Provided the red-carpet dress is from the archives

Just a few hours after the opening of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, which runs until 12 September at the Lido, the world of cinema’s wardrobe already seems to contain a microcosm of contemporary fashion history – not only because the red carpet has become one of the prime venues where fashion houses showcase themselves, but because, increasingly, what appears there hails from a bygone era, comprising garments that have been preserved, rediscovered, restored, reconstructed or reworked. Clothes – yes, of course – which have, however, already had a first life and are chosen to tell a second. The phenomenon is widespread enough to have changed the very meaning of the word ‘archive’. For a long time, a fashion house’s archive was regarded as a room of memory, a place intended for scholars, creative directors and industry insiders, containing photographs, pattern papers, fabric samples, documents, and garments bagged and catalogued. Today, however, it has become a sort of laboratory of the present, where one enters to seek out what has been, but above all to understand what might still be.

Fashion, after all, seems to have discovered a particular form of temporality, given that it moves forwards with the stride of someone who knows the way back very well. The trend is evident on the catwalks, where new creative directors are increasingly called upon to engage with the house’s heritage, and it is equally evident on the red carpets, where an archive dress is no longer a curiosity for connoisseurs but one of the most sophisticated forms of styling. In Cannes, for example, last spring, there was a great deal of sartorial nostalgia. Bella Hadid took to the Croisette in a wardrobe comprising archive pieces, including a Chantal Thomass suit from the Spring/Summer 1988 collection; on the red carpet, Louis Vuitton from 2003, Alexander Lee McQueen (previously worn by Cate Blanchett and Gisele Bündchen) and Ossie Clark made a comeback. The 2026 Met Gala was no exception. Hailey Bieber chose vintage Yves Saint Laurent couture, Carey Mulligan a 1997 Prada, Emma Chamberlain a Mugler from the spring of that same year, whilst Blake Lively arrived in a Spring 2006 Atelier Versace – a dress that had never been worn before and had remained in the fashion house’s archives for twenty years. The effect is truly intriguing, because the red carpet – the quintessential setting for spectacular contemporary fashion – has become a wall-less exhibition space featuring garments that have been worn and brought back to life. Vintage, in its broadest sense, belongs to the market and to personal taste, whilst the archive belongs to history. A vintage garment is an object from the past, whilst an archive piece is an object from the past whose provenance, collection, date and, often, the context in which it was created – along with its own genealogy – are known. The most exemplary case is that of Giorgio Armani. The fashion house’s archive has been aptly named ‘timeless’. It is not merely a storage facility, but a project to revive creative memory, encompassing more than fifty years of activity, over two hundred collections, 5,500 catalogued catwalk looks and more than 30,200 individual archived items which, taken together, form a sort of material dictionary of the Armani language. The very word ‘timeless’ also aptly describes the paradox of Armani fashion: the garments belong precisely to a particular era and yet, at the same time, seem to transcend chronology.

A jacket, a suit, a silhouette from the 1980s or 1990s can make a comeback today without appearing to be a costume from the past; these are items for which the date of origin ceases to be the defining feature. Whilst for Armani, therefore, the archive represents continuity, for other fashion houses it has become a lens through which to reinterpret their own identity. The case of Dior is particularly telling. The recent passing of Mathilde Favier, the long-serving head of public relations for Dior couture, has also brought to mind her deep connection with the fashion house’s history. Favier belonged to that particular category of people who, within a major fashion house, safeguard something more elusive than documents – such as the memory of codes, relationships, gestures and images. Jonathan Anderson’s debut as the house’s creative director, following Maria Grazia Chiuri, was, in this sense, almost archaeological. The Bar jacket, one of Dior’s great icons, returned to the centre of the collection through a reinterpretation of Monsieur Dior’s H-line. It is not merely a jacket, but a syntactic proposition characterised by its defined waist, shoulders, lapels, the relationship between the bodice and skirt, and the construction of the silhouette. The same applies to the A-line silhouettes and the entire system of proportions through which Dior had transformed the female body into a new architecture. Anderson did not have to invent a vocabulary, but simply reinterpreted it (in his own way), shifting the emphasis and determining which elements were still relevant. Work on the archive, when it reaches a certain standard, does not consist of staging the past, but of understanding which parts of the past are still capable of shaping the future. Balenciaga, too, is undergoing a similar phase under Pierpaolo Piccioli, who took over as creative director of the house in 2025 and has explicitly drawn on Cristóbal Balenciaga’s methodology, the relationship between body, fabric and form, and the physical lightness achieved through extraordinary sartorial discipline. The fashion house has described this work as a ‘recalibration’ of Cristóbal’s legacy – a term that is, to say the least, intriguing. To recalibrate means, in fact, to bring a measurement back into alignment with a new frame of reference. Balenciaga’s couture is not treated as a sacred image to be reproduced, but as a method that transforms the archives from mere repositories of forms back into repositories of thought. From this perspective, the work of stylists has also taken on a different character. The role of the archive consultant – increasingly present alongside celebrities and actresses – is not the same as that of a personal shopper. Their work is more akin to that of a researcher, an antiquarian, or sometimes (to exaggerate slightly) a detective, given that they must identify a collection from a single detail, know where to look for a specific garment, distinguish an original from a replica, trace the provenance of a dress, and track down pieces scattered amongst private collections, specialist boutiques and auctions. In short, it is a new form of erudition applied to fashion. ‘For an actress, wearing a dress from a specific Galliano, McQueen, Mugler or Margiela collection on the red carpet means incorporating into her image a wealth of information that a contemporary dress, however magnificent, often does not yet possess’, explains to Il Foglio della Moda a leading figure from a well-known Italian fashion house, who prefers to remain anonymous, ‘because we work and always remain behind the scenes’. “A garment carries with it the designer, the year, the fashion show, the historical moment, the photographs that made it famous, and the other people who have worn it; it is a caption embedded in the fabric. The red carpet thus becomes a form of fashion criticism expressed through the body,” they add. ‘In Venice, cinema and fashion now share the same obsession with memory, because both construct images destined to outlive their own time. The Festival itself dedicates the “Venezia Classici” section to the restoration and promotion of cinematic heritage. On the red carpet, this same logic can take the form of a rediscovered dress, a reference or a silhouette unearthed from a bygone season.’ After all, cinema, more than any other contemporary art form, has transformed the dress into memory. Think of Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Romy Schneider or Catherine Deneuve: many of the images we have retained of these women are inseparable from the clothes they wore. ‘When the fashion archive enters the world of cinema, it therefore returns to the place where the dress has historically acquired its ability to become an image,’ continues our insider. "Eva Herzigova's choice for her wedding in Turin offers an even more intimate take on the same story." To marry Gregorio Marsiaj, after twenty-five years together, the model chose a Lanvin archive gown from the Autumn–Winter 2020–2021 collection, designed by Bruno Sialelli: a flowing silhouette with a V-neck, a full skirt, ruffles and a light cape, chosen especially for her by stylist Anastasia Barbieri (if we’ve ever seen David Gandy half-naked, wearing nothing but a pair of white briefs, in a well-known perfume advert, it’s thanks to her). Hers was a gesture of great elegance precisely because it liberates the dress from the logic of a one-off occasion. That dress had already graced the catwalk; it belonged to a specific season and a specific chapter in Lanvin’s history, and now it has become part of a private story – one that is different and unique. Its value has not diminished because it was created years earlier; on the contrary, time has added a narrative dimension to it. A garment produced twenty years ago and perfectly preserved can possess something that a new product cannot: namely, a sense of distance. It has stood the test of time without wearing out through everyday use; it can be sought out, authenticated, studied and desired. Its scarcity is historical even before it is commercial. This is also the source of the success of archive consultants and of a parallel market that increasingly resembles the art market in terms of language and dynamics. The standout pieces from the most radical collections of the 1990s and 2000s – Margiela, McQueen, Raf Simons, Gaultier or Mugler – have become cult objects because they encapsulate a chapter of history in a tangible form. The collector is not merely buying a jacket, a dress or a handbag, but the opportunity to own an original page of that history. The phenomenon also has a decisive generational dimension. For those in their twenties today, the 1990s and early 2000s are not memories, but recent history. Nostalgia often belongs to those who did not experience what they long for. Images of old fashion shows, easily found online, have transformed collections once known only to a few specialists into global visual archives. A young person can thus discover, on a mobile phone screen, a collection from 1997 and regard it as contemporary in the most literal sense of the word, because they are seeing it for the first time. From this perspective, the archive is a time machine more complex than mere nostalgia, as it brings back into the present something that, for one generation, was already over and, for another, had not yet begun. The most interesting question remains, however: what does all this say about contemporary creativity? The answer cannot be merely reassuring. The extraordinary popularity of archives coincides with a period in which fashion seems to be struggling to produce silhouettes that are immediately recognisable as belonging to our decade. Shapes circulate rapidly, references overlap, and images are constantly recombined. Novelty tends to be a matter of proportion, styling, material and combination. The past has become a library open to all, but a library can be used in two ways: to repeat what is already known, or to formulate thoughts that did not previously exist. The difference lies in the quality of one’s perspective. A creative director who opens an archive to replicate a past success runs the risk of turning heritage into merchandising. Those who, on the other hand, explore it as a territory for research may find what the best-known images have left on the margins: techniques, proportions, materials, mistakes, obsessions or unfulfilled intuitions. The most fertile archive is not the one that offers the most famous answer, but the one that allows us to formulate a new question. This, perhaps, is why the great fashion houses are returning so insistently to their origins – not least because, in a fashion system that has become incredibly fast-paced, identity requires depth, and depth cannot be improvised. Dior embodies Dior, Balenciaga embodies Balenciaga, and Armani has embodied Armani for over fifty years. Heritage is not a photograph hanging on the wall, but a wealth of forms, ideas and gestures that can be brought back into circulation. In short, the past has once again become contemporary and – perhaps – the most accurate term is not even ‘revival’, because that looks back, whilst the archive looks in both directions, holding together what has been and what may yet happen. Contemporary fashion therefore seems to have stopped asking the archive merely for its memory; instead, it asks it for a language, and perhaps this is precisely its most sophisticated form of relevance: discovering that the new, sometimes, is not what we have never seen, but what we have finally learnt to see with different eyes.