#archival-fabrics

#archival-fabrics

The V&A often uses Chinese printers because they can produce catalogues at half the cost of British or European companies, but this requires compliance with censorship requests.

Craft is often defined as skill in making things by hand, but this interpretation is being challenged by AI. Craft transcends physical interaction; historical figures like Mozart and Beethoven exemplify mastery without traditional methods.

The new webpage, entitled 'How have objects come to be in the V&A?', points out that for some objects, their journeys have involved known histories of violence, coercion or injustice, while for others there remains uncertainty over exactly how they came to be here.

The Household and Wardrobe Accounts are English records that document the daily needs of the king and his family. This book serves as a guide to these sources, showing how they can be used and what valuable insights they offer into medieval government.

The question of how fashion is archived - what enters the museum; what is deemed worthy of preservation; whose clothes are considered culturally significant enough to outlast the bodies that wore them - has long sat uneasily at the centre of fashion history itself. Institutions have tended to answer it, or ignore it, in much the same way: couture gowns under glass, luxury garments mounted on conservation-grade mannequins in blockbuster exhibitions - an implicit hierarchy of the designed over the worn, the authored over the anonymous.

The Aubusson Tapestry Museum is situated in an exceptional context shaped by a rich history and a powerful natural environment. The Creuse capital of tapestry has been marked by its history since the royal manufactory of the 14th century.

The contemporary technology museum has emerged as a performative participant in the systems it seeks to document. The architecture of these institutions has become increasingly fluid and bold, often mirroring the velocity and complexity of the systems it houses. They operate as mediators between the human, the ecological, and the technological realms, transforming from encyclopedic warehouses into active educational engines.

Textiles are a window into the communities that created them, with every motif and line signalling a different memory, tradition or identity. Often seen as folk art, these pieces of embroidery and weaving bring together dozens of narrative threads, from Japan to South America. But nowhere is it more fraught with meaning than in Palestine.

This short captures Tim Bovard, the staff taxidermist for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, as he reflects on over five decades spent perfecting his craft. Sparked by a childhood fascination with the museum's dioramas that never faded, Bovard has devoted his career to shaping what he calls the 'illusion of life' - a process that requires both scientific precision and imaginative interpretation.

My husband and I just upgraded our apartment here in Germany to one with much more space. The downsides of this is we have hard marble floors and a tall-ceilinged living room (oh woe is us!). It's very echo-y and looks directly into our neighbors across the street. The windows have external shutters, so light-blocking isn't needed, but we'd love to get

Picture this: you're knee-deep in renovation dust, crowbar in hand, when something unexpected tumbles from behind century-old plaster. A yellowed envelope? A strange metal box? That moment when your heart skips because you realize you might have just found something extraordinary. For some lucky homeowners, these discoveries turn out to be worth thousands of dollars, transforming a simple home improvement project into an unexpected treasure hunt.

The Center for Craft is now accepting applications for the 2026 Craft Archive Fellowship, offering four $5,000 awards to support research on underrepresented craft histories in the United States.

But this week I spotted an ingenious use for the extras, courtesy of NY-based company Proche Studio. Here's their proposal: Mail in a wool blanket, and they'll give it new life in the form of a great-looking-and uber snug-chore coat, vest, or scarf. I'm particularly smitten by the chore coat, a fresh version of the quilt coats that became popular a couple of years ago, and much, much warmer.

An extraordinary archaeological discovery in eastern Germany has reunited a medieval bronze cross with the mould used to cast it-more than four decades after the mould itself was found. The object, a so-called wheel cross dating to the 10th or 11th century, offers rare and tangible evidence of early Christianisation among the Slavic populations of the region between the Elbe and Oder rivers.

Ba-rro: "Our starting point is always the context and what already exists." We are interested in recognizing the value of things simply because they are there, without assuming that everything must be preserved as a matter of principle. The question isn't what can be kept, but what deserves to be kept in each specific project. The decision to preserve, reveal, or remove doesn't stem from universal values or a nostalgic impulse, but from a situated interpretation:

This research-based design project by Laura Oliveira investigates discarded as a potential raw material for sustainable design applications. Human hair is produced continuously and in large quantities through everyday grooming practices, yet it is almost always treated as waste once separated from the body and typically disposed of in landfills. Despite its material properties, strength, flexibility, and durability as a keratin-based protein fiber, its remains uncommon within design and research contexts.

In the show, "dirty" extends to anything that breaks fashion's pact with propriety. Here are clothes caked in grime, blotted with makeup, stiffened by salt, pieced from trash, frayed, and faded. The garments span decades, from the 1980s through the mid-2000s, when the likes of Vivienne Westwood and Jean Paul Gaultier built their fame on defying convention, to today, when corporatization has made such daring increasingly rare. But forgoing practicality frees certain designers from the demands that the body be polite-and thereby policed.

These clothes are not secondhand, says Yin Xiuzhen, the Beijing-born artist known for creating large-scale installations out of found garments and keepsakes. I prefer to call them used' or worn', she explains. Clothes that have been worn' carry a lot of information like a second skin, imprinted with social meaning. In some of Yin's works the clothes are her own, telling a personal story. In others, the clothes are collected, stained and stretched across towering steel frames resembling planes, trains or organic forms.

I had always associated scrapbooking with grandmas and bored children, so, imagine my surprise when as a twentysomething with a Big Girl Job I found myself enamoured of printing, cutting, and sticking random bits and bobs into a book. If, like me, you've racked up a disconcerting amount of screen time, you may have stumbled across a multitude of craft-inspired social media posts made primarily by young women. Described as junk journalling, the hobby is distinguishable by an affinity with collecting and storing physical mementoes, such as tickets, receipts, packaging and Polaroids.