Fashion know-how: sources

The texts in this book deal with various issues related to know-how in fashion design, by posing for this first volume the primordial question sources. While fashion brings together a vast set of professions and of actors, and as many singular stories, how to think about this object of study faced with the diversity of practices that make it up? Plier cutters, tailors, Embroiderers and other designers, often anonymous, bring the world of fashion to life and their technical cultures. This volume addresses the anthropological traditions and existing historical data on the subject, but also questions the renewals current methodological approaches to understanding this dynamic field of research little explored. The question of archives, inevitably confronted with the immateriality of the gesture, is at the center of this study. How are we studied, preserve and transmit this technical knowledge which is also knowledge of the body? The contributions gathered here highlight the variety of disciplines which meet around the notion of know-how. Starting from the object, written sources and user guides that document it, focusing on a cinema which tells the story of work, to photography which records the stages and reveals the protagonists, the authors of this work, from the academic world or professional, offer as many insights and original study paths. On the preservation of archives in a large embroidery house such as the Montex Workshop through the capture of the technical gesture at a hatter or the inventory of forgotten fashion professions is, from the workshop to the museum, a panoramic approach that is taking shape. Émilie Hammen brings together here voices that help us better understand what brings together these multiple ways of to make fashion and pass on its know-how. This work is the result activities carried out within the framework of the Chanel chair research seminar and the 19M of fashion know-how at the French Fashion Institute.