The future of fashion heritage, built on DPP.
The MoMu Fashion Hackathon brings together designers, developers, and researchers to reimagine how we experience fashion heritage.
48 hours.
8 teams.
One challenge: make MoMu's archive of 38,000 garments accessible to everyone.
Sunday evening, jury time. The MoMuse demo plays on screen. The Kasuri fabric rotates. Hotspots glow. And Taylor Ann — our AI curator — speaks for the first time.
The jury leans in. They get it.
Our team wins the Bloomsbury Fashion Central Prize.
Friday evening. We had our first meeting with the Hackathon members. We were invited to Bakermat for a drink and to get to know everyone. I learned all about patterns that evening — fabric patterns, textile techniques, the language of materials.
Saturday morning, we were guided through trough the archive. Rows of garments wrapped tissue paper, each with provenance records going back centuries.
The challenge: how do you make this historical collection accessible without losing its soul?
Our test subject: an 18th-century Japanese garment from MoMu's collection. Kasuri is a resist-dyeing technique where threads are bound before dyeing, creating the distinctive blurred pattern.
Julie lays it flat on white tissue paper, measuring tape beside it. The team photographs every detail. Ali builds the 3D model. Ward connects it to the Digital Product Passport schema.
Saturday. The team splits into roles. Julie photographs the Kasuri kimono, measuring every detail. Ward builds the 3D viewer and connects the DPP data. Federica documents everything. Franziska shapes the narrative. Hours pass. The studio fills with code, conversations, and the weight of 38,000 stories waiting to be told.
"Mannequins in the corner. Laptops on the table. Antwerp skyline through the window. Perfect place to build the future of fashion heritage."
Interactive hotspots reveal material data, construction techniques, provenance. Each point tells a story. Click the collar — hear about the neckline construction. Click the pattern — learn about Kasuri dyeing.
Physics-based rendering. Real textures from the MoMu archive. The silk catches light like it would in person.
"This garment features the Kasuri technique, where threads are dyed before weaving..."
90 seconds demo
The 5-minute pitch
Our turn. The Kasuri fabric spins on screen. A hotspot pulses.
Applause.
This weekend wouldn't have happened without the people who opened doors, shared knowledge, and believed in what we were building.
Every garment will need machine-readable data about materials, manufacturing, and sustainability. Everyone's building compliance portals.
We're building experiences.
Because whether it's a museum piece or today's sustainable collection — people want conversations, not data dumps.
Digital Product Passports that consumers actually want to scan. From farm to consumer: full transparency, verified sustainability data, and living product stories.
See The DemoDigital Product Passports for Fashion Heritage
