The past as capital: how the fashion industry rediscovers archives
In her new work, Sofia Gnoli investigates how fashion houses are increasingly considering their creative heritage as a primary asset for the future. And not only for creative purposes
Long before Christie's and Sotheby's realised the potential of auctions of clothes and accessories by the great fashion brands a decade ago, in Milan - it was the year 2000 - Il Ponte organised the first auction dedicated to Yves Saint Laurent. Given the success of the category, the first fashion vintage department opened in 2010, when for all the other players in the sector, fashion was still something to be relegated to the decorative arts department along with tapestries and period costumes.
A year later, in 2011, by buying the stake held by Prada, Lvmh became the majority shareholder of Fendi, inaugurating a long series of acquisitions according to a formula destined to change fashion and its brands, tying them closely to finance and the need to become global generators of desire. A goal also to be achieved by making their past, often as glorious as it is dusty, a factor in sales growth, and identifying their heritage as a fabulous multiplier. In her new Archeology of Fashion Sofia Gnoli conducts a stratigraphic excavation that allows us to identify this peculiar relationship of fashion with its past, always suspended between creativity and business, in order to understand how it has become a crucial source of power for its future.
One of the most interesting cases in the rich and cultured volume is that of Christian Dior, who died just ten years after founding his maison, in 1957: some of his numerous successors have been the creative mind for a longer period, starting with John Galliano, who directed the atelier for 15 years. And they all faced the same dilemma: how to reconcile the elements that decreed Monsieur Dior's success with a personal vision, the flow of time and fashion's intrinsic, necessary tension towards novelty? It is no coincidence that Dior has become one of the brands that love museums and exhibitions the most: as early as 1988, the couturier's villa in Granville became the first museum dedicated to him.
But let us return to Lvmh: the year before, Bernard Arnault, still a real estate entrepreneur, had decided to invest in Dior, which he had taken over in 1984 when it was languishing, making it the original nucleus of his nascent luxury empire. It is no coincidence, according to Arnault, that 'innovation is most powerful when it springs from a preserved heritage', so a brand is all the more desirable when it is able to have the dignity conferred on it by its past recognised, which fuels its relevance in the present and makes its future more solid, moreover in an increasingly crowded industry.
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Gnoli also examines the case of Karl Lagerfeld: already committed to Fendi, in the early 1980s he signed the resurrection of Chanel, a fashion house that in his own words at the time was 'only worn by Parisian doctors' wives'. He took up Coco's original spirit in freedom, fluidity, irreverence even, but retrieving significant yet minor elements from the archive - the camellias, the pearls mixed with chains - making them emblems of his new Chanel as if they had always been.
