I recently saw a handbag by the French fashion house Christian Dior. Except that, despite it being new, I’d seen it before.
This bag wasn’t a wink to the past, but rather a near-facsimile, a design by Maria Grazia Chiuri that paid homage to one by John Galliano from his autumn/winter 2000 collection. It’s an equestrian-influenced bag known as the Saddle (its kidney-shape resembles a two-dimensional saddle, and a “D” logo dangles like a stirrup), executed in the print of a fictional newspaper, the Christian Dior Daily. It retails for £3,450 — the originals currently sell through resale and vintage dealers for around £23,000. You can barely tell the difference.
Which isn’t a new phenomenon. Ironically, for a house known for originating a fashion known as the New Look in 1947, Dior has always been grounded in the past. The New Look was actually a crafty amalgamation of 19th-century crinolined fullness of skirt, and wasp-waists inspired by Christian Dior’s own Freudian childhood memories of his mother in belle époque France. (Proust, eat your madeleines out.)
It’s not an isolated example. Rather, it’s something we are seeing again and again, both in fashion and culture more widely. Films are being remade, with new actors playing familiar characters; appropriation artwork borrows motifs from existing works, creating not-so-new pieces that already have a comforting gloss of familiarity. And cover songs are inescapable.
Fashion, however, can hew even closer, directly replicating its own past. Handbags are especially rich for revival: Dior’s Saddle bag is lifted directly from the Galliano years, now offered in an array of fabrics and finishes; Prada has a Re-Edition line of handbags, reproducing key styles from the 2000s and denoted by a special embossed clochette; and in January, Louis Vuitton will reissue its now highly collectible 2003 line designed with the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.
They are all direct reruns of past greatest hits, not used as inspirational fodder but reproduced to the finest detail. We’re seeing the same in clothing, too, at every level. For his first haute couture collection for Balenciaga in 2021, designer Demna produced an exact recreation of a famous wedding dress made by Cristóbal Balenciaga in 1967.
“We tried to do something else with it. We were like, ‘OK, let’s do it like this, or let’s do it like this. Let’s change the darts here,’” Demna told me at the time. “We just ended up replicating the dress. There was no way it could be better.”
That idea ties with an overwhelming enthusiasm today for vintage — ironically, because people don’t want to be seen in the same thing as everyone else. On the red carpet, the teams of Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga and Zendaya have been cajoling fashion houses to crack open their archives and loan them one-off items from the past, to avoid the likelihood of anyone turning up in the same dress. The popularity of vintage has expanded to most high-profile individuals, attending any old awards ceremony.
Meanwhile, celebrities and fashion fans alike are trawling vintage dealers and auction houses for museum-quality archive pieces, driving prices to astronomical levels. Record auction prices were achieved for various designer pieces in 2024 — the greatest for Jean Paul Gaultier. A strapless Spring/Summer 1999 denim and feather haute couture dress fetched €377,000 in November.
Unlike, say, the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, which sold for $32.5mn earlier this month, these clothes don’t have a celebrity affiliation nor screen-time. It’s simply about the power of the design itself — and their uniqueness, as relics of the past, imbued with cultural capital.
Which is why it’s strange that fashion houses have started reproducing so many of these items, stripping them of that all-important authenticity and scarcity. Then again, fashion is about making money, and brands are well placed to capitalise on the surge — they own the originals, and who better to rip you off than yourself?
Gaultier is a good example. Over the past few years, the brand has reissued signature tattoo and op-art prints on clingy stockinette, just as Monsieur Gaultier showed them in the early 1990s. Vintage originals do a swift trade, but the reissues, notably, are a fraction of the price. A graphic 1995 catsuit sells on the vintage website 1stdibs for £12,500; a similar wiggly-striped Cyberbaba top retails today for £310. They’re also conveniently offered in a range of sizes and free of snags, tears and odours.
But doesn’t that lose the meaning? Part of the appeal of these clothes is a hard nostalgia trip — often for fashion moments the wearer was either too young to experience first-hand, or not even born for. Call it an “unlived experience” — reliving the moments you wished you were present for. I remember a 2019 Vetements show staged atop a series of dinner tables, in direct emulation of a 1995 Martin Margiela show that most of the audience hadn’t attended but had read plenty about. Many of that audience were dressed in vintage, too. If not true vintage, then ideas culled from the past.
In his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, French philosopher Guy Debord stated, flatly: “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it.” Ironically, this is a passage lifted directly from the French poet Comte de Lautréamont’s Poésies of 1870. Debord was writing a year before the May riots that would upheave French society and, around 53 years before Instagram was launched. But his words still resonate, because we live in a society of spectacle and, as his countryman sociologist Jean Baudrillard later expounded, simulacra and simulation is all around. Especially in fashion.
The dark philosophies of Debord and Baudrillard are somewhat heavyweight rhetoric to throw out around handbags, but there seems to be something in the air right now: as opposed to just retro style, we have shifted to redux style. The difference is stark: retro style imitates the past, draws inspiration, but reignites it with a mood of the contemporary.
The most salient fashion example of the latter is Yves Saint Laurent’s 1940s collection of 1971 — squared shoulders and slinky jerseys taken from wartime clothes but energised with the sexuality of the 1970s and the designer’s genius in cut. Despite initial outcry (critics objected to a perceived glorification of wartime dress of the Vichy collaborationists), it proved so potent a mix that it foreshadowed the dominant silhouette of the 1980s by a good decade. Redux style, rather, is about exact, mechanical reproduction. The mood of our moment is precisely what’s being avoided.
That’s entirely understandable. We are living in a time of confusion, upheaval and uncertainty — politically, culturally, artistically, even morally. During those moments, fashion especially tends to grasp after its known and comforting past, although rarely with such exactitude. These days, the whole appeal isn’t newness but that instantly identifiable redux, Google image search pointing to every pop cultural pivot-point you’re referencing, and ensuring no one misses the reassuring fact you’re wearing a 1995 Gaultier dress, with a 2000 Dior handbag and 2010 Prada shoes, even if they’re not actually originals from those years.
But isn’t that also indicative of where the world is, with airbrushed and artfully posed social media pictures, scripted questions and deepfakes? Of course, a dress from 1995 was actually manufactured in 2024. It’s almost an extension of the prevalent “dupe” culture, in which Gen-Z consumers seem to embrace imitation as the sincerest form of flattery, openly buying knock-offs of everything from beauty products to Skims shapewear, to Miu Miu trainers.
Duping time seems to be the ultimate push into the counterfeit, but maybe it’s logical. Everyone says time is the greatest luxury — you only need to google now, it seems, to search for your temps perdu.
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