This week in my Fashion History class we’re studying the
Italian Renaissance and I've reviewed some projects with some perplexing
information included. For example,
several students seem to believe that the Italian Renaissance took place in
1968. Not a typo a genuine answer
repeated several time over the last several semesters. I believe this has to do
with the Franco Zeferelli film of Romeo and Juliet produced in 1968. For those of you joining the story late, the
Italian Renaissance is generally dated between 1420 and 1600. So for today’s project I wanted to explore
some resources that might help my students to gather information and submit
their reports. Specifically, I wanted to
know if the online clipping and shopping tool, Polyvore, would work for
historic image research projects.
What I did to test Polyvore for research viability was to
reference the Metropolitan Museum of Art website to gather painting resources
of women’s costumes from the Italian Renaissance period. I downloaded the Polyvore clipping tool and I
made a collage of painting images. Not
liking the original outcome – it was missing an appropriate background for the
time period - I added a search for Italian Renaissance textiles and used a
period proper textile image to set as the foundation on which to build the
collage. Though, not as robust as
Photoshop the speed and ease of use make this a great informational gathering
and display tool.
The Polyvore site keeps the proper attribution of where the pictures
were found online, however, I lost those when I downloaded the collage to save on
my computer. Anyone using the collages for
class research will have to find a way to print the attributions separately to
hand in with collage projects.
Overall, though, I found this a great way to gather images for inspiration and illustrating research.
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