How Fashion Archives Preserve Luxury Brands' Legacy and Inspire Future Collections
Today more than ever, luxury fashion brands use archives to honor their heritage while inspiring modern designs. Learn how Chloé, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and others preserve their cultural legacies.
During the startup phase of fashion labels, preserving pieces was not always top-of-mind. But as fashion has evolved and brands along with it, cementing a legacy by preserving and referencing the past has become essential. Today, celebrities increasingly wear archival pieces to events and on the red carpet, to the point that it has become commonplace. For example, Zendaya wore the iconic Fall/Winter 1995 Mugler robot suit to a premiere of Dune: Part Two earlier this year, and for the Grammys in February, Olivia Rodrigo chose a Spring/Summer 1995 Versace gown famously modeled by Linda Evangelista on the runway. Brands with storied histories and newer brands alike now maintain archives to gather and preserve their individual aesthetic and cultural heritages.
For many designers and creative directors, an archive serves as inspiration to innovate as well as a way to honor a brand's legacy. Upon her arrival at Chloé, Chemena Kamali examined the brand’s archive, with a particular eye on Karl Lagerfeld’s creations of the late 1970s. Created in 2011 for the "Chloé Attitudes" exhibition organized at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris the following year, the archive is enriched with contemporary garments as well as auctioned vintage pieces and donations. At Balenciaga, an internal team deals not only with acquiring clothes and accessories of the house, but it also holds documents, sculptures, and furniture. For the brand, these pieces are also considered important because each object tells a story and allows a better understanding of the techniques used by Cristóbal Balenciaga himself.
“The archives have always played an essential role in the heart of our maison,” explains Olivier Bialobos, Deputy Managing Director in charge of Global Communication and Image at Dior. Creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri found key inspiration for her ready-to-wear looks [for] Fall/Winter 2024-2025 looks in archival pieces from 1967. For Fausto Puglisi, creative director of Roberto Cavalli, the archive starts as a learning tool.
“I always like to look to the future, but the beauty of having an archive is that it allows you to know lesser-known aspects of the founder’s creativity,” says Puglisi. “For example, the garments designed in the early 1970s when Roberto was touring Saint-Tropez, and presenting his idea of denim with cut diamonds mixed with a personal reinterpretation of Tuscan brocades.” Cavalli’s archive is located in Milan and there is also a digital archive.
As archives have not always been a priority for brands, some of the most renowned names in fashion are still on the hunt for pieces of collections past. In Los Angeles, Italian collector Maurizio Donadi has been searching for vintage clothes for two decades.
“In the past, archives were often poorly organized. Now, there is much more care in cataloging,” Donadi says. “My job is as a consultant mainly for creativity, but I am also commissioned by companies that want to recover their pieces. I have a network of specialized people between America, Asia, Europe, and Africa, although the best way is to follow the garbage. There you can find fine clothing. It’s all about understanding the journey of the garbage, intercepting the discarded pieces locally and doing careful authentication work.”
“In the past, archives were often poorly organized; now there is much more care in cataloging.”
The Max Mara archive in the province of Reggio Emilia was born spontaneously from the mind of Fashion Coordinator Laura Lusuardi, and has been structured as BAI Max Mara-Corporate Archive and Library project since 2003. “In the archive many souls coexist, the Max Mara models from the 1950s to today, with sketches of all collections and vintage items purchased around the world during my many research trips,” Lusuardi says.
Likewise, Gucci’s archive is its beating heart. Founded in the late 1990s under the creative direction of Tom Ford, it has been based in Florence since 2021, where a team deals with research and acquisitions and facilitates conversations between the present and the past.
At Louis Vuitton, the past is essential to the house’s present and future. This year marks the tenth anniversary of Petite Malle, the first bag created by Nicolas Ghesquière when he debuted as creative director for womenswear. To develop it, Ghesquière made an in-depth study of the historic trunks preserved by the label, especially for the 2014 model, which was inspired by a late 1800s trunk that had been specially ordered by British conductor Leopold Stokowski.
“The only way to find ideas is to look at what has been done in the past,” said the late Vivienne Westwood. Westwood’s spirit still animates the work of her brand’s heritage team today, led by her husband Andreas Kronthaler. The Westwood archive is a pillar of the brand’s London DNA, and the team works closely with historians, collectors, museums, and cultural institutions to verify the authenticity of found items and to maintain a high level of accuracy.
Some houses are equally committed to the spaces that house their archives. Armani/Silos, a space established by Giorgio Armani in Milan for exhibition and the public, provided an opportunity to reconstruct the early years of the brand, which was born in 1975, when archiving was not a familiar practice. The Ferragamo Museum in Florence, where visitors can admire the brand’s rich archive, has a different origin. “Ferragamo’s genius has come to us thanks to his wife Wanda and his children, who have worked hard to preserve what Salvatore left behind after his death in 1960,” museum director Stefania Ricci says. “Now, it is clear to everyone that fashion is not only an economic subject, but also a cultural phenomenon. Sometimes we receive donations, but more often our team goes hunting for interesting pieces at various auctions. Today, we are looking for pieces from Salvatore’s Hollywood period.” A pair of Ferragamo pumps belonging to Princess Diana of Wales were bought at auction for $130,000, but the competition is fierce as pure collectors come into play.
“Now, it is clear to everyone that fashion is not only an economic subject, but also a cultural phenomenon.”
Italian designer Alberta Ferretti has thoughtfully built the archive of her brand. “I have always been very careful to preserve especially those special pieces that marked important milestones in my career as a designer and entrepreneur,” she says. “It is important to stop and take the time to archive, not only because it tells the evolution of a brand, but also because it reflects the changes that occur within the company. I try to look at contemporary [inspiration] when I design my collections, but the archive is a great starting point when I create clothes for celebrities. For the costumes of Taylor Swift, for example, we started from archival clothes, adapting them to her young woman’s sensitivity and performance needs.”
Prada, meanwhile, is constantly looking forward, and Creative Co-Directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons look to the past only on rare occasions (the Spring/Summer 2025 collection that debuted in September was one of those special moments). However, the protection of its cultural heritage is fundamental for the brand. Over the years, the group has dedicated some spaces at its offices in Milan and Valvigna to its historical archives, where clothing, footwear, and leather goods are stored. All this is complemented by activities aimed at the public, such as the exhibition Pradasphere II, held in 2023 at the Start Museum in Shanghai, where key pieces of the archive from 1913 to more recent collections were exhibited, repeating the success of the first edition that took place in 2014 in London and Hong Kong.
Unlike other houses, Fendi has always had a habit of keeping its most iconic pieces. The heritage team is fully involved in new acquisitions across all product categories, because only the experience within the brand allows them to recognize the authenticity of products and link them to a particular production or historical period. Current collections follow a strict process: once their life cycle in stores is over, a group of pieces are selected to enter the archive.
Etro founder Gerolamo Etro always valued collecting various objects, a passion shared by his children and admired by current Creative Director Marco De Vincenzo. On the top floor of the Milan headquarters are rooms full of books and fabrics(the oldest dates back to 1400), while at their location Fino Mornasco, Etro keeps thousands of pieces dating from 1968, the year the brand was founded. The pieces come mainly from auctions and from the acquisition of entire collections and archives of internationally located textile companies. In recent years, the archive team has been focusing on the search for vintage items to be mixed with the heritage of the brand.
In a world battling climate change and the rise of fast fashion, the significance of archives also ties to the concept of sustainability: something old can be made new again as trends come and go within a matter of weeks. Diving deeper into the archives also allows fashion houses old and new to inform their present, allowing for forward-thinking quality pieces and practices in the future.
