Fashion is often held synonymous with frivolity, excess, and luxury; as such, the study of costume history and theory has historically been considered impractical or subsidiary. The significant rise in costume education and scholarship during the 20th century has brought new and more frequent queries regarding the histories of fashion, etiquette, and material culture to our libraries. We are now often asked to assist in researches of cultures of style, and how they may be analyzed in a multidisciplinary context. Is it possible to analyze fashion trends through the lens of the law? Are effects of American colonialism present in fashion trends today? This brief historiography of costume and fashion studies seeks to utilize a multi- and interdisciplinary lens that reference librarians may employ to assist patrons with style-related inquiries.

What do academic librarians and fashion designers have in common? As designers produce a good—clothing—and librarians provide a service, it may seem like the two share no similarities. However, in recent years, both professions have been asked to do more with less. Designers are tasked with churning out clothing collections at a record rate while academic librarians have had to maintain and in some cases increase their level of service in the face of steadily decreasing budgets. One response to this relentless cycle in the fashion world is the development of slow fashion, a designer-oriented process that prioritizes producing fewer collections of clothing using materials that have less of an environmental impact. For libraries to respond to increasing demands, slow collection development is proposed and applied to building fashion resource collections in academic libraries.

On January 5th, 1903, Mrs. A.M. Dunstan, a designer and dressmaker with an eponymous store on 34th Street, sold a $370 green velvet coat with matching bodice to Clarisse Livingston, a New York socialite. This information, captured from a household invoice within the Edward Livingston papers at the New York Public Library, reveals more than pecuniary data about the sale of clothing at the turn of the century; rather, the invoice contains complex metadata about the relationships between modernity, fashion, and group identity. This paper describes the processes and results of a preliminary study of fashion-related invoices from the Livingston papers and seeks to demonstrate that invoices are a rich, yet often overlooked source of cultural data.

How do art and design libraries collect the history of the future? Trend forecasting literature presents exactly that challenge. These multifaceted print and digital publications, issued regularly and expensively by a handful of companies, are held by few libraries even as they influence everything from womenswear to computer games. We examine how libraries collect these materials and consider their role in the broader information landscape.

First, we historically situate forecasting, looking to origins in colour charts, trade catalogues and international communications. Next, we look at the post-war institutionalization of trend forecasting, describing its role in the consolidation of a consumer-oriented supply chain.

With the Fashion Institute of Technology as the case study, we then examine forecasting in context: how faculty incorporate it into pedagogy, how students engage with the materials and how librarians integrate critical thinking and information literacy into instruction. Practical matters such as cost, housing, long-term archiving and access are also addressed.

We conclude with a forecast of forecasting, examining its move to digital formats and the challenge of meeting pedagogical needs that are at once rigorous (as accreditation demands) and creative (as schools promise), reflecting the mash-up wonder of today's fashion discourse.

Fashion magazines contain hidden delights ripe for investigating. One can explore overt content and covert messages in fashion magazine advertising art by probing the periodical and its promotional images for historical or social clues and for the advertiser's manipulative methods. Art librarians can apply and encourage the use of analytical techniques in connection with fashion advertising art from any era or region of the world. The focus here is on a single firm, the Demorest Fashion and Sewing-Machine Company, best known for its paper sewing patterns, and how in a single volume of its monthly magazine it promoted the purchase of fashion goods in connection with a world's fair: the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Comparing a 19th-century fashion engraving with a related photograph; and viewing a magazine advertisement as a set of repeating patterns according to a 21st-century process, fractal-concept analysis, together yield a trove of information and prompt further ideas for alternate and peripheral lines of inquiry.

The Herbert Sondheim, Inc. scrapbooks in the New School Archives and Special Collections document the activities of a notable early to mid-20th-century New York-based manufacturer of ready-to-wear women's fashions. A precursor to the contemporary fast fashion industry, Sondheim's employees sketched and kept detailed notes on materials and construction of garments produced by Parisian designers, which the firm then adapted into more affordable and easily obtainable apparel for American consumers. A retrospective visual materials cataloguing project resulting from a graduate student's interest in the collection led to the online availability of over 1200 sketches of fashion adaptations and challenged archives staff to develop appropriate descriptive metadata for a fragmented, ambiguous and complex documentary record.

The Art of Costume Design: The Work of Dunya Ramicova is an on-going project by the University of California, Merced Library to digitize, preserve, and promote the work of costume designer and UC Merced Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Dunya Ramicova. This article talks about the collection itself and the various projects undertaken in support of its preservation and promotion.

In 2011, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc purchased a fashion photography archive with over 750,000 images from runway photographer Niall McInerney, with the aim of digitizing it for the educational market. The archive spans the period from the late 1970s through to 2000, before the rise of digital photography. It includes many rare images – backstage and street style as well as runway. Bloomsbury recently completed the three-and-a-half-year digitization project, and is in the process of indexing the images for digital deployment as part of Bloomsbury Fashion Central, which will also include the Berg Fashion Library and Fairchild Books content. This article looks at the drivers behind the purchase of the archive, the challenges it presented and the logic of partnerships with other possible content providers.

A case study concerning the in-house digitization of a small collection of Central Saint Martins graduate fashion shows. The background of the collection is outlined (VHS and DVD recordings spanning from 1979 to present), as well as the workflow put in place to deal with the technical aspects of recording, cataloguing, processing and archiving an audio-visual collection with minimal budget and staffing.