Material Wealth 1: Introductions and Buying Against the Trend

For our new series Material Wealth ARCHIVE.pdf Editor-in-Chief Chris Ziebert curates listings across the secondhand market

Introduction

Hello! Welcome to Material Wealth, ARCHIVE.pdf’s semi-weekly newsletter where we curate listings from the fashion secondhand market across websites, countries, and brands for your convenience. As we have continued our archiving practice, we have been looking for more ways to foreground the materiality of fashion; at the end of the day, the final fashion product is the garment. I don’t want to let these scans just be images – they capture incredibly designed objects that you yourself can own, often for reasonable prices. This newsletter will function as one of our steps in that direction, with the goal of helping you buy the things you see in the scan library on our website and Instagram, and getting them off of the moodboard and into your daily lives.

I will be the primary author of this column. My name is Chris Ziebert, and I serve as Editor-in-Chief of ARCHIVE.pdf. I am a seller myself (though I promise not to shill any of my own wares here) and have spent an inordinate amount of time learning the secondary markets of the brands I care about, and I want to bring those clothes to you.

A big inspiration behind this newsletter is friend of ARCHIVE.pdf Sami Reiss’ Sami Reiss’ SNAKE, where he trawls LiveAuctioneers for the best upcoming auctions for great pieces of furniture and decor design history. Though we work in different fields of design, we echo the base assumption behind Sami’s newsletter: the most efficient and effective way of getting great design into your life is through secondhand. But the whole of the secondhand market is overwhelming, and I hope that this newsletter will ease navigating it, and help get some of these clothes into your closet.

A final note, before we get to the listings: I will be pulling listings from secondhand websites around the world, some of which are region-locked and require a proxy. There have been countless guides written on proxying from abroad (most especially from Japan, but from European websites like Vinted as well), so I will begin by operating under the assumption that you have access to one of those, but if there is demand for an official ARCHIVE.pdf guide to proxying, please sound off in the comments and I will put something together.

Below the paywall, you will find some great Raf Calvin Klein, Helmut Lang, a big Hermes auction, and a ton of Belgian fashion.

And with that, on to:

MATERIAL WEALTH 1: Buying Against the Trend

Part of the motivation behind this newsletter is to encourage a different way of thinking about fashion than the seasonal commercial schedule, and making this about getting good designs into your life rather than keeping up with whatever trend cycle. This feels especially urgent now that trend cycles have come to dominate so much of the secondhand market, with whole brand’s markets rising and falling depending on their position relative to the current season’s runways. I would not touch Hedi right now because those prices are the highest they have ever been. It has become reasonably difficult to buy old Rick now as well, for much the same reason. So instead, we think about what we can take advantage of, and there are always plenty. Lang is on the upswing, but not really at the peak it reached at the beginning of the archive craze in the 2000s, and there is so much that goes overlooked that you can always find deals. Right now, the Demnalenciaga hype is dying down, which is bringing a sell-off of a lot of great Balenciaga and Vetements for buying the dip (I won’t cover this too much this week, but maybe next time). The point is: if you buy the good stuff that everyone is busy forgetting about, you can accumulate some really special things for the lowest their prices will get.

But into the listings. First off, a couple of bigger collections. Kerry Taylor and Maurice Auctions are hosting one of their collaborative sales on Thursday, with a lot of very good, very bourgeois womenswear. The highlights for me are the Hermes by Nadege Vanhee lots, of which there are a good number. The market for Hermes RTW is quite small, and the most hype gets directed at Margiela’s tenure (the auction also has one of Margiela’s best designs for the house, a double-layered cashmere coat from Autumn/Winter 1999), but Nadege’s work has been consistently very good and much cooler than one would normally associate with Hermes. These kinds of auctions frequently shoot very high, but some things will slip under the radar, so I will be interested to see what the hammer prices on those pieces are.

Over the past few months, this seller on Yahoo!Japan has been trickling out his extensive Lang collection via auction. A few things have gone very high, with the peak reached by the leather flak jacket from Autumn/Winter 1999, but a lot of less-grailworthy pieces have ended at more responsible numbers. At this point, it is mostly tailoring and shirting – good for wedding season, graduations, etc. I will warn that of the handful of things I have bought from this seller, there have been some alterations I needed to let out; it seems like this seller was just buying sizes blindly and altering them to fit, but most are reversible, and some of these things are priced well enough to be worth the gamble.

So long as we are talking about Helmut: Tokio7 recently price dropped their S/S 04 “Dragonfly” (size 42, $784) leather jacket, which is a real all-timer for me – if it were a size larger I would probably have bought it already. They also have the white version of the same jacket, with a slightly different set of details, in-store for the New York readers. I love 2000s Lang because it dispels for me a lot of the “minimalist” description; while Lang was pared down, he got very complex at times, and S/S ‘04 is one of the best collections for capturing that under-discussed part of his work.

A few more Helmut listings: