Fashion and communication often merge, blend and clash as part of a conversation that, hungry for novelty, realises its raison d’être1 in the continuous production of content and in the relentless exploration of content to communicate. But it is not easy today to clearly define the boundaries of fashion communication, which, thanks to or due to its mediatisation,2 has changed considerably in recent years, increasingly encouraging new communication methods and tools and broadening the contents to be communicated. Indeed, if until recently, the focus of fashion communication was the product, the new collection or even the designer’s or entrepreneur’s point of view, today we could say that everything around fashion is communication, and every opportunity is good to echo the brand’s image from different points of view. Communication is, therefore, necessarily increasingly conceived according to editorial logics, building around the brand a palimpsest capable of using different scales, types and moments of communication to present, but above all constantly re-present, to the general public, the brand, its identity, its presence on the market and also its history. In this context, the history of the brand and, above all, the company archive is increasingly evolving and becoming an inexhaustible source for the construction of a corporate heritage narrative, also becoming a communication tool that takes on multiple forms poised between market and staging, between cultural event and media event. While the archive maintains its role as a creative stimulus and represents an integral part of the corporate identity and an inexhaustible source for the creative process,3 it is also increasingly becoming an integral part of corporate communication. On the one hand, more and more companies have enhanced their corporate heritage in different forms by creating corporate institutions. However, by producing exhibitions — which have also become travelling events to promote new collections — creating ‘spaces’ within institutional sites or flagship stores dedicated to the presentation and enhancement of the brand’s heritage and history, this article explores whether even typical commercial or present-day communication tools such as fashion shows and their pervasiveness through social channels4 could represent today a hybrid form of valorisation of the brand’s heritage and archive, and could represent one of the multiplicity ways in which a company can promote various aspects of their culture.5 The archive thus becomes one of the elements of a communication abacus that includes not only exhibitions and publications but also, among other things, digital communication, events and their communication and, last but not least, fashion shows.
Apart from sites such as www.tag-walk.com (which, however, has a time span starting in 2016), voguerunway.com (among the richest with images starting in 1988), which constitutes a sort of online archive in editorial form only and exclusively of collection presentations (whether fashion shows or commercial presentations), corporate sites often become a channel for consumers and clients to discover and deepen their knowledge about the brand in all its nuances. Even if, in most cases, the ‘about us’, ‘history’, ‘world of’ or ‘maison’ sections, depending on the nomenclature used, introduce the customer to the corporate world through brief or limited selections of information and collections, there is no lack of realities which, on the contrary, have made and continue to make the sharing of the archive a strong point of corporate communication. Therefore, the archive becomes a tool for establishing brand awareness and explaining the company’s identity, as was the case, for example, until 2015 for Marni. The brand, founded by Consuelo and Gianni Castiglioni, in fact, far from using traditional methods of communication, designed its corporate website, giving a lot of space to the narration of the brand’s history and all the collections. A form of sharing that, in the absence of advertising campaigns and major events, allowed the company to explain and show the brand’s identity, evolution and history. Marni used its site as a digital archive not only intended for use by the general public but also by the company’s in-house teams, thus at the same time both as a working tool and as a communication tool, allowing users to navigate through the site to discover the brand’s entire creative journey and its evolution, from the fur experiments of the first collections to the most recent fashion shows, collaborations with artists, exhibition projects and events. In this sense, everything becomes a piece of the company’s narrative. The online archives collect and preserve the brand’s historical memory and communicate, educate and involve the consumer, whether established or neophyte. In this sense, the Prada Group is one of the companies most emphasising and sharing a significant part of its history and archives. In fact, the group enhances its history for both Prada and Miu Miu by offering an exhaustive archive section within the sites of the two brands, the Pradasphere and the Miu Miu Club, respectively. Sections that open and make accessible the archive of all the collections but also of events, advertising campaigns, collaborations, exhibitions, fashion show sets and everything that has contributed to creating the brand’s identity till today. Digital is an open window on the history of the brand, thus allowing anyone to build their own independent knowledge of the company and its evolution. The archive communicated, therefore, as a common tool to improve brand equity, thus critically contributing to the credibility of a company and its brand.6
But alongside these forms of valorisation of the archive and the company’s history, in recent years, new modes of communication have been developing, using in a form that we could define as postmodern communication,7 the old and the new in the same place and at the same time, presented as elements of the company’s very contemporaneity. The archive is part of the contemporaneity of the company made not only of cross-references and re-elaborations but also in a mode of true resumption and re-proposition sic et simpliciter.
Thus, for example, since the early 2000s, even the red carpets — usually a moment of communication of the contemporary — have evolved into ideal catwalks where new and archive clothes can be worn simultaneously, not only opening up the concept of vintage from a niche to the mass market but also providing a new point of view on the company’s history and archive. The beginning of this “revival” practice can be dated back to 2001, when Julia Roberts won the Oscar for “Best Actress” and “scandalised” by wearing a Valentino dress from the Autumn/Winter 1992 haute couture collection to the ceremony, thus defining a watershed moment for vintage and have helping to encourage the move towards vintage fashion by wearing vintage attire to red carpet events.8 The red carpet has thus, over time, consolidated itself as a communicative battleground, where more and more brands have begun competing for actresses to wear not only the latest styles but, at the same time, historical archive garments. And if Julia Roberts’ vintage Valentino was a styling choice, more and more archive garments are being directly supplied, if not recreated, by companies that thus bring both their history and the present to the red carpets. It so happens, for example, that on the red carpet of Cannes in 2022, Bella Hadid wore the iconic white Gucci by Tom Ford dress from Autumn/Winter 1996 collection while Måneskin, Olivia DeJonge, Rebecca Hall, Alessandro Borghi wore the recent creations by Alessandro Michele for the Florentine brand. Or even consider Zendaya in 2024, who was dressed Mugler during the presentation events of the second chapter of Dune, where she wore both the history of the brand — the iconic robotic dress created by Thierry Mugler for the Autumn/Winter 1995 collection — and its present — with a creation designed by Casey Cadwallader for the Mugler pre-Fall 2024 collection. More and more archives and current garments are thus mixed, allowing brands to celebrate both the past and the present simultaneously. And so it happens that the past increasingly enters the present as a premise, and each decade flirts with vintage recreations, implementing not only a process of reconstitution, re-examination and revelation of the past9 but of true creative mash-up10 where history and the contemporary blend seamlessly.
In this complex communicative landscape, where past and present, different forms and tools overlap, from corporate ones to those typical of publishing to the pervasiveness of social media, fashion shows also take on an increasingly central role, as the end point of the creative process and the starting point of the communication machine, but also as a topical moment that allows, even in the short time of the event — rarely longer than fifteen minutes — to catalyse the interest of both the public in attendance and the public at a distance through the various social channels. Fashion shows — where aesthetic, semantic, expressive, communicative, theatrical, technological and, last but not least, emotional11 elements are integrated — become complex and multifaceted forms of communication that work not only on different times and places, but also become tools to present new collections, but increasingly also to enhance and stage corporate fashion history and archives.
Thus, Fashion shows also become ephemeral exhibitions where the brand heritage overlaps with new collections or even substitutes new product presentations.
They are unique and unrepeatable acts12 that transcend the mere presentation of the product and contribute to the cultural value of clothes, which are transformed from functional artifacts into fashion. They also fulfill many other functions, such as communication and culture, by staging the design process.13 The fashion show is a “cognitive bricolage”14 that goes beyond its commercial function and increasingly aims at intellectual and aesthetic appeal. In this context, the boundary between fashion market and fashion culture is becoming increasingly thinner,15 just as the figures of Creative Director, Art Director, Stylist, Fashion Designer and Curator are becoming more and more indefinite, figures that are often condensed into a single person or even separated into project teams, capable of creating narratives and performances that make the fashion show not only a commercial or communication moment but also in a certain sense educational and cultural.
Educational when pieces of fashion history are shown on the catwalk (sometimes reinterpreted and sometimes in their original form), cultural when the re-presentation and styling choices become actions similar to those of a curator who studies, selects, combines and creates narratives capable of stimulating curiosity and astonishment in the public through live, unrepeatable events that are not always completely transferable because ‘the physicality of what happened continues to be fundamental and the presence, and therefore the recording that all the senses make of the live event remains irreplaceable.16 Fashion shows as a unique act between market, fashion, performing art and cultural events echo in the contemporary society of images, the mediatisation of fashion,17 the new possibilities of communication and the continuous streaming and sharing of information through the many tools available to us. It thus happens that fashion shows, the places chosen for their staging, set design, direction, choreography, and, last but not least, style choices are consolidated in the communicative panorama of fashion as central elements of the design process, giving shape to that possibility of communicating an increasingly captivating image, not only of innovation and creativity but also linked to the history and cultural enhancement of the archive and corporate heritage through ’commercial art performances’, where tickets are free but almost everything on stage is for sale.18
More and more, then, in the runway show, clothes often transcend their physicality in favour of performances designed to establish an immediate and multi-sensory dialogue between the designer/brand and the audience, going beyond the merely commercial nature and becoming more like particular forms of art19 capable of posing a set of questions on how fashion can relate to people and more generally to society,20 history and the present. If artists such as Robert Kushner took over the language of the catwalk for their own performances — just think of the happenings Robert Kushner and Friends Eat Their Clothes in 1972 or Persian Line I in 1975, where models and models tended to parade around naked, barely covered in food or antique fabrics —, more and more often fashion is appropriating not only on the catwalk but also the most varied and varied forms of expression: events are designed to “catch the eye and appeal to the senses”,21 during which the product comes to life in the form of a spectacle, and it is not always easy to understand whether the idea of the collection or its staging came first. Fashion shows are increasingly becoming temporary forms of exhibits, in contrast to traditional fashion exhibitions with clothes displayed on static mannequins, protected by glass and bound by conservation restrictions. In this new perspective, projects such as Fashion in Motion by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London become particularly interesting. Over several years, the London Museum has organized a series of exhibitions in the form of fashion shows that, from 1999 to 2022, have seen Philip Treacy, Alexander McQueen, Missoni, Christian Lacroix, Gareth Pugh, Ma Ke, Roksanda Ilincic, Yohji Yamamoto, Meadham Kirchoff, Ralph and Russo, Sibling, Grace Wales Bonner and Harris Reed exhibiting their work, not just through films and photographs, but with models moving within the museum space. These are, therefore, extremely temporary exhibitions that take place only once and are archived in videos accessible online. These forms of cultural event exhibitions increasingly leave the institutional spaces of museums and transform the catwalks of fashion shows into temporary museum and art spaces, where history and corporate archives come to life. A fusion between art and fashion is increasingly realized through spaces normally intended for art, as containers for fashion shows, but above all, through elaborate forms of staging that define fashion’s appropriation of the meanings and landscapes of art.22 The fashion show is thus consolidating itself as an autonomous discipline,23 as a communicative system articulated on multiple narratives, which seamlessly selects, manages and amalgamates different spheres and contents:24 art, architectural design, retail experience, cinema, photography, performing art, set design, branding, new technologies and is also increasingly linked to the concepts of the exhibit, heritage marketing and curatorship.
Indeed, exhibition, curatorial practices and heritage marketing seem today to be areas that, in various ways, enter into the contemporary world of fashion shows and their communication actions. Actions that are difficult to classify within a single category work on different communicative levels. Thus, it happens that fashion shows become a tool not only to describe the present day of a brand or a designer but also to show pieces of history, sometimes punctual, sometimes part of a more complex and articulated discourse where, even in the short-form nature of a fashion show, they build narrative paths that follow the same logic as a museum tour. Exhibitions in the form of a fashion show, which persisted over the long term, no longer in the form of an exhibition catalogue but in the digital form of videos or photos within the institutional websites of brands or sector magazines, as well as in the personal memory and shared through the social networks of the public present at the event.
While some forms of corporate heritage communication are now well established, fashion shows as a cultural tool, in a way, still represent a relatively recent field of new ways of sharing brand history. In a certain sense, the vocabulary for fashion curatorship is broadened, which is no longer limited to that critical practice involving the study and presentation of fashion through artifacts, traditionally in museum settings, as well as their care and preservation but which sees in the brevity of the fashion show event a further field of communication and a possibility of communication. The archive is no longer just a place to preserve and display the heritage, it also becomes an active part25 of the creative process and various communication actions. The archive, therefore, is a stimulus not only for the development of narratives that take shape in traditional or institutional exhibitions but also as a stimulus for the development of educational policies (e.g. in training courses) of research and dissemination (commissions of monographs and corporate publications),26 and, increasingly, as a form of entertainment and communication through its ramification onto the catwalks.
Paraphrasing Danilov,27 catwalk shows also become a form of staging tangible objects and/or intangible elements, shown on a catwalk similar to a museum gallery in motion, capable of communicating the present and history. The catwalk, therefore, is a dynamic museum gallery where the audience stays still, and the contents, themes, and stories move between changes of light or scene, borrowing narrative modes typical of the concept of an exhibition, sometimes creating chronological storytelling, sometimes creating object conversations, sometimes defining the exits according to themes or creating constellations of products and narratives.28
Trying to classify these different ways of staging the archive in the form of a fashion show, we could define three strategies or ways of staging the corporate archive: the archive/fashion show as a moving exhibition, the archive/fashion show as a performative act, and the archive/fashion show as a replay and holographic re-presentation of history.
The Archive/Fashion Show as a Moving Exhibition
Although the archive’s presence on the catwalks is a relatively recent practice, mainly concentrated in the last two decades, there is no lack of examples of exhibitions in the form of a fashion show, where the selection of garments becomes more similar to a curatorial action than to styling, and where the sequence of the exits and the movements on the catwalk are studied with the same care and attention as the set-up of an exhibition in a museum. The fashion show is a celebration event that takes different forms, such as those implemented, for example, by Antonio Marras for the celebration of Kenzo’s fortieth anniversary or by Olivier Rousteing for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Maison Balmain.
Among the many designers who have also defined their design poetics through highly theatrical and engaging fashion shows, Antonio Marras “always chooses, for his fashion shows, the paradigm of narration, as if the collection were a script for a film of which he is the director”.29 And Marras also becomes a curator when he transforms the fashion show into a sort of short-form exhibition.30 This happened, for example, on the circular catwalk set up in October 2010 inside the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, transformed into a museum gallery, used not only as a stage for the presentation of the brand’s latest collection but also as a space for the celebration of history.
And so, on the occasion of the Spring/Summer 2010 fashion show, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Kenzo (the brand for which Marras was creative director from 2003 to 2011), Antonio Marras transformed the finale of the fashion show into a form of spectacle halfway between artistic performance and a celebrative exhibition. Once the presentation of the contemporary collection is ended, a slow succession of models walks on the rotating circular platform, wearing layers and layers of fabrics and clothes from the archives. Forty models-totems, one for each year of the brand, slowly take their place on the stage, following a precise sequence of shapes and colours to give life to a (very) temporary exhibition of the Maison founded by Kenzo Tanaka, where we move from the narration of colour themes and prints to the purity of black and white, a sort of travel diary (both in the history and in the geographies of the brand) of fashion that ends with the models in the new collection parading around the history of the brand to visually seal the relationship between past and present.
In a different form but following the same curatorial approach, Olivier Rousteing also worked for the celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Maison Balmain. In this case, due to the restrictions caused by the pandemic, the autumn/winter 2021 haute couture fashion show was staged on a boat on the Seine, transforming the river into an open-air catwalk, on which Olivier Rousteing organized an event/show/concert called Balmain’s Sur Seine. It was an event that lasted about two hours, during which the Balmain crew got on board a boat to move from the Eiffel Tower to the east, stopping for a performance by French pop singer Yseult and 50 dancers choreographed by Jean-Charles Jousni, along the Pont des Arts pedestrian bridge, before going around Île Saint Louis and back to the starting point. The twenty-one models on the boat formed a fashion show/exhibition where, alongside contemporary models, thirteen pieces from the company’s archives were also represented, signed not only by Pierre Balmain but also by the various creative directors who have led the fashion house over the years, from Erik Mortensen to Oscar de la Renta (Fig. 1). Associated with the hashtag #balmainsursaine, the fashion show was not only seen live by Parisians and tourists along the route along the Seine but was also the first event broadcast on the brand’s TikTok channel, an event conceived to be as inclusive as possible, especially considering the period characterised by pandemic restrictions, but also to show the evolution of the brand and the world through the clothes, which dialogue between the past and the present.
The Archive/Fashion Show as a Performative Act
Alongside forms that, although in the novelty of the action, we could define as classic celebrations, we also witness extremely spectacular forms of staging the archive in the form of true performances, where not only the curatorial action becomes important but also art direction, direction, and script play an important role in the construction of an effective narrative.
Soon after the event, Balmain’s Sur Seine, again Olivier Rousteing, celebrates his ten years at the helm of Balmain in a spectacular and spectacularized form of his own creative journey chez Balmain. It so happened that on 29 September 2021, not only a fashion show was organized, but a real festival, called Balmain Festival V02, staged in the spaces of La Seine Musicale, the concert hall on Île Seguin in the western suburbs of Paris. The fashion show was one of the event’s highlights, including a live concert by Franz Ferdinand, Doja Cat and Jesse Jo Stark. However, the presentation of the new collection was only the prelude to the finale show during which supermodels of all eras, from Naomi Campbell, Milla Jovovich, Cindy Bruna, Karen Elson, Liu Wen, Adut Akech, Mariacarla Boscono and Carla Bruni (re)walked the catwalk through the last ten years of the brand, wearing the iconic pieces created by Olivier Rousteing for Balmain.
The fashion show and the archive, as part of an event, as an excuse to create narratives that borrow actions and modalities from the show. This is also the case, for example, with Jean-Paul Gaultier, who makes divertissement but also paradoxically parodies typical elements of his fashion presentations, using the catwalks to tell a story, invent a situation and present a state of mind.31 His fashion shows have always been off-the-charts events, such as the laundry made for Autumn/Winter 2002, the fashion show of mannequins and models for Autumn/Winter 2004, the fashion show in the boxing ring, complete with a match for the Autumn/Winter 2010 men’s collection or the ‘France Got Talents’ show for Spring/Summer 2014. Spectacular events that he did not abandon even for his last fashion show, the closing one for his ready-to-wear line, the Spring/Summer 2015 collection. For this event, Gaultier chose to offer his audience not a fashion show but a real show. An event designed not so much to present the latest collection, both in terms of season and production, but more to share over forty years of career and creations. The event was held at the Grand Rex, a cinema in the second arrondissement of Paris. The air was not that of an end but of a première, with the streets around the cinema blocked by traffic and with a long queue at the entrance. The event was entitled Élection de Miss Jean-Paul Gaultier 2015 and was set up according to the classic canons of a TV broadcast for a beauty contest. The stage was set with a staircase for the aspiring misses and a catwalk that entered the auditorium. The evening was hosted by British showman Alex Taylor and Rossy de Palma who paid tribute to Madame de Fontenay, former president of the Miss France committee, and to her black and white looks and hats. The show got off to a classic start with nine categories, each presenting a part of the collection and, at the same time, showcasing a piece of Gaultier’s history and archive. Nine themes dear to the Parisian creative, organised as if they were museum room themes. Thus, we find a sequence of scenes that include Miss Marinière, Miss Hommage à Madame de Palmay, Miss Tour de France, Miss Meteo, Miss Femme de Footballeur, Miss Vintage (with elderly ladies striding along accompanied by busty bare-chested models), Miss Smoking (a tribute to the Maison’s iconic product), Miss Lucha Libre, right up to Miss Rédactrice du Mode where caricatures of the most important, iconic and powerful fashion editors parade à-la-Gaultier. Suzy Menkes writes in her report on the show: “My fellow fashion editors and I were all mocked/honoured on the catwalk: Grace Coddington with her red curls, Carine Roitfeld with her sculpted cheekbones, the rock-chic of French ‘Vogue’ editor Emmanuelle Alt, and Franca Sozzani, editor of ‘Vogue Italia’, with her mass of Botticellian blonde curls. I considered it a great compliment from a great stylist that my topknot hairstyle made it to the stage.”32 The event closed with the awarding of the Miss Sash and crown by a real Miss France, Chloé Mortaud, winner of the title in 2009. Of the two finalists, models Anna Cleveland and Coco Rocha, the winner of the prize was Coco Rocha, who had faked a fainting spell live on air: the event ended with Gaultier arriving on stage under a silver confetti rain, inviting all the models, and the audience in the theatre to dance, just as was his style (Fig. 2).
The Archive/Fashion Show as a Product Replay
Unlike the spectacularisation of the fashion show, we also find approaches that make the product the centrality of the narrative, by re-proposing products on the catwalk in their original form, not only to celebrate history but also to demonstrate in a certain sense the timelessness of certain creations and their being extremely contemporary, regardless of their date of creation.
Viktor & Rolf, for example, have been realizing their concept of a total work of art since the beginning of their careers through collections and fashion shows in which the performance becomes a dress, and the dress becomes a performative act, giving life to a personal vision of fashion through what we might call meta-dresses in the form of fashion show-events33 during which the two designers often become protagonists, creators of the construction of the dress and the collection. They revamped twenty-five looks from previous collections for the Autumn/Winter 2018 couture season, one for each year to celebrate their 25 years together as designer artists. It is a revival that does not follow a chronological sequence, creating a non-linear journey but made consistent by a clear a-chromatic choice: all twenty-five looks were recreated in different shades of white. The show opened with a garment from the spring 1999 ‘Blacklight’ collection. It ended with a re-edition of the famous final layer from the Autumn/Winter 1999 Russian Doll collection of Parisian haute couture, their consecration as enfants prodiges of late 20th-century fashion.
If Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren made themselves curators, Stefano Dolce and Domenico Gabbana for the Spring/Summer 2023 season celebrated themselves in the form of a fashion show but collaborating with an exceptional ‘curator’: Kim Kardashian. The American celebrity has, in fact, acted as curator for the occasion and has selected pieces from the brand’s archive from the 1987 to 2007 fashion shows. A “vintage” fashion show during which corsets, ruffle dresses and lingerie outfits beloved by the two creatives were again on the catwalk. These garments were slightly reworked for the present day, but in a subtle way, so that the connections between the era and the present were evident enough for the social media audience, where much of the communication of the fashion show takes place in the contemporary. Each garment displayed labels sewn to the sides or wrists identifying the year they were first presented (Fig. 3). A high-impact communicative action, where Kim Kardashian’s media power allowed a major media bounce, which the mere re-presentation of the garments would not have had. An extremely strategic and mediatic way of using the archive and, above all, the curator’s choice, which, as Obrist’s lesson teaches,34 often becomes more important than the exhibition’s content or the fashion show, as in this case.
The Archive/Fashion Show as a Set Replay
In this game of re-propositions, replicas or revivals, the product alone is not always enough, but the communication or even the memory of the fashion shows, the communication and the history of fashion becomes central. If Prada, in 2011, used the archive and stock of the sets of the fashion shows created by OMA, as material for an artistic display (curated by the Belgian collective Rotor) at the Prada Foundation, there are, however, no lack of examples where the re-proposition or reconstruction of the sets and spaces of the ateliers and fashion shows becomes central in the creation of the narrative of a fashion show. So, for example, for his farewell to Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs does not re-present his own history within the Parisian Maison, re-proposing his creations, but synthesizing the most spectacular sets of the fashion shows. The fashion show of the Spring/Summer 2014 collection was in black, where not only the garments but the whole space was monochrome, covered by a black patina, which covered all the surfaces of the space and all the elements of the set design, which, on closer look, were re-propositions of many of the sets of the fashion shows created during his sixteen years at the LVMH-owned Maison. And so the models walk through the history of Marc Jacobs’ fashion shows for Vuitton, from the lifts of Autumn/Winter 2011 to the escalators of Spring/Summer 2013, from the carousel of Spring/Summer 2012 to the fountain of Autumn/Winter 2010, to the hotel corridors of Autumn/Winter 2013, all black sets re-proposed to remind us of the designer’s extraordinary skill. The importance of space becomes maniacal for Demna Gvasalia, who, for her first couture show for Balenciaga, Autumn/Winter 2021, not only studied the couture archive of the Maison but maniacally worked to bring Balenciaga’s haute couture back to the spaces where it was presented, yet not a revamped version, but rather its last version, the one that appeared in the archive photos taken shortly before the closing of the Maison. The salons on Avenue George V, where the brand had always shown its shows, were reopened for the occasion. Here, they did an operation of historical fake: the rooms had been put to a different use, and the designer wanted them to be restored to the exact same state as when they were closed in 1968, to the point of reproducing damp stains on the wall, which were not there, and the white curtains yellowed at that precise stage, based on period photos thanks to the work of a great set designer (Fig. 4).35 Historicized spaces stopped in 1968 that served as the backdrop for a collection in which the creative Georgian was able to synthesise, or rather, amalgamate, the archive and the new course of the Parisian Maison, aware of the fact that nowadays we cannot erase one from the other. Everything could exist simultaneously, looking to the future and the past to understand where we are going.
The Archive/Fashion Show as Stage Replay
Archive replicas, not only as a re-proposition of garments and places, but also as a re-proposition of staging and visual and photographic imagery. According to this approach, it so happens that Demna Gvasalia opens the Balenciaga Couture Autumn 2023 fashion show with a replica of a Cristóbal Balenciaga haute couture dress in black velvet that is not only re-proposed on the catwalk as a product but is worn by Danielle Slavik the same model who wore it during the original presentation for Balenciaga himself. In this mode of replication, it is also interesting to see how even the spaces and sets of the fashion shows have become so important and iconic that they have become part of a fashion house’s narrative, history and visual archive. Even Donatella Versace, while defining her own personal creative path at the helm of the Medusa fashion house, often re-proposed not only the iconic themes, volumes and prints created by Gianni but also the same fashion shows as her brother, who created very Versace style of fashion show in the Nineties. It was the time when the supermodel phenomenon was consolidated: Claudia Schiffer, Helena Christensen, Karen Mulder, Yasmeen Ghauri, Kate Moss, Tatjana Patiz, Carla Bruni, Nadja Auermann, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington occupied the stage; the importance attributed to the models created a great buzz for the collections, although they were often talked about more than the product,36 even conditioning the design, which was conceived to enhance those statuesque bodies. Their crowning achievement came in March 1991 during the Gianni Versace fashion show: the finale of that collection featured Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington walking arm in arm to the beat of George Michael’s Freedom '90. A catwalk finale that crowned Versace as the absolute king of glamour and the supermodels as the ultimate queens of the catwalk. A few years later, Donatella Versace re-proposed the same type of finales during some fashion shows, even with the same supermodels. For example, during the Spring/Summer 2018 fashion show, which coincided with the twentieth anniversary of Gianni Versace’s murder, a show where garments and prints from the company’s archive between 1991 and 1995, the period that saw some of Gianni Versace’s most iconic collections such as: Vogue and Warhol (Fig. 5), My Friend Elton, Icons, Baroque and Animalia (Fig. 6), Native Americans, Tresor de la Mer, Metal Mesh and Butterflies. The outfits were organized by themes — as if they were rooms in an exhibition — and by groups of models — a mode dear to Gianni Versace — mixing new models with original ones. In fact, if some garments were ‘reinterpreted’, others were shown on the catwalk in their original form, such as the black and white balloon skirt from the Native American Autumn/Winter 1992 collection, originally worn by Naomi Campbell and which was literally taken from the archives because the work on it was such that it could not be replicated in time for this fashion show. The finale was almost ‘holographic’ with the line-up of models entering the catwalk together and the tableaux vivant (unveiled while a voice-over read “Gianni, this is for you!) featuring Naomi Campbell, Carla Bruni, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer and Helena Christensen in gold knit dresses from the Autumn/Winter 1994 Metal Mesh collection (Fig. 7), accompanying Donatella Versace down the catwalk.
The same approach of a photographic replica of the fashion show archives was implemented by Moschino, which, from time to time, for the various anniversaries, not only worked almost philological manner on the archive products but also on the methods and forms of presentation. For the brand’s thirtieth anniversary, for example, Rossella Jardini, the brand’s creative director at the time, celebrated with a tribute to Franco Moschino by setting up not a catwalk but a mise en scène in four parts: a prologue with a short Franco Moschino video, a first act with iconic products and Franco Moschino’s muses parading on a white catwalk against the backdrop of a heavy red velvet theatre curtain: Pat Cleveland in the bustier dress and tricolour cow from Autumn/Winter 1985, Amalia in the Flag dress from Spring/Summer 1990, Giselle Zelany in the dress made from rubbish bags from Spring/Summer 1994, Violeta Sanchez in the coat with teddy bears from Autumn/Winter 1988. The third act consisted of the contemporary fashion show while the finale began with the stage curtain opening, revealing a tableaux vivants of models who then walked the runway, showing the audience the second part of the archive: the suit jacket with the hat/airplane, the printed T-shirts, the cowboy hats, the leather jacket made with gold chains, the men’s suit with the “Gazzetta dello Sport” print, the shopping bag dress and the “La classe non è ACQUA” swimwear.
Iconic elements are part not only of the company’s product archive but also of the visual and photographic archive of the imaginary that the company has built up, such as the Olive Oyl — Moschino’s icon — interpreted on the Pat Cleveland catwalk for the “X Anni di Kaos” fashion show in 1994 and re-proposed by Mariacarla Boscono on the catwalk for the Moschino Cheap and Chic Spring/Summer 2024 “Once upon a time” show.
Conclusions
The archive, in conclusion, is a creative stimulus, a tool at the service both of the product and of long and short-term narratives. Personalities inherent in the contemporary fashion system, from creative directors, art directors, stylists and even curators, increasingly work in the archives on different levels, depending on the project, and make use of all the sources it contains, whether material or immaterial: products, such as images and videos, graphic or exhibition artifacts. Everything in the contemporary (not just the fashion product) thus becomes a part of the communication of the history of a brand or designer: a history composed of products, people, events, staging, exhibitions, advertising campaigns, and, last but not least, fashion shows both as content (the collections presented) but also as set design, direction, models, music and choreography. The archive means everything that has contributed to making the brand iconic, transcending the clothes’ physical form. It also includes the imagery conveyed through photographs, videos, and advertising campaigns, fundamental parts for constructing the brand identity and its recognizability. We could, therefore, define archives not only as permanent structures that collect, inventory and preserve official and original documents and products of historical interest produced by a company in the performance of its activities and functions, guaranteeing their consultation for study and research purposes37 or just as a source of new ideas for innovative ideas or of central importance for corporate marketing and customer relations to increase brand awareness and corporate reputation.38 Archives, therefore, as “living machines”, as a source for the creation of hybrid forms of communication, of staging in forms of fashion shows that are difficult to attribute solely to the business sphere but which give rise to innovative communication tools that are at the same time commercial, cultural, educational and last but not least spectacular, where the central element is not just the product, but the whole of communication, as an opportunity to generate knowledge, build narratives and also open up new markets through “old” actions.
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