Inside my £1,000 Shein haul”, “what to buy in the spring/summer Zara sale”. Keeping up with the latest “hot” new thing sweeping social media is an exhausting game. Thankfully, the new status symbol upends this throwaway cycle — rejecting meaningless, instantaneous consumption for mindful, educated and timeless purchases: archive fashion.
Traditionally the preserve of purists, connoisseurs and deep researchers, nowadays the average Gen Z shopper can decipher their Margiela Tabi boots from their Helmut Lang painter jeans. And while the hashtag #archivefashion has more than one billion views on TikTok, it’s far from just an online phenomenon, with new entrepreneurs opening stores in capital.
