultural evolutions, identify their drivers and patterns of change, and then design a possible new cultural environment, which can embed the newly-found meanings and drive the innovation of products and services. Through a literature review, the paper introduces the notions of ‘contemporary cultures’ and ‘culture intensive goods’, investigating the paradigmatic shift from technology- and market-driven innovation to design- and culture-driven innovation. Within this theoretical framework, the paper will focus on fashion, one of the most advanced culture intensive industries, as a peculiar case which has built methodologies and tools to draw innovation trajectories, starting from the reading of socio-cultural and economical contexts. In particular, the paper will discuss how cultural contents are embedded into fashion artefacts, how cultural exchange is becoming part of the relationship between contemporary users and producers and how fashion has become an eminent provider of cultural diversity and authenticity in contemporary markets.

Branded content appears to be the most promising frontier of contemporary companies’ strategies within our hyperconnected society. This new context requires brands to demonstrate an increasing capacity to engage customers in continuous interactions and cultural exchanges through on-going narratives co-created with their audiences and perceived as authentic components of their hybrid physical-digital daily experiences. Within the physical-digital networks of interactions, (fashion) brands assume a new social role largely as original contents’ producers and editors. Products lose their ultimate meaning while narrations that deliver brands’ values become the true reason the public engages in conversation with the brands and recognises their social and cultural influence as their actual value. Maintaining distance from the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility as a mere greenwashing act, this paper presents an exemplary design practice seeded and nurtured in Mumbai and later grown globally, rooted in the idea that social innovation and culturally intensive industries such as fashion can enfranchise social innovation.

Currently, the issue of archival fashion is mainly to explore emergent methods and digital technologies' application to foster innovation in terms of activation, knowledge-sharing and knowledge-generation related to archival artefacts. The complex archival collections consist of a plurality of artefacts, meanings, and practices interconnected through technologies that make the archive a knowledge-generating process. Narrowing the study on fashion archives, these are characterised by a significant heterogeneity of materials preserved by companies, private collectors and cultural institutions as evidence of heritage values, design activities, manufacturing culture, and creative processes embedded in artefacts and intangible know-how. This inner knowledge inherently linked to archival fashion stays permanently implicit in the artefact and usually cannot be accessed by public audiences. Even though Cultural Institutions currently deploy technologies to democratise three-dimensional garment explorations, there are still rare attempts that operate with digital technologies to allow an in-depth study of the creative process and technical know-how lying behind fashion heritage. In light of this, the paper explores the Reverse Engineering (RE) methods applied to fashion archives to access and unlock the implicit features and techniques embedded in archival fashion to facilitate knowledge-sharing and knowledge-generation processes in exploring culture-intensive artefacts through digital technology application. Through the explorations of case studies in the fashion archival context, the paper will focus on augmented fruition practices to derive knowledge from the reading of the archive itself, starting with RE and reflecting on virtual and augmented integration to represent and disseminate fashion culture with the final aim of activating the vast inner fashion knowledge patrimony. Specific considerations will regard the potentialities of digital integration in fashion archives in terms of (1) the different nature of the knowledge unfolded through RE depending on peculiar aspects of archival artefacts; (2) technologies used to encode/decode inner knowledge; (3) the future digital directions related to archival practices and experiences derived from them, also in light of the changes in design languages when technological approaches hybridise those of humans.

The paper approaches the subject of traditional craft and local know-how from the perspective of design practice. The specific focus is on those fields of design that produce the so-called culture-intensive goods (Hesmondhalgh, 2002; Bovone and Mora, 2003), such as fashion, home goods and food. They are the result of recombination by design of a specific cultural capital into new shapes and meanings. Thanks to "Made in Italy" best practices context selected in those fields, the paper will discuss how design shapes future artefacts rooted in the reinterpretation of the past. On one hand, accessing craft culture and its reiterative attitude of transmission of identity and tradition along times. On the other hand, recombining craft processes into reconfigured practice, encoding different meanings into new narratives.