Why Established Brands Are Buying Back Their Cultural Heritage As A Way To Create Value

Photographs credits: Guy Marineau | Image YSL 1977

The management of cultural heritage is big business for an iconic brand. In an insightful article written for the financial times, Lou Stoppard weighs in on why design houses are paying huge sums of money at auction to buy back missing pieces to safeguard cultural heritage. 

Sonnet Stanfill, fashion curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum explains “there’s a dawning realisation that if you want to be a so-called heritage brand, you have to be able to tell the story through objects…An archive can be useful for design inspiration, for lending to an exhibition, or for if you think you’d want to do your own retrospective.”

Shonagh Marshall, a freelance curator who archived Alexander McQueen’s collection in preparation for the Met’s Savage Beauty exhibition in 2015, and who has also worked on the archive collections of Christian Louboutin and the late stylist Isabella Blow, agrees. “The motivation often lies in the sense of building a brand, which is now entwined with cultural heritage. Keeping those objects means keeping a sense of narrative — without them you have no assets.”

Kerry Taylor, who runs her own auction house, is considered a world leader in vintage fashion, antique costume and textiles, says “some of the more established brands, such as Dior, Balenciaga and Chanel, really see the value in buying back their heritage,” she explains. “The Chanel archive in Paris is like a glamorous high-security prison. Everything has black lacquered sliding cabinets. If Karl Lagerfeld wants to look at something from the 1920s or 1930s, there it is, beautifully stored and catalogued. Not only does it reinforce the importance of the brand itself, [but also] when new designers come along they can plunder it for ideas — and stay within the house.”

Lou Stoppard says "The fashion archive is becoming highly prized. Brands are pouring resources into building museums in which to house their collections, while canny young designers are buying back garments from clients, or bidding against collectors and museums to retrieve rare vintage pieces with which to build their own." Which has become an excercise where "many brands are now using their archives to produce exhibitions as a way of extending their brand message."

The full article can be read here