Dr Djurdja Bartlett was a beloved member of EFHA’s community. She joined the scientific committee since its foundation, greatly contributing to the intellectual growth of the association, proactively participating in the organisation of activities, events and conferences. Her work influenced us to reflect on the role heritage plays in the relationship between politics and fashion. Fashion and Politics, the book she edited in 2019, and the themes it touches upon indeed inspired us to apply the same methodological rigour in our own practice and consider our own position as pan European association preserving and making available fashion heritage online.

To remember her, we redirect to her introductory speech to the 2019 EFHA conference, held at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London in collaboration with the Transnational Fashion Hub, which she chaired.

[extract]

“(…) Derrida insisted that archiving technology also informed the concept of the future and possibly the future itself. “The archive” he formulated “ties knowledge and memory to the promise.” Following from this, Derrida clarifies that being a mal-de or having fever, does not mean being sick:

(…) it is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest interminably from searching for the archive, right while it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it right. Was something in it and archives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive, and in any irrepressible desire to returnto the origin of home sickness and nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion. Indeed, no repetition compulsion, no mal-de can rise for person who’s not already in one way or another, a mal d’archive.

I would like to finish my introduction with this rather long quote because I believe that passion has got us here, either speakers or attendees, and will keep us going not only today and tomorrow, but also in our future endeavours. Thank you.”

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Djurdja Bartlett will be greatly missed.