Week 9: Our well-told story & unexpected metadata

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

Original sketch for the Wedding Dress from the collection sketchbook; Fall-Winter 1988;  Pulled from the internet. Photo Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent

I hope everyone had a restorative spring break! This week at ICP we will work collaboratively and individually: first, we’ll work with Sarah so that she can get started on the website and then you will be work more on your individual projects in concert with Bradly. Our class schedule:

  • Discussion of Kiani & Dania’s blogposts (30-ish mins)
  • Sarah Greene directs discussion of look/feel of website (60 mins?)
  • Scanning, editing of project materials.(remaining time).

 

 

To prepare:

READ Kiani and Dania’s blogposts; notes from last website discussion

SKIM (if time) the Well-Told story posts of your peers

SIGN-UP for your Harlem Semester tour

Some of you already picked out materials from the Shange material that you want to scan/photograph. I will pick them up before class. If Shannon is available, you can request materials to bring down to ICP by noon.

Please don’t forget to sign up for your Harlem Semester tour by 3/23. (FYI, I am not going on 3/26; I was testing the system.)

Work desk of Yves St. Laurent at the St. Laurent atelier. The Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent. 3 rue Léonce Reynaud, 75116 Paris

Work desk of Yves St. Laurent at the St. Laurent atelier. The Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent. 3 rue Léonce Reynaud, 75116 Paris

At the end of this week, I was privileged to travel to Paris with some of the Africana faculty to discuss a future Africana project in conjunction with the Barnard Global Symposium. The Symposium started with a reception at the Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent and yielded an unexpected archive experience.  In addition to carefully preserving St.Laurent’s workspace, they have many of his sketches–starting when he was fifteen.

The sketches all had a series of numbers on front and back. The curator visibly perked up when I asked about the numbers, it turned out that, in addition to transforming the modern fashion industry, Yves St. Laurent was a King of Metadata! Almost every one of the thousands of sketches contained not only date and place of composition, but numbers indicating who created the pattern, the sources of fabric and accessories and other information. As the curator noted, by following the numbers, you could get a detailed economic history of the modern fashion industry in Paris.

Moral of this story: you never know where metadata will lead you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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