Christie's is auctioning off the wardrobe from The Devil Wears Prada 2, with proceeds going to charity. Simultaneously, Iris van Herpen is demonstrating the art of pleating at the Brooklyn Museum, bringing her signature tension-as-structure approach into a context that can hold it as fine art. Both events are fashion crossing into the archive, insisting on a different frame: not trend, not commerce, but object with history.
The Costume as Cultural Artifact
The Devil Wears Prada wardrobe is interesting precisely because the film itself is a document of a particular moment in fashion's relationship to power. The clothes on screen were not props. They were arguments. They encoded a worldview about aspiration, gatekeeping, and the violence of taste. Pulling them out of storage and placing them in a Christie's sale context doesn't diminish that. It does something more interesting: it turns the argument into an artifact, submitting it to the logic of the secondary market rather than the runway. A 2019 paper in Fashion Theory by Paulicelli found that costume auction culture systematically elevates screen-worn garments above runway originals in cultural valuation, partly because narrative context functions as a form of authentication that surpasses provenance alone.
Pleating as Slow Craft Against Algorithmic Fashion
Van Herpen's Brooklyn Museum appearance is doing adjacent work in the opposite direction. Where the auction extracts a garment from its original context to grant it museum-grade status retroactively, van Herpen is bringing the process itself into the institution: the pleat as verb, not noun. It connects to what industrial designer Eugene Whang has described as the irreducible gap between taste and preference. Mass fashion produces preference satisfaction. Van Herpen produces a different kind of encounter entirely, one where the making is inseparable from the meaning. The silk scarf that Celine and Loro Piana are currently marketing as infinitely reconfigurable sits between these two poles: flexible enough to be personal, branded enough to be an archive of the house's aesthetic position. Fashion's archive is never just storage. It is always also argument.