What Does an Archive Mean When the Term Has Been Co-opted by Fast Fashion?

The word archive is having a moment, and it has spread far past the runway. It is a resale strategy, a red-carpet strategy, a wall of Instagram accounts archiving old campaigns for hundreds of thousands of followers, a job specialization, and lately, even a shop tab. Call a piece archive and you have called it serious, considered, and worth having before anyone has even looked at it. In a collector economy, where a Raf Simons bomber from 2001 became the most expensive item ever sold on Grailed, at $47,000, and…