Unequal Atmospheres: Italian Fashion Museums and Digital Imaginaries

Unequal Atmospheres: Italian Fashion Museums and Digital Imaginaries The digitisation of cultural heritage is commonly described as a democratisation of access, but it profoundly transforms the atmospheric dimension through which heritage is experienced and imagined. Drawing on the ‘atmospheric turn’ (Anderson, Böhme) and studies of the imaginary (Castoriadis, Durand), this article investigates how Italian fashion museums and archives, with a focus on those in Tuscany, translate institutional atmospheres into digital environments. Based on the mapping of over 1,200 Italian institutions from the CHANGES project, a qualitative sample is analysed along three axes: representational, narrative and affective. The results suggest that the atmospheric inequalities observed across the sample cannot be explained solely by technical differences. They appear, particularly as differences in the capacity to produce atmosphere within a digital environment. It is argued that digital platforms operate as selective atmospheric infrastructures, amplifying certain imaginaries of Italian fashion while marginalising others.