This graduate seminar-plus-workshop parallels an eponymous course at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY). The course concept and syllabus are conceived together; shared classes with all students and group projects are combined with sessions that are discrete to the respective cohort and feature individual work on texts, sounds and images. In our courses, material processes of repairing, remaking and reusing are combined with original techniques of editing and montage, to learn about shared principles in diverse fields of creative practice. We study these processes through media archaeology that analyses digital culture and memory, unearthing layers of past and present media that represent cultural movements and fashions. Histories of montage show how divergent elements are brought together in new and unexpected combinations, with distinct rhythms and types of sequencing that unite many creative techniques: from editing film and sampling sounds, via collaging images and assembling materials, to fusing fabrics and patchworking textiles. A principal medium for our archaeology is the fashion film and its material culture. It is a medium where making and meaning come together through historical patterns and their contemporary revivals. The cutting of such patterns is a shared technique for garments and moving images. Our expanded understanding of the fashion film traces the original montage of material and its representation in moving images, from films of the silent era to today’s digital motion capture. Practical studio work with editing processes prepares our analyses of mediatic techniques across time and space.