Revisting Your Archives to Create The Modern Version of You

 

Balmain's Olivier Rousteing

For Curva-Lish, since I cover a few lifestyle verticals to articulate what it means to live a cultured life of style, I bump into many inspiration points.

This week, my inspiration has been two brands that are moving boldly forward by giving acknowledgement to what once was apart of their foundation and creating in its modernized future version of itself.

This is important because post-COVID lockdown, I think everyone is trying to determine how best to move forward. Everything has changed. Even with a critical upcoming United States election less than two weeks away, most people know that there is no going back to what was their lives before the pandemic.

So what are we to do?

Let me give you a unique idea inspired by these two mega-fashion brands.

First let's consider what Balmain Creative Director Olivier Rousteing has brilliantly done for his latest runway showcase Balmain Spring 2021.

He went into the Balmain archives.

Not pre-pandemic archives. I'm talking 45 year old archives from the vision that Balmain's original founder created.

Here are a few images from that Balmain archive:

Using the Balmain checked logos from the archives, Rousteing re-imagined the checked logo in a way that makes it both modern and at the same time paying homage to it's design beginnings.

So before I tell you what this has to do with you and me, let me give you one more brand example for what it means to re-visit the archives.

Kim Kardashian's SKIMS brand announced this week that they would be recreating the infamous Juicy Couture two-piece velour track suits that was made popular by the reality star and her friendship with Paris Hilton.

The first image defined a whole generation of 2000s pop stars and fans and the second image is the new SKIMS marketing campaign image with the two stars revisiting their roles in shaping a generation, including paying homage to the style of that time.

Hilton and Kardashian in 2000s

Hilton and Kardashian in SKIMS 2020

Soooo, when I thought about what it means for me to move forward in this still existing pandemic environment with so many uncertainties, I told myself, 

"I should re-visit my archives and look at it with fresh eyes of someone who is surviving in an environment of so much uncertainty."

We ALL have archives. No, it might not be a 45-year old fashion archive like Balmain or a 20 year old archive like a reality star but don't compare. 

We ALL have archives that we can refer to.

It may be some archive (such as a journal) you had in your 20s when you documented what you had hoped your dreams and goals would be in your 40s/50s/60s.

It may be an archive of some drawings you made when you had hoped to be a professional artist but now that you are an accountant that doesn't seem do-able. Go back to those archives anyway. You never know what creative spin-off that may inspire in you determining what your future looks like. 

Your archive re-visit will be the "modernized, experienced, having lived a few years since the archive" person. Those fresh set of eyes on your archive has the potential to be your biggest life opportunity full of possibility.

You reading this blog post right now is a manifestation of me re-visiting my own archives.

RIGHT before the pandemic and shut downs, I had everything in place to launch a Curva-Lish digital magazine with the lead stories being my media coverage of SXSW and the Dallas Arts Fair. I had intensely prepped for two months.

In a one week time period in March 2020, both these projects got cancelled in what seemed like overnight. I was so devastated I haven't really written any media coverage since then other than a random blog post in May, 2020.

So when I re-visited my archives, I realized that using this blog platform is one of the key communication channels in which I share the vision and perspective of what cultured life and style means. 

It's always how I've defined Curva-Lish.

But now, moving forward, it's going to be the "looking to the archives, modernized version". 

Hope you do the same.

** All Balmain images credit to Balmain Instagram and all SKIMS images credit to SKIMS Instagram