How the contribution of amateurs has changed the definition of an archive in fashion. (Work in progress)

How the contribution of amateurs has changed the definition of an archive in fashion. (Work in progress)

The interest in the Archive of fashion considerably increased over the last 10 years in academic studies as well as in popular culture. Nowadays, due to its digital adaptation, archives have become deeper and more complex but at the same time much more open to the public. Archive passed from numerous meanings throughout the years, from depository of a designer’s legacy to more recently in the own collectors’ wardrobes. Is for this reason that it is hard to give one singular definition to Archive in fashion since its continuous changes have refined the whole meaning. 

In general, ‘the archive or archives are a collection of documents and records that contain historical information’, so —in fashion— refers to garments from the past body of work of any given designer or brand, that are not part of the current collection, and that represents its heritage.  

Nowadays, institutions, brands and amateurs are attracted to what an archive will be in the future; although it is important to remember that archival work is not a new practice in this field. Archive practice started around the 80's when fashion brands began collecting and organising their collections, encouraged by the first fashion exhibitions made by museums and institutions. For instance, Dior’s archive was established in 1987 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the brand with a retrospective at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. 

At that time, brands started taking care of archive pieces and looking at them in a critical way to understand what they were doing and to valorise their heritage. In the early 1990’s, influenced by consumer culture, fashion enthusiasts, in particular in Japan, started collecting and owning pieces of significant collections from their favourite brands or designers. As we can see in Kyoichi Tsuzuki’s series Happy victims where the journalist photographed collections of clothes of specific fashion brands in the apartments of their owners. 

In the late 1990’s, the term archive started to be associated with a group of avant-garde menswear collectors, who have been the first fashion archivists that researched, collected and resold rarest pieces online. In this way began the archive clothing culture. 

This practice began in majority on niche Japanese website and it had often more than one barrier to entry, such as a monetary-based (see Raf Simons AW2001 sweatshirts), knowledge-based (having to know about Yahoo Auctions Japan or other Japanese sites), and scarcity of the product(s) (certain Slimane pieces come to mind).*

Protagonists of the archive culture are designers like Raf Simons, Maison Margiela, Dries van Noten, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Hedi Slimane, mostly his Dior designs. Or Japanese brands and designers like Comme Des Garçons, Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto. 

Today, after the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, a massive spike in traffic on resale apps led to a boom for the industry’s biggest players. The number of archivists increased and the term has assumed, on platforms like TikTok or Instagram, new meaning since an increasing number of people are referring to their own wardrobes as archives. 

More meanings come from the Archive of fashion communication materials that lately have been bringing offline fashion content into the online landscape for millions to discover. Around the 00's, fashion publications and magazines were the most important vehicles of communication for brands. Indeed, they shared their creative vision through these channels, back at a time when fashion shows were only viewed by the press and buyers. Printed publications become of huge importance to experience a designer’s work and the narrative of fashion, through languages like photography, art direction and stylism. 

Few libraries and museums started to conserve these communication materials, archiving and collecting fanzines, rare publications, magazines, catalogues etc. An example of this rare work is the Antwerp Fashion Museum’s Library, which from 2002 has preserved numerous materials produced for communication purposes by brands together with photographers, art directors and graphic designers. In particular, the library’s archive focuses on the protagonists of Belgian fashion, representative of a ready-to-wear fashion designer that is often defined as conceptual or avant-garde and that strongly invests in these communications practices (2).

A big contribution was also made by amateurs and fashion collaborators on archiving and collecting these materials during the early 00’s to today. Some of them lately shared their archive work online, transforming it into blogs or Instagram accounts. An example of this independent work is Rare Book Paris, run by an anonymous ex-fashion designer, who has collected magazines and publications over the last 15 years ago and now sells them on Instagram DM. Other amateurs like Shahan Assadourian preserve these materials through digital scans on archivings.net and FF Channel on Youtube collect and digitise old runways and backstages videos.

This recent digital function of archives emphasises on how we look and discover old fashion contents and materials. The archive is now in the collective imagination of fashion and has become a solid part of the discourse of the industry and the system.