A customer shops at the City Opera Thrift Shop in New York. It’s in the vintage market where you’ll encounter the term “archival” most abundantly – and inconsistently. Photo: The New York Times
It’s the word that ate the fashion industry: archive.
Banana Republic has an “archive” collection, where it sells its Reagan-era T-shirts and pants.
Sydney Sweeney hasn’t merely worn a Versace dress, she has worn an "archival" Versace dress.
In Paris, you can buy 30-year-old Comme Des Garcons jackets and Margiela sweaters from the Archivist Store. That’s not to be confused with other resellers like Archive Reloaded, Archive Threads or Archive Vintage.
And new labels like Post Archive Faction and B1archive trade on the hazy authority of labeling something archival to sell their ideas.
“It’s a peculiar use of that term,” said Valerie Steele, the director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Steele has a lot of familiarity with fashion archives in the traditional sense – mammoth, often climate-controlled storerooms of antique garments managed by fashion houses in various states of anal-retentive organisation.
To her, “archive” is suffering the same fate as the word curation. If it once added a glaze of authority to an item, it has now been overused to the point of obsolescence.
“The implication is that you too could have an archive of iconic fashion, you know, historically and artistically significant fashion,” Steele said.
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In reality, as she said, “it can be a little bit confusing”.
It’s in the vintage market where you’ll encounter the term most abundantly – and inconsistently.
On the resale marketplace Grailed, a US$20,000 (approximately RM84,500) Raf Simons parka from 2005 is deemed “archival” by one seller, but another seller uses the term for a US$49 (RM208) Stussy T-shirt.
Vintage sellers treat “archive” as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once viewed obscenity: I know it when I see it.
Inside Garde Robe, a temperate-controlled storage space, where clients store their high-end garments, an archive in the traditional sense. People often refer to vintage fashion as archival. Photo: The New York TimesOften it’s a process of elimination. A 2010 Linkin Park tour tee? Not archive, said Cole Reagin, who owns Archive Reloaded, a web shop based in Torrance, California.
“That’s not even that old,” Reagin said.
It’s not that rare either. If this is the shirt that will complete your life, you can find one on eBay for US$35 (RM148) right now.
Reagin also said that he has seen some online dealers claiming that anything bought from a Japanese auction site is “archival”.
Where an item hails from, he said, does not determine its archive-ness.
So what does? Scott Santiago, senior manager of brand marketing at Grailed, offered that archival “denotes the importance of the design or of the era that it came from”.
That definition seems close to reality. Wade into the vintage waters online and truisms emerge.
Anything that ushered a fashion sea change – a Dior Homme shrunken suit or an original nylon Prada handbag from the aughts – earns the archive stamp.
As does a piece from a collection that fashion group think dictates was unimpeachably great.
See: the tattoo tops from Jean Paul Gaultier’s 1995 collection or just about anything from Martin Margiela’s tenure at Hermes. Consensus, though, is flimsy.
A 2001 Raf Simons camo bomber drenched in haphazard patches and worn by Drake and Ye (finally, something rappers agree on) is, was and always will be archival – one is available on Grailed for around US$50,000 (RM211,000).
But, would a T-shirt or pair of a pants from the same collection be archival?
That, Santiago said, is “in the eye of the beholder”.
Kerry Bonnell, the owner of Archive Vintage in Austin, Texas, offered a simpler definition: “When I would say collectible design, I think people are just saying archival now.”
When Bonnell founded her business in 2006, the term hadn’t yet washed over the vintage world.
For her, it was a way to distinguish her shop, specialising in museum-calibre luxury designs from the vast ocean of vintage sellers peddling stale suits and costumey dresses.
See: A skeleton-printed US$6,800 (RM28,700) Alexander McQueen minidress from 2009.
“Back then vintage sites were dusty, with wicker mannequins and pink backgrounds and lots of hats and gloves, like grandma stuff,” she said.
Resellers today are coming to Bonnell’s conclusion over and over again.
“Archive” is just shorthand for better than mere vintage. Sticking the word in a listing “will tell the right buyer where to look,” Santiago said.
In practice though, that means the word is used, and really abused, by advantageous resellers.
“It’s just trying to keep ahead of the algorithm,” Reagin said.
Grailed, for example, does not police what words sellers use in their listings, and resellers are free to describe items however they wish.
The upshot? There are currently more than 38,000 listings with the term on Grailed. If the term is elastic, it is perhaps nearing a breaking point.
“Just because something is really niche and maybe special doesn’t mean that it actually matters or it’s actually valuable,” said Luke Fracher, the owner of Luke’s, a clothing reseller in New York and Los Angeles.
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He finds himself in the camp that believes the term has been overused to the point that it no longer has any authority at all.
“It’s such a fluid, dynamic term that it means nothing,” he said.
And calling something “archival” doesn’t automatically make an item easier to sell.
An Hermes dress from 1999 may be covetable and oh-so-archival to certain collectors. But do they have $3,090 (RM13,000) to buy one off eBay right now? Not quite.
“The more niche something is, the harder it is to actually sell,” Fracher said.
Even if the term is overused, the “archive” onslaught exposes how shoppers today are hungry for something different, something scarce, something plainly rare.
“Any rich guy can go into, like, Louis Vuitton and spend $100,000, $300,000, and walk out looking just like a monogram,” Reagin said.
Yet buying a Louis Vuitton jacket from 20 years ago? That demonstrates, if not deeper fashion knowledge, then at least some crafty shopping skills.
“It can look a lot more cultured than just being a rich kid,” he said. – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
