On 27/02/07, T P t0m0p0@gmail.com wrote:
On the other hand, a lot of pop culture is ephemeral. (...) Do we really want articles on the latest Paris fashions, each year and every year?
A set of articles on 'contemporary' fashions on an annual (or biannual or quadrennial or decade or as appropriate) cycle is, perhaps surprisingly, a very good thing to have, from a historical perspective. They're not really something you can easily link out to, but it's a very interesting field of study and one where (especially as you get older) good overview print material can become flakier.
There are people scanning 1890s ladies magazines for the fashion pictures and uploading them to Commons, incidentally. The raw material is there to work with.
Even if not accepted as field of historica study in its own right, it's a useful reference source; a reliable work discussing specific fashions of the 1530s versus the 1550s is a godsend when, for example, trying to work out supporting information for unsourced contemporary portraits.
(And I suspect, to a lesser degree, it's true for more contemporary photographs. Surprisingly often you can look at an undated image and say "before 1985" because of some detail; clothing should be able to factor into this as well, though I don't know if it's routinely done by archivists)