MCN2015

At any given moment, somewhere in the world, a city is hosting a fashion week event. Global Fashion Capitals (June 2 - Nov 14, 2015) examines the fashion cities around the world and explores the factors that enable emerging cities to rise to global prominence.

The Museum at FIT is continually experimenting with new ways to engage visitors with digital content in our galleries. For the exhibition Global Fashion Capitals we collaborated with a couple of partners to create digital initiatives that attempt to bridge the online/onsite museum visitor experience.

We worked with Microsoft cloud services to implement a digital style map which is both an interactive platform and visual projection. It uses Instagram to aggregate tagged content that is delivered as city “clouds” on the map. A visitor to the gallery can either watch the projection or use iPads to select a specific city and view street style and runway images that reveal each city's unique identity. The project was aimed to integrate information from multiple sources in an automated way using basic scripts and code.

The museum accepted an international fellow from Helsinki, Finland to create an electronic publication to engage global fashion bloggers from around the world in order to contribute insight and perspective about the local fashion culture of their city. This collaborative project connects diverse international voices -- whether through video, narrative essay, or interview -- and integrates research, fashion, and digital media to provide meaningful networking and sharing of knowledge.

Many social media platforms will be employed during the run of Global Fashion Capitals. However, Instagram is the invisible architecture that supports the global style map. Specific keywords and usernames aggregate meaningful content. A Fashion Week Map (powered by Google maps) will provide easy discovery of the abundance, location, date, and patterns of global fashion weeks as they have emerged and flourished over time.