A Feel For Fashion: Chris Ziebert

Where do you look for new ideas or voices in fashion?

Social media has become the easiest way to find new fashion perspectives; but the best new insights I hear are from conversations in person. Between the many events happening in New York, my relationship with Parsons, and fashion weeks, I am fortunate to meet new fashion personalities all the time. 

What is the most significant change you are seeing in fashion right now?

The biggest change is the explosion of secondhand consumption. Among my generation, secondhand is almost entirely destigmatised, buoyed by the popularity of archival garments among celebrities, and the recent high-profile auctions of historic pieces. Obviously, this is a development that is exciting to the Archive.pdf team, as most of us have been buying secondhand for a long time. I hope that this development continues, and that it teaches the audience to think about fashion with a longer time horizon.

Who or what is generating the greatest influence in fashion today?

Unfortunately, short-term financial interests are exerting the most influence in fashion today. One sees this most clearly in the rapid turnover of designers at major brands, which sets the pace for the rest of the industry — it’s a very toxic sense of immediacy. In this environment, designers cannot take the time to build the challenging and distinctive bodies of work characteristic of history’s greatest designers, which hinders fashion’s expression of the moment. 

How have you seen the fashion narrative change over the past five years?

The past five years of fashion feel, to me, like a series of promised but unrealised revolutions. First, there was the post-pandemic promise of “dressing up again,” but dressing down remained the norm even off Zoom. Then, there was the massive wave of new creative director debuts from the past year, which promised a new direction. Some of those debuts were great, but none of them seem to have made that dramatic of an impact yet. My hope is that, as the dust settles over the next year or so, some of these designers settle into their new jobs and find a way to bring about that kind of change.

In what ways is AI impacting the quality of the information in fashion?

AI has made simple, well-documented fashion facts more accessible than ever, but when doing more thorough research it frequently hallucinates information. Popular misconceptions are reproduced as fact, and there are few ways for the well-informed to correct the record. Additionally, AI copywriting’s overreliance on buzzwords flattens the presentation of different designers, collections, and garments. These descriptions are rarely empirically wrong, but the lack of specificity fails to capture the essence of the subject, losing some of our ability to appreciate it. And this does not begin to discuss the proliferation of AI-generated runway imagery, prevalent on the secondhand market, which is both misleading to the potential consumer and an adulteration of fashion history. 

How essential is heritage and/or a distinctive identity in contributing to a brand’s success?

Today, I find heritage to be more of a hindrance than a strength. The need to respect a house’s history can restrict a designer from building their own creative vision for the brand, yielding collections which feel overly nostalgic and lacking a point of view. During the couture season, Cathy Horyn wrote for The Cut that “the best way to handle a founder’s principles is to either ditch them altogether or approach them from an angle.” I agree with her wholeheartedly. I am much more interested in the creative proposal made by a designer than I am in the heritage of the house under whose label the designer works. 

How important is knowledge of the past to create new aesthetics rather than repeating and quoting?

It is important that fashion designers know fashion history, both as a reference point and to understand what has been done before. The greatest designers are thoroughly steeped in fashion history. However, knowledge of the past is not itself enough to protect a designer from merely repeating it, as there are many well-studied collections that reflect the archive without contributing anything new. One cannot merely resurrect; the past must be filtered through a distinct point of view to advance a proposal that goes beyond quotation. 

When was the last time you marvelled over something in fashion?

I am lucky enough to marvel over fashion every day. Between my close attention to the contemporary industry and my research for Archive.pdf, there are always incredible new pieces of the past and the present to find. The aforementioned proliferation of vintage has aided this because it enables new ways of thinking about fashion which substitutes the seasonal churn for a slower-paced appreciation of good design. Once one embraces this broader time-scope of fashion, it is easy to find things to fall in love with.

There seems to be more overlap between fashion/show business than ever. Thoughts?

The relationship between fashion and the entertainment industry occasionally yields interesting results. But for the most part, it is not the driver of my interest in fashion; I am much more interested in seeing how “regular” people integrate their clothes into their everyday lives than I am in how a brand decides to engage with a celebrity. 

Can you share a mantra for the coming year?

“Get real, this is an important medium.” Raf Simons directed this line at some of his contemporaries in the aftermath of his Spring-Summer 2002 collection, which drew a media firestorm after 9/11. Fashion has always been falsely denigrated as a frivolity, but especially in the social media era it has become very easy to treat it very superficially. To me, this line from Simons is a reminder to treat fashion, its history, its business structure, and its makers with their due respect, and to carefully consider what one writes, says, buys, and wears. That fashion deserves to be taken seriously is one of the core motivations behind Archive.pdf, and so this quote is one I carry with me into all coming years. 

This interview has been lightly edited.