The modern industry, in this specific case clothing and accessories, generates every year what will become its industrial heritage most of it in a digital way.
The Institute for Present Time History (IHTP) and its dedicated seminar on History & Fashion accepted The New Artisans proposal to bring awareness to Fashion historians on the current and future industrial heritage challenges.
From patterns to product specifications or sell through and other commercial information, all of it is now digitized in one way or another. The diversity of digital systems and formats that results as well as the volatility of such formats is raising multiple conservation, storage and accessibility challenges for the future generations.
This provide a whole new set of data to be used by future fashion historians who will have to become familiar in digging into complex, and sometimes outdated, ERP, CRM, PLM databases archives as well as multiple digital document formats especially by Computer Assisted Design software.
If not addressed by companies and researchers, decades of industrial heritage could simply disappear leaving us only with the final object, if lucky, but with very little about its related processes and industrial context.

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