The cultural sustainability of fashion: application of cultural appreciation and technological development in archival repositories

Archives are increasingly digitized, preserving a wide array of items, including those related to Western fashion designers inspired by Chinese culture. However, understanding the production processes and the designers’ expression of cultural appreciation through fashion mediums within these archives presents challenges due to historical and preservation reasons. This issue also touches upon the delicate balance between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. This study aims to promote cultural understanding and the cultural identity embedded in clothing design. It explores how digital technologies, such as 3D printing and AI, can significantly reduce energy consumption and waste in the material development and manufacturing processes of fashion design. This is achieved by analyzing and summarizing the framework of Chinese-style clothing symbolism, which helps individuals unfamiliar with this cultural background to understand specific regional cultural symbols used in fashion design from a cultural appreciation perspective. Furthermore, it serves as a valuable reference for designers seeking inspiration from Chinese culture. The research utilizes the application of fashion design involving Chinese culture in the Gianfranco Ferré Research Center (GFRC) at Politecnico di Milano as a case study. This digital virtual space narrates the source of inspiration behind fashion design, exploring the stylistic codes and cultural influences of Asian culture within the Gianfranco Ferré archive to reconstruct the culturally sustainable iconographic apparatus linked to these stylistic codes.