From corporate collection to Digital Caveau: enhancing the value and accessibility of the textile collection at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: dating it back to the mid-1960s, at the time when the company was adopting a new strategy to diversify the production and position it at the high end of the market (Chiara, 2013).The collecting strategy of Antonio Ratti might have been initially spontaneous and led by the purpose of inspiration, but it soon became strategic, especially for what regarded the acquisition of the archives of the textile companies he took over. Ratti purchased the first corporate archive in 1969, an unusual practice at the time. It was the archive of the company created by Guido Ravasi , an important artist-entrepreneur of the Como silk manufacturing district (Rosina and Chiara, 2008). The collection consistently grew over the next two decades: according to Chiara Buss, keeper of the FAR textile collections from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, Ratti aimed at supporting scholarship and heritage preservation, and building a comprehensive collection (Buss, 2024). This approach was in line with the broader corporate policy that Ratti employed for cultural promotion in his company (Benedetti, 2017).In the late 1980s and early 1990s, strategies were put in place to study the collection, assess its historical and cultural relevance, and organise it into a structured archive. This signals the shift from a private corporate collection to an institutional collection (Belk, 1995). Ratti recognised the importance of enhancing the value of his collection and displayed it through exhibitions and publications, and sought the support of scholars to achieve this.In 1985, Ratti established the Fondazione Antonio Ratti with the aim to foster research and cultural programming dedicated to art and textiles (Augello, 2022). In the 1990s, he appointed experts to undertake the research on different sections of the collection and to edit themed catalogues: Silk, Gold and Silver (Buss, 1992), Qibti (Donadoni Roveri, 1993, Cravates: Women's Acessories in the 19th Century (Peter-Muller, 1994), Cachemire (Lévi-Strauss, 1995), Velvets (Buss, 1996) and Silk and Colour (Buss, 1997).The institutional, collective perspective is best epitomised by the exhibition Silk. The 1900s in Como, organised by FAR in 2001. It was curated by Chiara Buss, keeper of the FAR textile collection, in collaboration with textile and fashion scholars. The display offered an unprecedented insight into the Como silk industry as manufacturers opened their archives for the first time (Buss, 2001).Another pivotal change in the shift towards an institutional collection was the increased accessibility in the 1990s. The collection had been available to scholars upon request (Buss, 2017) but in 1993, the textile collection was formally donated to the FAR. Ratti commissioned architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni to design a tessilteca [textile library] that would address the conservation needs of the textiles (Chiara, 2013) and facilitate its fruition.The exchanges with the company's employees and clients -who could access the collection for inspiration -and with scholars who researched it, alongside the growth of the collection and the establishment of the textile library, led to the recognition that a structured cataloguing system was needed to optimise organisations and search operations (Buss, 2024). In 1998 Ratti appointed textile historian Chiara Buss to undertake this task. Buss worked on the first digital catalogue of textile collections in Italy for the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan: it launched in 1995 and received Italy's highest design recognition in 1998 -the Compasso d'Oro Award by the Associazione per il Disegno Industriale [Association for Industrial Design] -with the following motivation:An excellent example of the application of new technologies for communication, realised without resorting to technical exaggerations of the possibilities of hypertext and multimedia. It combines relevant information content with a healthy sobriety of tools that makes navigation particularly effective. (Fondazione ADI, 1998: 4) The Poldi Pezzoli textile collection was limited and, as Buss reported to the authors (Buss 2024), the complexity of developing a database for FAR was due to the size of its collection, counting many thousand artefacts. As there existed no models that suited the needs of FAR, the search criteria and structure of the multimedia catalogue -which had to allow the inclusion of photographic reproductions of all entries -were developed directly in response to the contents of the FAR collection.The clusters of the collection became the main categories: individual ancient textiles (referred to as antichi singoli), mainly modern Western European, then coptic textiles, cravates, cashmere shawls, sample books and garments (vesti). Each of these were then divided in sub-groups -such as weave, provenance, decorative pattern -and the options for each sub-groups were determined by what was in the collection, rather than adding a standard, broad range of options. Buss recounted that this was a trial and review process, an exchange between the software engineers and herself (a textile historian), finding the better solutions that would capture the extensive textile variety of the collection (Buss, 2024). The back-end was finalised in 1998 but the frontend continued to evolve until its final form in 2001.The launch of the multimedia catalogue in 1998 was celebrated with the exhibition Navigando tra le sete. At that time, the catalogue included 800 entries (Colombo, 1998). Curators continued to contribute to the catalogue, updating entries and inserting new images when digitisation campaigns were undertaken. The biggest limitation to these campaigns were the funds required at the time for digitisation, for which the appointment of external service providers was required. The sample books constituted the biggest part of the collection and, since a complete digitisation was not possible, it was decided that only 10% of each book would be reproduced. The selection of which samples in the books to reproduce was made jointly by the textile curator and a representative from the Ratti manufacture, thus the choice did not only take into consideration curatorial aspects but also appeal to clients (Rosina, 2025).The catalogue could only be accessed onsite until 2011, when the FAR commissioned a new website which incorporated the catalogue: by using the same criteria, users could search the collections and view low resolution images of the artefacts. This proved difficult as the database was showing signs of ageing and the translation of its system into a website with the then-available technologies was a slow and complex process (Rosina, 2025).The strategy to increase accessibility took place alongside the growing, nation-wide recognition of the importance of fashion heritage. In 2010 the SAN, Sistema Archivi Nazionale (National Archival System) launched the digital portal Archivi della Moda del Novecento (Archives of Twentieth-Century Fashion), which gathered data from more than two hundred public and private institutions. The aim was to 'to discover, enhance and make available a wide range of sources, so far unexplored, of the archival, bibliographical, iconographic, audiovisual heritage related to Italian fashion' (SAN, 2010).Similar projects at international level soon followed. Europeana Fashion, a best-practice network of 22 institutions from 12 European countries, ran from 2012 to 2015. The purpose was to aggregate and harmonise existing digital content from these institutions and integrate it on the Europeana platform (Europeana Pro, 2015). Another platform with broader scope, We Wear Culture, was launched by the Google Cultural Institute in 2017 (Melchior, 2017).Despite the boost of digital archival technologies in the late 2000s and early 2010s and the development of integrative platforms, the accessibility of corporate archives was still questioned due to the importance of heritage as a crucial element of differentiation for companies (Augello, 2022). Many corporate archives are still not accessible to the public or, as in the case of Armani, it is only accessible onsite at the Armani/Silos in Milan (Franceschini, 2019).The collection of FAR is accessible to the Ratti manufacture but the foundation is legally and financially independent from the company, thus relieving it from ties that corporate archives have. On the other hand, not being linked to a functioning company with an active communication strategy reduces resources and chances for communication, which impact the awareness of the collection. As recounted by Margherita Rosina, keeper of the FAR textile collection from 2007 to 2016, the collection was made more accessible with the integration of the database in the website but it was not combined with a promotional strategy beyond the existing network of the collection, eventually counteracting the accessibility strategy (Rosina, 2025). Given the extensive investments required by the development of digital archival tools and digitisation campaigns, it is fundamental to allocate sufficient resources to promote the use of these tools in order to ensure a return that justifies those investments.The working definition of archived employed by far aligns to that of Italy's foremost encyclopaedia, Enciclopedia Treccani:Location where the collection is permanently located, and the offices that are part of it. 2. [...] b. In information technology, an organized set of homogeneous reference data, constantly or periodically updated, from which an automatic processing or documentation system can obtain indexes, tables, etc. An archive that is large and accessible to a larger or smaller audience is called a database. (Treccani.it, 2025) It is worth highlighting the difference between the corporate archive of the Ratti company and the FAR archive not only from an organizational point of view but mainly because the two institutions have different purposes.The mission of the Foundation is, by statute, to allow the archives to be open to the public; Antonio Ratti decided to establish the Foundation in order to open his private collection and library to the public.The archive of the Ratti company, to protect their customer privacy, is accessible only to those who are part of the company itself, and often with great limitations. Access to the archive is not allowed to all employees, only those in the production and sales department are authorised with personal passwords to access the digital archive, the physical archive is accessible on request to the office in charge.The archive consists of all the fabrics produced and commercialized by the company itself. It is divided into two macro categories and it is stored within two spaces close to each other. In the first one there are documents such as drawings, sketches, or sample books in numerical order, in the second one are stored all the historical sample of fabrics produced since the origins of the company.Here applied was the criterion of division by decorative motif, such as floral, geometric, cashmere, and animal. One section is dedicated to the productions of acquired collections -for example Rainbow and Carnet -and another to the collections of some of the most important clients, such as Versace (Ratti, 2025).The two archives split in 1985 when Antonio Ratti decided to open his private collection to the public, as described in the previous section. In 1995, Antonio Ratti, after years of cataloguing the collection in paper form (Fig. 1), proposed to the Foundation's director, Chiara Buss, to study the possibility of digitizing the FAR collection. It was a forward-looking project with no reference model. The director was in team with an engineer in computer science to study the feasibility together.The first step was learning each other's technical language to prepare the back-end architecture (Fig. 2). The development of the tool involved:1. creating lists with all the subdata for each lemma to be poured into the system; 2. developing a record sheet that could contain all the useful data for describing the different types of objects contained in the collection, garments, accessories, fabric fragments, headdresses; 3. undertaking the photo campaign for each individual object to complete the sheet; 4. choosing which and how many items to include in the catalogue. Also included in the catalogue were management data not visible in the front end, topographical, critical historical notes, preservation sheet. This new tool, facilitated searches for the foundation staff and was accessible to the public in computers installed in the FAR library. Thus, staff members had the ability to select items in their customized search. Figure 3 reproduces an image of the first digital archive.In 2018, the operating system was obsolete and the metadata storage server was collapsing. Actions were needed to save the heritage, therefore updating the catalogue became a practical and urgent need.The search for the new platform began in 2015, only in 2018 was found the most optimal solution from both management and economic points of view. After four years of work, the digital tool was developed, which consists of a data entry part and an exploration interface.The storage facility at FAR is called caveau, a French term that describes a vault where money or valuable objects are kept, so the name Digital Caveau was chosen for the new database to reference the FAR history. Free access is provided to anyone who requests it, there is a diverse audience from students to artists, scholars and industry professionals. FAR has established solid relationships by networking with Italian universities such as La Sapienza in Rome, La Venaria Reale in Turin, Naba and Marangoni in Milan, and with foreign institutions and universities, such as FIT in New York and the Uzbekistan Government. Unfortunately, the database is only in Italian as the translation of technical terms requires extensive research, and this is one of the challenges FAR hopes to resolve in the near future.The creation of this tool raised some technical and content difficulties:1. It was revised the entire system to be able to import existing data into the new database, which is not an ad-hoc system like the previous one but is instead based on a standard model. This standard model relies on a digital platform that traces Italian ministerial records for the description of objects of historical and artistic interest (ICCD, 2025). The difficulty of this migration lies in analyzing the structure of a system that is restricted and technologically dated to a system that is standardized with a technology that leans on twenty years of technical developments. Therefore, the system had to take into consideration two different systems and find an effective solution to preserve the data 2. Entry forms were modelled for each type in the collection (Fig. 4). 3. One of the main challenges addressed with the new database was developing a system that would provide accurate descriptions of the heterogenous artefacts in our collection. This point required to modify the existing structure to differentiate cataloguing sheets and increase data entry fields. Specific sheets were created for drawings and sample books, while before only had sheets for the single samples in the books, also sheets for garments which can be integrated with sub-sheets relating to the materials in which they are made. In addition, a hierarchical-relational structure with layered connections was employed, while the previous structure was horizontal. Dedicated sheets on exhibitions, publications, donors, and companies were added, which resulted in a much broader network of data where one can not only search for artefacts, but also for the events, people and activities related to them. 4. Each record sheet contains four sections: Main data, technical data, reports, conservation and summary (Fig. 5). The first two sections are related to existing data in the catalogue, and have been migrated as a whole, the other two sections, Relazioni [relations] and Conservazione [conservation], as well as a section for notes in the backend have been added and filled one by one. 5. Creation of management tools: massive migrations of images and data from matrices, processing of sets (data groups), creation, editing and addition of vocabulary lists, relationships between database entities. 6. Creation of new descriptive sheets for entities that are not objects but are related to them: Donors, Funds, Bibliography, Exhibitions, People, Authors, Curators, Entities (Fig. 6).Four years later, the front-end was created with the same IT support. The frontend has two sections.Archive aims to support users in their navigation: it features a timeline and themes through which general searches can be started. 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Authors: Matteo Augello, Maddalena Terragni
Institution: Fondazione Antonio Ratti
Language: English
Subfield: Conservation
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,413
OpenAlex ID: W4411222021