YNAP and Bloomsbury partner up to launch educational fashion video archive

Online fashion retailer Yoox-Net-a-Porter (YNAP) has joined forces with publishing house Bloomsbury to set up an archive of rare fashion show footage from 1973 to 2003. The footage will be made available to the educational market. The two companies have been digitizing and cataloguing a total of 3000 videos from influential runway shows.

“We’re thrilled to be making this priceless resource available to the educational market exclusively through Bloomsbury. The period covered by the archive saw the disruptive impact of innovative designers such as the Antwerp Six, Rei Kawakubo and Hussein Chalayan; it spans more than two decades of London, Paris, New York and Milan runway shows”, said Kathryn Earle, Managing Director of Bloomsbury Digital Resources, in a statement.

Titled “Yoox Net-a-Porter Group Runway Archive Collection”, the resource will contain hundreds of hours of footage. The material was curated by Valerie Steele, Director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Alexander McQueen’s 1992 “Jack the Ripper” graduate show and Jean Paul Gaultier’s “Rabbi Chic” fashion show are just two of the invaluable resources featured in the archive.

The footage will be made available on Bloomsbury’s Fashion Central platform in 2019.