But unlike the people you find in the lineup outside Supreme or Palace, archival fashion collectors are more interested in the old rather than the new. Archive clothing is essentially the obsessiveness of stamp collecting, sneakerhead culture, or Pokemon cards but applied to fashion.
Strictly speaking, archival fashion is any piece of clothing taken from a designer’s past body of work, but in the last few years it has come to describe specific pieces from historically significant menswear collections. At its most obsessive, it means becoming an archivist of your favorite designer, researching, collecting and reselling their rarest pieces out of sheer love, and maybe a little bit of one-upmanship. At its most superficial, it’s owning an exceedingly rare piece of designer clothing to stunt in.
