In 2018, a camouflage bomber jacker by Raf Simons from fall-winter 2001 sold online for $47,000—a stupefying amount, even considering that it was a very rare piece from the designer's most famous collection. In the years preceding the sale, an identical jacket had been circulating among some highly influential and discerning figures, starting with the archival-fashion collector David Casavant, who loaned it to Kanye West, who let his wife, Kim Kardashian, wear it a few times. But the bomber itself isn't so remarkable. It's actually an off-the-rack style that you might find in any European army-surplus store—but modified by Simons to appear hard-worn, beat-up, and patched up with punk and new-wave ephemera. It's a pedestrian garment, really.
In the past five years, this kind of historically significant menswear, known as “archival,” has crept beyond the cult-fashion fringes and into the cultural zeitgeist. “It's the greatest hits,” says Arun Gupta, the CEO and cofounder of Grailed, the online marketplace where the $47,000 bomber was sold. Pieces listed on the site end up on the backs of superstar trend instigators like Travis Scott and Lil Uzi Vert. Which, in turn, drives up the value of other surviving examples of those pieces—and other selections from the same era or collections.
When archival collectors talk about these garments today, they're identified not just by the designer but also by the year and the season they were released. That way real heads will know if your Helmut Lang parka is from the era when Helmut himself was still designing for the label, or if your Yohji Yamamoto jacket is part of one of his seminal collections. And thanks to Grailed—as well as eBay, 1stdibs, Etsy, and a new crop of archival-focused Instagram dealers—access and awareness are greater than ever. “Men are just getting comfortable with the idea of actually being intentional about the stuff that they wear,” Gupta says, acknowledging that the arms race to collect the rarest grails can get intense. “It's like, do you buy clothes to have them, or do you buy clothes to wear them?”
The items gathered here are some of the most covetable pieces from some of the most important collections in menswear history—and every one of them was vetted to the best of our ability and available for purchase as of the moment this magazine went to print. Few of these items are so rare or expensive that you wouldn't actually wear them out (even the $47,000 bomber could survive a few nights at the club). Indeed, the stuff represented here is having an outsize impact that goes beyond the world of hyper-specific dealers and collectors. Many young designers today are heavily influenced by what Hedi Slimane, Raf Simons, Martin Margiela, and Helmut Lang were doing 10 to 20 years ago. Which is why these “old” pieces look so good paired with the designs of today. They're all part of the same lineage. This is the source material.
Maison Martin Margiela
Square-Toe Boots
Early '00s
Credit: Instagram users @arth_archive (white) and @heatarchive (black)
The elusive designer abruptly left his namesake brand and disappeared from public life in 2009, but his legacy of deconstructed fashion and avant-garde streetwear is as present today as it ever was. Take the square-toe boot here. It was a Margiela staple throughout the late '90s and early 2000s and is a quintessential example of the designer's peculiar design ethos. The black pair is a simple, undeniable classic, while the white pair represents one of Margiela's signature motifs: a pristine white when brand-new, but with time and wear, the paint cracks and chips away, creating something one of a kind.
Helmut Lang
Bondage Fishtail Parka
Fall-Winter 1998
On loan from David Casavant
Like Martin Margiela, Lang left his namesake brand and retired from fashion suddenly, in 2005. The brand lives on without him today. But if Margiela's contribution to fashion history is deconstructivism, Lang's is pragmatism. He turned street clothes into fashion and made fashion something that everyone could wear all the time. And just as with his contemporary Raf Simons, men's fashion was not a secondary part of his business. “They didn't treat menswear as a side piece to womenswear and really made it its own art form,” says the archivist David Casavant, owner of this parka (as well as hundreds of other pieces by Lang). This shimmery, almost ethereal fishtail parka is as wearable today as when it debuted in '98.
Jean Paul Gaultier
Psych Girl Shirt
Spring-Summer 2000
On loan from @middleman.store on Instagram
A legend in his own right, JPG wasn't really a men's-archival fixture until Lil Uzi Vert started wearing the designer's distinctive graphic pieces. (Marilyn Manson, Uzi's idol, is also a fan.) “We were the first store that really pushed all our chips in on Gaultier,” says Kyle Julian Skye Muhlfriedel, cofounder of the archival shop Middleman and owner of the shirt pictured here. “I found myself devising all sorts of questionable small-sample metrics like ‘average likes per brand’ and ‘drop-day sale percentage’ to prove why we needed to post more. But it was Uzi wearing Gaultier that really changed everything [in 2019]. He purchased a ‘Satan’ jacket from us, and after posting it on his Instagram, the demand for Gaultier went through the roof.”
Tom Ford For Gucci
Floral Embroidered Denim Jeans
Fall-Winter 1999
On loan from Evolution at 1stdibs
Anyone with an Instagram account can tell you that Gucci is red-hot, thanks to visionary designer Alessandro Michele's baroque new-wave update. But who remembers when Tom Ford was at the helm? From 1994 to 2006, Ford sexed up Gucci's relatively staid leather-goods business. He supercharged the wattage with help from his friends Kate Moss and Mario Testino, staged provocative runway shows, and made the kind of louche, expertly crafted menswear that rock stars and rich guys couldn't resist. Fast-forward 20 years to A$AP Rocky wearing a very similar pair of Michele-designed floral Gucci jeans on the street, and you've got yourself a nice bit of archival-fashion synergy.
Issey Miyake
Parachute Cargo Bomber
Fall-Winter 1996
On loan from @constant_practice on Instagram
Working with seemingly indestructible materials like ballistic nylon and industrial-grade hardware, Japanese designer Issey Miyake has had a long, innovative career. As with many designers of the pre-internet era, however, details about his early work can be sparse, which makes archival Miyake even more interesting for collectors. “This collection is not well-documented,” says the owner of this bomber, Zeke Hemme, the Philadelphia-based archival-fashion dealer behind Constant Practice. “So there are few images of the item on the runway.” What does exist, at least in terms of this rare grail's provenance, might be better than runway documentation: Robin Williams wore the black version to the premiere of Flubber in 1997.
Comme Des Garcons Homme Plus
Gobelins Tapestry Patchwork Shirt and Pants
Spring-Summer 2000
On loan from @constant_practice on Instagram
Rei Kawakubo has been designing menswear for the label she founded since 1978. Fortunately, Comme des Garçons pieces are identified by their year and season on the inside tag, so keeping track of the brand's expansive and aesthetically wide-ranging back catalog is relatively easy. Tracking down the rarest of the rare, however, is not: The pants were located by Constant Practice's Hemme at a tiny vintage shop in Tokyo. Each piece from the collection is unique, purportedly made using scraps of material from the historic Parisian tapestry manufacturer Gobelins, which has been around since the 1600s. “From what I have heard,” Hemme says, “the patchwork pieces had to be custom-ordered and sold out before hitting the shelves.”
Dior Hoome By Hedi Slimane
Luster Blazer
Fall-Winter 2003
On loan from @middleman.store on Instagram
When he worked as the creative head of Dior Homme, Hedi Slimane slimmed down suits and ties and jeans at a time when men needed it most. “My passion for clothes was an unintended side effect of my fervor for music,” says Middleman cofounder Kyle Julian Skye Muhlfriedel. “Hedi dressed the soundtrack to my childhood.” The impact of Slimane on the indie-rock aesthetic that dominated the early 2000s cannot be overstated, which is why his autumn 2003 Luster collection is probably his most influential and collectible collection ever (including his time at Saint Laurent and now Celine). What made this a memorable piece from the runway show was its shimmering thread: The blazer explodes with luminosity when it's hit by a flash.
Raf Simons
Riot! Riot! Riot! Bomber
Fall-Winter 2001
On loan from David Casavant
The jacket that started it all. “It was always one of the most iconic Raf pieces from one of the most iconic shows,” says Casavant, who lent that very bomber to Kanye. “Before Raf was such a ubiquitous name, Kanye borrowed it and wore it for two months straight and made it even more iconic.” All of which created the fervor that led to the $47,000 sale of an identical piece. As a designer, Simons has been personally cited as an inspiration for Kanye, Virgil Abloh, and others who have channeled the disruptive energy of unsettled youth into fashion. The collection this bomber came from, titled Riot! Riot! Riot!, represents the direct and thrilling vision of Simons's stylized, dystopian future—as well as our menswear present.
Yohji Yamamoto
Painted Leather Aviator Jacket
Fall-Winter 1991
On loan from @constant_practice on Instagram
Fashion's great anti-fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto has a singular aesthetic sensibility: black, drapey, androgynous. Yohji's designs are somehow both instantly recognizable and perfectly anonymous. Which is why the very occasional colorful flourishes are so exciting. Widely considered to be his best and most coveted collection, shown in Tokyo in tandem with Comme des Garçons, the line included a series of leather aviator jackets featuring hand-painted pinup-girl motifs—a military reference made in response to the Gulf War. In true Yohji style, it is at once one of his most collectible designs and, for the uninitiated, one of the least recognizable as Yohji.
Prada
Prada Cross Body Bag
Late 1990s
On loan from Abid Khan
Miuccia Prada has ushered in countless waves in menswear, and her most prescient creation was Prada Sport, the diffusion line of technical and sporty apparel and accessories she launched in 1997—20 years before “athleisure” was even a word. A few years later she incorporated Sport pieces (similar to this body bag) into her mainline runway collection. It was a revolutionary move at the time, and today harness bags like this one are everywhere in menswear. “The minimal-to-no branding speaks to the humility of Miuccia's work,” says Abid Khan, the London-based fashion dealer who owns the bag pictured and many others like it. “The focus is on the piece itself and not the brand associated with it.”
A version of this story appears in the Spring/Summer 2020 issue of GQ Style with the title “10 Grails From The Golden Age Of Men's Fashion That You Can Still Wear Right Now.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Ben Alsop
Soft-goods stylist: Bettina Budewing
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