Learning by archives. The role of fashion exhibitions and fashion archives to defining (and stimulating) possible new educational paths.

In the contemporary panorama of fashion design - a domain that is becoming a hybrid between tradition and innovation increasingly, between digital and physical, between product and communication - archives and the staging of fashion are becoming more and more essential tools not only for the design of individual products but also for the definition of innovative communication and educational processes. In fact, in contemporary times, the fashion archives, both in their physical and digital forms, represent an essential element for fashion design education. The archives are officially considered a "cultural asset", not only because it preserves but also because it is able, through its activity, to generate innovation, becoming an active protagonist of the contemporary fashion design scene. The artefacts that fashion archives preserve can convey not only individual stories related to a single product, brand or designer but also collective stories related to the culture of a specific time or place, to artistic movements and political ones, to music, cinema and photography. The archive is not a physical place that crystallizes products, but a creative and dynamic space, also digital, capable of generating new trends and an inexhaustible source for contemporary fashion. The archive becomes the generator of new narrations through a mechanism capable of connecting different worlds, styles, eras and products. From this point of view, clothing (as well as fashion accessories) are not seen as a finished product but as artefacts capable of narrating past stories and, at the same time, producing new ones. In this context, museums, exhibitions and archives are increasingly taking on a renewed and active role in contributing to the definition of new design paradigms, capable of overcoming the traditional categories of revival or costume favouring a more contemporary "mash-up" approach. Mash-ups in which past and present, craftsmanship and new technologies, revival and experimentation blend seamlessly. The paper aims to present the didactic experience in the Master in Design and Technology for Fashion Communication, born from the collaboration between the University of Bologna and several fashion archives in Italy (such as Archivi di Ricerca Mazzini and Fashion Research Italy). A project of didactic experimentation built through a multidisciplinary approach, in which the students are involved in a project activity in which they play a central role in the design of all the phases of an exhibition: from historical research to archival research, from curatorship to spatial planning, up to the definition of the multimedia translation of the exhibition contents. A training project, organized in phases of increasing complexity, in which the curatorship and the staging of fashion artefacts become educational tools based on learning by doing and learning by experience approach.