Archival fashion Is Elitism Repackaged
The biggest celebrity trend of 2025 was - Archival Fashion. And it most likely will be in 2026 as well. I live for celebs turning each red carpet into a battlefield to flaunt their fashion knowledge, plus connections by sourcing looks from the 20th Century. Niche-r the better.
Picture Credit - Getty Images, Instagram
Think of all the Hollywood powerhouses that have championed vintage fashion last year. And what do they all have in common?
1. They are all RICH AF with a legacy that would last generations to come. History is evident that legacy is built by standing out. By being inaccessible. By doing and having things that only you can do or have, or both!
At its core, archival fashion is about access. Access to rare garments, to private collections, to fashion houses that selectively open their vaults. Who gets that access? It's a no-brainer, it’s almost exclusively celebrities and influential stylists of celebrities whose bodies fit a narrow sample-size ideal. When history can be worn only by a select few, it stops being cultural preservation and becomes cultural hoarding.
There is also the facade of sustainability put up intentionally or unintentionally. Wearing archival is framed as environmentally responsible since “nothing new is produced.” It feels like a marketing gimmick to not be upfront and say, “I pulled this look from Chanel 1995 to let you know that you could never.” Wouldn’t these celebrities want to reconsider their entire lifestyles and carbon footprints if they truly cared about being “sustainable”?
2. They are considered to be tastemakers of our era. Archival fashion also reinforces fashion’s hierarchy of taste. It positions the past as something only the culturally initiated can decode and wear “correctly.”
Who decides what is worthy of preservation? Who decides which histories are visible and which remain forgotten? The archive, after all, is not neutral, it reflects power, wealth, and Western-centric narratives. There are plenty of instances where the crème de la crème of fashion were inspired by the East (Chanel’s Paris-Bombay collection, Jean Paul Gaultier Fall 2007 Couture Collection, Saint Laurent Fall 2004 Ready-to-Wear Collection and many more)
It is a fact that fashion doesn't work in isolation. It mirrors the zeitgeist it was made in. By bringing a look back from the past along with the clothes, you are bringing back everything that was happening during that time, you are bringing back the designer's whole life up until that point in time, and you are bringing back the people whose lives were touched and moved by that garment.
This situation reminds me of Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction theory, which says that the rich define “good taste” as per their whim and fancy, and they redefine it quite often to keep the not-so-rich from being able to catch on to it, making “taste” not just a personal choice but a social tool to reinforce class structure and hierarchy.
Picture Credit - Grammys, McQueen, Givenchy
3. They are all sample sizes. They can source looks from any famous designer’s archival piece and not worry about fitting into it. Anyone beyond size 4 would not be able to wear an archival runway piece, which makes you wonder if couture was made to measure, are there no archival pieces existing today that were made for bigger women or were the patrons all sample-sized women?
Fashion enthusiasts alike revere the garment to such an extent that any minor tweak to the piece is considered almost sacrilegious. Example when Kim Kardashian wore THE Marilyn Monroe “Happy Birthday President” dress for the Met Gala 2022 (some might argue that she not only made changes to the dress but also damaged it, and it didn’t even look flattering on her)
Doesn’t it make you wonder if the garment stops being about why the designer made it, the concept and idea behind it, was it derived from somewhere, was it an homage to a person/place? And it just becomes about the year it was made in, as long as it starts with “19.”
Because if it were genuinely about the idea of the ensemble, then it could be made for different body types, from bigger sizes to differently abled. Or is the idea of the garment so narrow that it can only be communicated by a size 2 model?
Let’s see what the next status symbol would be for the elites to flaunt.
