Right content, right context: Europeana Fashion Tumblr
For the past five months, Europeana and Europeana Fashion have been collaborating on a special Tumblr blog to share fashion-related content. We have now produced a case study detailing the story so far, complete with its successes and lessons learned.
This month, the Europeana Fashion Tumblr is curated by Missoni
The idea
We wanted to engage a new online audience with Europe’s cultural heritage, collaborate with Europeana Network partners, and connect cultural institutions with a new social platform.
Tumblr was founded in 2007 as a microblogging platform and social networking site. It allows users to blog in various forms: texts, photos, citations, links, music, videos. Users can upload posts via their browser, mobile phone, desktop or email. Each Tumblr blog is easy to personalise by the creator.
Visitors and users of Tumblr can follow other users’ blogs, as well as make private blogs. Individual posts are easy to share and re-post. Visitors can search for topics across all of the blogs. Currently there are 90 million blogs online on Tumblr with a daily amount of 77 million posts. The service is most popular with teen and college-aged users - half of Tumblr’s visitor base is under the age of 25.
Tumblr and fashion
According to Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp, approximately 180 of the top 1,000 Tumblr blogs are fashion-related. And fashion-related Tumblr posts are re-blogged on a much greater scale than general Tumblr posts, says Tumblr Fashion Director Rich Tong, suggesting that 'there's a huge capacity for fashion content to go viral on Tumblr.'
We agreed to run the platform together for five months. Europeana provided an online strategy and promoted the platform to its followers. Europeana Fashion selected curatorial themes in collaboration with Europeana and its partners and also promoted the Tumblr to its followers. After this first five months, Europeana Fashion and its partners would select the content together and take care of the daily postings.
Marily Monroe singing Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend
We decided to organise the posts by themes, like shoes, or art and fashion. Each theme would be on display for a month. This meant we could retain a curatorial look and feel. We wanted it to be an online fashion blog but at the same time to let it be almost like an online exhibition, to follow the tradition of the cultural institutions that we worked with.
The themes we used were: Shoes; Art & Fashion; the History of the Antwerp Fashion Department; Colour from the Emilio Pucci Archive; and the shoe collection from Museo Rossimoda della Calzatura.
The results
Over the first five months, the Tumblr received over 15,500 page views. Three of the biggest countries were fashion-forward nations Italy, the United States and France. They were joined in the top five by the Netherlands and Germany.
With any project, there are challenges to overcome. We found that curators sometimes needed support because of other demands on their time, technical proficiency or language barriers. We also needed to address copyright issues, making sure all content was properly credited and linked to the providing organisation.
The Tumblr is now open to all Europeana Fashion partners and the second half of the calendar years has already been filled by partners wanting to curate their own themes.
Europeana Fashion Tumblr uses a grid style
For the partners that have already participated, the experience enabled them to reflect on their current practices as a museum. Associate partner Museo Salvatore Ferragamo is looking forward to using new media for a larger public, not just for the people coming to visit the museum. For Museo Rossimoda, the Tumblr was a way to re-think curatorial practices. The museum’s permanent exhibition is arranged chronologically and by designer, while the Tumblr evolved around themes. The Tumblr thus functioned as a platform to experiment with a thematic approach.
MoMu - Fashion Museum Province of Antwerp - has already reserved the Tumblr for a second time. Next year, a curatorial intern will prepare a Tumblr curation alongside an exhibition on feathers. This example shows how the Tumblr can also be used as a place in which junior curators can develop their curatorial practices.
Thank you
Geer Oskam, Senior Marketing Specialist from Europeana says, 'We're really pleased with the results of the Tumblr. It's down to the hard work of all the people involved, particularly Michelle van Duijn and Neil Bates from Europeana and Alessandra Arezzi Boza and Gabrielle de Pooter from Europeana Fashion. We'd also like to thank all the institutions who helped by opening up their content, and the curators for taking the time to put the themes and images together. Fashion content and Tumblr go well together - it's the right context for the right content and that's what has made it successful. It's also easy to use, easy to customise, which enables us to create something that's both playful and engaging.'