Archival fashion is hard to get into
Archival fashion is really just style based on the styles that have already passed. You may have seen a resurgence of thrifters all over the internet in places like Tik-Tok, taking advantage of the cyclicality of fashion to purchase some great older pieces that have come back in style, at a significantly lower price. But archival fashion and thrifting have kind of shifted apart. Thrifting is more about getting items that are “in” now for a low price. Archival fashion is about reviving items that created the items that are “in” now, sort of.
Much like with sneakers, due to the platforms available and the ubiquity of scalpers, archival fashion has evolved into an aggressive search across the internet and thrift stores for the most expensive, rare and oldest pieces of designer fashion history. The most iconic of Dirk Bikkembergs, Dries van Noten, Raf Simons and Jean Paul Gaultier and so many other brands are being resold all over. Everything from the Raf Simons Riot Riot Riot bomber from their FW/01 collection, famously worn by Drake earlier this year in his Toosie Slide music video to pretty much Dior’s entire navigate collection from 2007 can be found somewhere online being bid after by an army of hungry Frank Ocean and Hedi Slimane fans.
And it is very difficult to get into and only getting more difficult for many reasons.
The real problem is the platforms — the websites and stores being used to find and purchase/sell these pieces. Ideally people would put their items onto a site, set a decent price that is perhaps a little more or a little less than the original MSRP and eventually they will get a sale. But it has become so much more complicated. All the sellers are in it for the money — and unfortunately all the buyers too. This is because they aren’t buyers but future sellers. When everyone can see that, for example, the Raf Simons x Peter Saville parkas are getting sold for prices of over $20,000, they will convince themselves that they need to sell it for the same, regardless of if that item is actually worth it, kickstarting the Veblenian demise of fashion resale as we know it.
Sites like Grailed are the worst for these copycat prices. Instead of it being a space where one man’s trash becomes another man’s treasure, everyone’s a one man clothing store trying to get as much cash as possible.
But then you have a tried and true site like eBay where users bid. That should be better right? Kind of. Sometimes the site is actually very good, but mostly for thrifting of regular old items — not archival fashion. Although the prices can be very good, it can be very difficult to even find items from some relatively popular archives and when they do appear they sell out very quickly, which is bound to happen even on dedicated sites like 404archives.
And it’s only getting harder to buy into because it’s such a recent development. The people who were doing this at the start are still doing it now and it’s growing. And more people getting into it introduces competition which might be good for the buyers, but something tells me it isn’t.
That’s because the problem isn’t really scalpers or buyers with bots, it’s just more good old fashioned capitalism. Even if you were rich enough to participate in the dick measuring contest that is archival fashion, you would still be drowned out by people with just as much money but way more motivation and desperation for the flex than you. We saw it happen with StockX and Goat. People want money more than anything. So, unless you plan on reselling eventually, if you want to get into archival fashion do so knowing that you are going to be spending a lot of money and there is about a zero percent chance of you getting it back.
