THE POWER OF THE ARCHIVE: (RE)TELLING HISTORICAL NARRATIVES Elena Johansen

THE POWER OF THE ARCHIVE: (RE) TELLING HISTORICAL NARRATIVES

BY ELENA JOHANSEN

In 2017, prominent fashion critic, Alexander Fury, explored the significance of the corporate fashion archive in an article titled, “In Fashion, the Beauty (and Challenge) of Looking Back.” For Fury, a fashion archive’s contents are not merely “relics, but rather [a] foundation for future creations… [a] petri dish for designs of the future.” [1] This article is part of a recent growing interest in fashion archives that have led many brands, like Vans, to start investing in archives for the first time and others, like Gucci, to start utilizing their archives in new ways, morphing museum with the retail environment into a sort of full “Gucci experience.” But this new interest raises important questions: what is the corporate fashion archive’s role in recording and retelling history? And beyond that, how accessible and visible should a corporate collection (that is inevitably shaped by systemic biases such as racism, classism, sexism, and sizeism be?) I argue, do brands have a moral responsibility to share their full history and make archives accessible to the public? To researchers? Both?

At a basic level, the corporate fashion archive is a space for a brand to preserve its story, identify a narrative, and also act as a tool for inspiration. Yet the relevancy of an archive’s holdings reaches beyond any one brand itself. As renowned sociologist Joanne Entwistle explains, “human bodies are dressed bodies.” [2] Fashion and clothing are intimately entangled with people, the body, and as an extension of that, politics, economics, culture, social issues, and issues of the environment and sustainability. A fashion archive, then, is a place to collect, study, and understand those relationships as a space of social, embodied history. Yet, despite recent brand interest in fashion archives, many

corporate archives in the United States remain virtually invisible to the average layperson and are also hard to find for scholars of history or fashion. It is even difficult to determine if a company holds an archive at all. Most are only accessible to the brand’s designers that share their walls. A 2017 Society of American Archivists article quotes Pendleton Woolen Mills’s former president, Mort Bishop III, who recognizes their archive’s importance to the brand itself, saying, “Insight to our past gives us foresight to the future.” He describes the archive as “the keeper of our treasured history... It embodies our corporate culture, enabling us to remain who we are yet step forward with exciting innovations.” [3] Indeed, this relationship between the archive and product development is exactly what Fury was referring to when he described the archive as a “petri dish.” Yet, the same article also notes that at the Pendelton archive “access by non-employees is available only by permission of the company President.” [4]

Without broader access to the archive, the historical narrative of these companies remain fully controlled by the brands themselves, and the way a brand tells its history will undoubtedly be biased and incomplete. A brand must serve the interest of its stakeholders and therefore so will base its collection policy and archive practices on what best supports the bottom line. If a brand’s history is necessarily problematic (consider Pendelton’s history of cultural appropriation, Chanel’s associations with Nazis during World War II and Brooks Brothers history of clothing both slaveholders and enslaved individuals), many aspects of a history might be omitted from the collection and its written history altogether. Historian Jonathan Square in his recent research on Brooks Brothers history of making clothing for enslaved people notes that while some institutions like “universities have started atoning for their connection to slavery and the slave trade, Brooks Brothers, and other for-profit entities, have not.” [5] In an era where there is still much work to be done in combating

racism and addressing the American legacy of slavery, recognizing and investigating American institutions’ roles in this history is vital.

Today, the community or media engagement for most American corporate fashion archives is nonexistent. By contrast, many European brands like Yves Saint Laurent, Azzedine Alaia, Gucci, and Ferragamo have more visible archives, which host gallery spaces that function like museums. In the United States, an exception is the Levi Strauss & Co. archive, which has been around for over 30 years (although this is a fraction of the company’s over150-year history). Levi’s company historian, Tracey Panek, regularly engages with different forms of media and attends or hosts various events and conferences to celebrate and educate about the brand’s history. Levi’s headquarters also has a public space at their archives called the Vault Museum that highlights aspects of the company’s long history. There exists a huge missed opportunity in the lack of transparency and lack of education that results from the nonpublic functioning of most archive spaces. Despite these exceptions, the majority of brand archives do not have public-facing archival spaces and as such lack any type of historical transparency.

As brands increasingly pool company resources to create, essentially, museums of themselves in the form of company archives, fashion names are buying their spots in history and using the corporate archive as a tool of legitimization. An archivist is not a “passive and impartial guardian,”, because unintentional (and sometimes intentional) biases shape the collecting, preserving, analyzing, display, and use of an archive. [6] A brand’s collection policy alone (the rules they abide by in terms of what objects to seek out and accept or deny in building and maintaining the archive) will be wrought with donor biases and other larger systemic biases. For example, corporate fashion archives tend to encapsulate the clothing of mostly thin, white, famous

women. Michel-Rolph Trouillot explains, “Human beings participate in history both as actors and as narrators… At best, history is a story about power, about those who won.” These winners control what and how history is remembered. [7] With recent conversations around addressing white supremacy in the United States, including in the museum, [9] the corporate archive is a critical place to start to unravel the stories of these winners and rethink the narrative that champions thin, white and well-off women.

As curator Maura Reilly explains, “sexism and racism have become so insidiously woven into the institutional fabric, language, and logic of the mainstream art world that they go almost entirely undetected.” [9] This is true of mainstream fashion and corporations too. Reilly argues that to renegotiate these influences, historians, curators (and I would add archivists) must “be consistently counterhegemonic.” [10] Not only should corporate fashion archives be made accessible to a broader audience, but they should be created, managed, and preserved in a manner strictly “counter hegemonic.” Archives are used by academics and researchers to retell history—that history should be complete in order to be fully understood. There also needs to be more research on the history of the fashion archive itself. Historian Alexandra Walsham writes, “Archives are the factories and laboratories of the historian... the warehouses from which we acquire the materials to build the history we write.” [11] Only when we fully understand history, and the places where history is produced, can we truly learn from it and move forward.