Has Archival Fashion Lost Its Cool?

Part of the fun of seeing stylish people is projecting romantic backstories onto them — imagining they inherited that bag from a wealthy relative, held onto it as a relic of their misspent youth, or picked it up at a Paris market while visiting a lover. This dynamic between style voyeur and stylish person explains the ongoing allure of women like Kate Moss and Jane Birkin. Their clothes were often unidentifiable, but the way they wore them and the fact that you didn’t know where…