In 1993, Espace Mode Méditerranée opened its fashion museum and documentation center to the public. The complementary nature of the museum and the documentation center not only promotes a deeper understanding of the history of fashion, but also contributes to the exhibitions organized. Patricia Vallet (head librarian for over 30 years) will compile, enrich, classify, archive and bring to life thousands of books and thematic files on fashion and the Mediterranean. Numerous readers, students, teachers, designers and historians from all over Europe sought her out. In 2004, Sylvie Richoux, then curator of the Musée de la Mode, opted for a surprising exhibition, "Glossy", offering us a look at fashion magazines. The exhibition ranged from 18th-century engravings to interwar newspapers, with a special focus on today's national and international press. This organ of influence and questioning on society, women's lives, beauty myths and rituals, as well as the omnipresent fashion, both object of desire and rejection. The fashion press increasingly obeys the dictates of the advertiser. Even the still timid arrival of the web was addressed! Sixteen years after Glossy, paper is being recycled, and fashion is being cultivated on social networks through the prism of a surge of influencers, some of whom have already been replaced by robots. I'm convinced that paper culture will once again have a bright future ahead of it, and so will the documentation center at Marseille's fashion museum!
