The room where you are now is the Archive: the place where we preserve an important part of the heritage of ITS Foundation, which counts 14,758 portfolios, 1,089 fashion items, 163 accessories, 118 pieces of jewellery and over 700 photographic projects. The uniqueness of this archive is that it collects the first works of selected young talents, or better yet their theses, free from commercial dynamics and therefore totally devoted to innovation and limitless experimentation.

Until 2021, this heritage was kept in an old attic of a building in Piazza Venezia 1 here in Trieste, under the name ITS Creative Archive.

Since 2022, thanks to the Fondazione CRTrieste it has found its rightful place, which allows us to preserve it in the best possible way. Generali, with its project 'Generali ensuring the future of creativity', stands by us and supports us in the conservation and restoration of the items.

In addition to the transfer of the pieces, between 2020 and 2021, a team of 6 people from our staff re-catalogued each piece, recording all conservation and restoration operations on a database. Each garment was analysed from different points of view, including measurements, volumes, materials, techniques, and colours used, as well as studying the best conservation conditions and carefully checking for any slightest damage requiring restoration.

At the end of this operation, (THE GUIDE SHOWS THE EXAMPLE DISPLAY OF THE ARCHIVE) the garments were placed inside these compactable cabinets that you will find on your right to be properly preserved.

The aisle you see open has been set up for you, to give you an indication of how the garments are stored inside the cabinets. In reality, for reasons of space, the storage of garments is much denser. The challenge we face is to use as little space as possible while maintaining the highest conservation possible.

Another part of the heritage is kept in a storage room on the ground floor of this building. There we keep oversized items, which are too big for these cabinets, or those that need to be stored on a bust or mannequin. All the portfolios of the ITS finalists (almost 700) are also stored in the compactable archives in front of you, while the portfolios of the applicants are stored in the Library we visited earlier and on the ground floor.

In 2021, during the work of the re-cataloguing of the garments, a team of 15 people processed all the portfolios.

What was done? Each portfolio was placed in a new case (which is the one we saw opened in the video mapping in the Library), labelled with a barcode and content and material were checked.

As far as the restoration part is concerned, consider that at present, the necessary restoration work has been carried out only on the garments currently on show (47 out of over 1000 of the complete collection).

In addition, every month all pieces on display have to be cleaned and their state of preservation monitored. What we have told you so far is the state of the art, but what awaits us is work that will continue over time and that will see us working not only on the garments we already have but also on new acquisitions (through annual ITS Contest the collection will grow). In addition to this room, after the door on your left as you look at the compacts, there is a space closed to the public, entirely dedicated to the restoration work, the CONSERVATORY.

There are 3 types of restoration work: 1. conservative, aimed at avoiding future deterioration; 2. active conservation (restoration), with restoration and replacement of components, i.e. restoring serious and evident damage that has affected quality; 3. ameliorative, aimed at

improving the original quality; Finally, a small curiosity concerning the archive: As many of the pieces in our possession were the finalists' dissertations, it often happened that items were completed in the run-up, even within minutes before the ITS Contest show (or inclusion in exhibitions, in the case of accessories and jewellery). For example, during the analysis of the state of preservation, we found many pieces with missing finishing seams (often replaced with pieces of paper scotch tape!): this is a peculiarity of the ITS archive that we decided to keep alive, intervening only and exclusively in cases where the state of preservation of the item is at risk. Well! Our visit has come to an end but ITS Arcademy - for those of you who are here in Trieste for more than just a few hours or are planning to return to stay a few days - we still have a lot to offer. If, with this short trip, we have been able to rekindle your creativity keep in mind there is an entire Learning area dedicated to educational experiences waiting for you, with a calendar of workshops and 'hands-on' laboratories in which to try your hand at the sewing machine rather than scissors, needle and thread. Courses for all ages, with specific proposals for children, families and professionals. They will enable you to go into even more detail about what a portfolio is, to use your hands to create, to discover the secrets of complex techniques directly from the voices of our finalists, who will return to give lectures open to all. But also, to simply repair a garment you are fond of, to extend this moment of creativity. Because ITS Arcademy is not just a place to discover, but a place to live creative stories.