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Thematic archive · Design and advertising

Design and the visual languages of everyday life

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1950s

Museo del Traje: a collection for reading Spanish fashion

The Museo del Traje collection brings together regional dress, jewellery and accessories, works by Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, and holdings representing Cristóbal Balenciaga and Pedro Rodríguez. Using the available institutional information, we examine what this concentration of objects allows us to say and the limits of a collection description.

1950s

The Toy as Document: What a Museum Collection Can Tell Us

Toys do more than evoke childhood: their materials, purchase routes, uses, and preservation make social transformations legible. Drawing on museum and academic sources, we examine what can—and cannot—be claimed when a toy enters a collection.

Before 1950

When a Vehicle Enters a Museum: Five Ways of Telling Motoring History

The available sources describe collections of cars, motorcycles, engines, chassis, manuals and tools in Italy, Spain and Germany. Rather than forming a list of brands, they show how museums turn vehicles into technical documents, design objects and evidence of mobility.

1970s

Walkman: Private Listening in Public

The available evidence places the presentation of Sony’s Walkman in July 1979 and describes it as a portable stereo player associated with lightweight headphones. This analysis considers what that documentation supports, why the object matters to the cultural history of listening, and which questions require further sources.

1950s

Spanish Fashion as Document: From Garment to Fashion Illustration in Public Collections

Collections and exhibitions at the Museo del Traje and other institutions make it possible to read fashion as material culture: garments, accessories, photographs, magazines, patterns and fashion illustrations preserve traces of production, circulation and use. A tour of what these sources allow us to state—and what they do not—about Spanish fashion from the post-war years to the 1970s.

Contemporary

Contemporary Retro: When the Past Becomes a Strategy for the Present

The return of products, visual languages and references from earlier decades is not a simple reproduction of the past. Drawing on academic and journalistic sources, this analysis examines contemporary retro as an operation in design, consumption and identity, while identifying what the available evidence does not allow us to conclude.

Contemporary

From Album to Archive: What Museology Can Teach a Sticker Collection

Stickers do not automatically have to become institutional heritage to deserve documentary attention. Drawing on Modena’s Museo della Figurina and basic principles of inventory, conservation and museum context, this analysis treats the album as a cultural source: a set of printed objects, themes, uses and memories in which the information matters as much as each item.