At a time when history itself feels endangered — erased or rewritten by politics and AI, which obscures sources and floods the record with deepfakes — the question grows only more complex. Is an artistic director there to design clothes, or to curate a house’s legacy? Is their role to rewrite history — artificially reviving memories and parodying... See more

Today’s designers are hardly the first to navigate fashion’s complex relationship with the past: Houses are simultaneously obsessed with defining and defending their aesthetic territory, celebrating moments of past glory while asserting their relevance to what’s new, now, next.

Two years into an industry-wide slowdown from which the path forward for fashion remains unclear, “the past becomes a refuge, full of mirages we can turn to paper over the present,” observes Didier Barroso, Parisian gallery owner and director of the vintage boutique Plaisir Palace.