Dries Van Noten Study Center / MoMu - Fashion Museum Antwerp

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Driven by his passion for craftsmanship, textiles and the heritage of fashion, the renowned Belgian designer Dries Van Noten will support the educational and research activities of this Study Center for five years helping its development with an annual endowment. The study center will bear the name of the designer during this period.

MoMu Hackathon 2025: A Weekend at the Museum

A character in a suit is rendered in 3D software, emphasizing the details of the outfit.

Saturday 22.11.2025 to Sunday 23.11.2025

Discover how fashion, technology and creativity come together in an inspiring weekend at the museum. Collaborate with like-minded makers and thinkers, experiment with digital tools and breathe new life into the MoMu Study Collection.

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Discover and learn for yourself

MoMu has created a study collection, a separate collection intended to teach visitors about fashion by allowing them to study objects up close.

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Projects

Punk x Ballet Russes ● Low Art x High Art ● MoMu Library x FATE

Punk x Ballet Russes ● Low Art x High Art ● MoMu Library x FATE

FATE® Fashion And Textiles Education Archive is a resource created to support the study of material culture: clothing and textiles that evidence ethnographic diversity. FATE® archive is used by fashion brands, feature film, television, arts industries, museums, foundations and government bodies. The archive is composed of over twenty thousand garments, textiles, accessories and books which are housed in London, UK.

From 25 February 2025 until 21 March 2025, two collections, the Punk Special Collection from the FATE® Fashion and Textiles Education Archive, London, United Kingdom, and the Ballet Russes Special Collection from the FATE® Fashion and Textiles Education Archive, London, United Kingdom, were presented to the public at the library of MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp for the first time. The FATE® archive exhibited 16 punk garments (ca. 1977 – ca. 1984) and 15 Ballet Russes costume garments (1937) from these special collections.

While these two special collections seemed separated by social demarcation: punk clothing being reflective of low art and the Ballet Russes costumes being of the high arts; both were created in correlation with the creation of music and movement. These garments showed their use, their function, body sweat from the heat of the room or heat of the stage lights. Both special collections evidenced their own cultures and histories.

“MoMu believes in the power of direct engagement with materials and techniques as a valuable learning experience, which is why we created a study collection. We were privileged to collaborate with FATE and their fashion and textile education archive. For four weeks, FATE’s Punk and Ballet Russes collections sparked a dialogue on the interplay between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art in the reading room of the MoMu Library. We were privileged to share these unique pieces up close with both the Belgian fashion network and visitors to the museum.” – Dieter Suls, MoMu Project Coordinator

“FATE, London, UK was honoured to be part of this international collaboration with the innovative MoMu Library, Antwerp, Belgium.” - Clare S. Spencer, FATE® Co-Founder & Director

Glossy Surfaces

Glossy Surfaces

Glossy Surfaces, a 3-year international Flemish government funded heritage project, refers to the shiny effect resulting from a coating applied on clothing, most commonly thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU). This specific plastic has a very limited lifespan and conservation issues can occur within a few years.

This project, composed by an international consortium of museums – ModeMuseum (MoMu, Belgium), Museu do Design e da Moda (MUDE, Portugal) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET, USA) – as well as scientific partners – Department of Conservation and Restoration from NOVA School of Science and Technology (Portugal) and Centexbel (Belgium) - seeks conservation solutions for thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) coatings in fashion collections.

This project’s main focus group are professionals of cultural heritage institutions and mainly the collection caretakers (conservators, registrars, curators, storage managers,….) who are responsible for these fragile objects. Because of the ubiquity of TPU’s in industrial objects produced since the sixties, the relevance of guidelines for storing TPU’s is of interest for most musea who’s collection strategies focuses on collecting objects starting from this early stage of plastics.

Abstract Year 1

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Survey Report

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20230526 Abstracts

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Damage Atlas

Coated Fabrics Collection Care Symposium

Coated Fabrics Collection Care Symposium

MoMu hosted the ‘Coated Fabrics Collection Care’ Symposium on Thursday, 25 May and Friday, 26 May 2023 in Antwerp, Belgium.

This symposium presented the results of  Glossy Surfaces, a 3-year international Flemish government funded heritage project. The title Glossy Surfaces refers to the shiny effect resulting from a coating applied on clothing, most commonly thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU). The project, composed by an international consortium of museums – ModeMuseum Antwerpen (MoMu, Belgium), Museu do Design e da Moda (MUDE, Portugal) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET, USA) – as well as scientific partners – Department of Conservation and Restoration from NOVA School of Science and Technology (Portugal) and Centexbel (Belgium) - sought conservation solutions for thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) coatings in fashion collections.

The first day of the symposium focused on the results of the project, research done by the partners in the project, case studies from other museums and panel discussions. The second day included presentations on conservation treatments and several workshops on the conservation of TPU which the participants could attend.

Programme and Information Symposium EN

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Melijn Project

Melijn Project

The project "Handwritten Text Recognition" (HTR) of the Melijn archive aimed to explore the possibilities of building an online eco-system, based solely on open source tools. It was also an opportunity to transcribe (HTR) and publish a total of twenty volumes of 17th and 18th century handwritten letters, sent by the Antwerp merchant family Melijn. These letters contain valuable information, such as trade routes, merchandise, and historical events from that era. We used the transcription platform Transkribus (READ COOP) for training an HTR model, and will use MADOC (UGent, Digirati) for publishing the digital browsable manuscripts and transcription side by side.

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Opentheso

Opentheso

A well-managed terminology is extremely important to any institution with its own collection for efficient object registration. A high-quality thesaurus, with a well-built hierarchical structure, enriched with Linked Open Data concepts, is a useful instrument for registering and publishing a collection. The use of a customised tool to manage such terminology optimally is therefore no luxury. MoMu works with the open source tool Opentheso. The tool is web-based and is made available to the public free of charge.

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Museum Monitoring Tool

Museum Monitoring Tool

In order to create the optimal environment for preserving collections, MoMu developed the data logging system 'MuMo', which stands for Museum Monitoring Tool, together with the University of Antwerp. This data logging system checks, among other things, temperature and humidity, the presence of dust particles in the air and monitors the insect traps and visualizes this data in a web-based dashboard. MuMo is built with open hardware and open source software and is - including instructions to implement the system itself - available to other museums via MoMu's github page. The MuMo project is supported by the Flemish Government.

MuMo Github

Magazine

Museum Monitoring in Four Key Points
MoMu, together with several partners, is working on MuMo, a data logging system for the heritage sector. Dieter Suls, coordinator of the Dries Van Noten Study Center, explains the how and why of this scientific collaboration. Read more.