Jojo Gronostay
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MODE ARBEIT (FASHION WORK)
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“Archival Fashion”: Fashion, Value, and Recurrence in Dead White Men’s Clothes
This essay evolved on the occasion of Jojo Gronostay’s exhibition MODE ARBEIT (FASHION WORK) in the Kunstraum Weikendorf (April 19 — September 27, 2026). In a showroom setting, this exhibition wove issues of local supply structures together with the global circulation of clothes, enabling visitors to spatially experience processes of valuation, devaluation, and recycling. The essay is intended as a fashion theory-based commentary that addresses this constellation and critically analyzes the dynamics of circulation and the ascription of value.
In the last few years, few terms have seen an art theoretical boom quite like “archive.”[1] Ever since Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, an archive can no longer be understood as simply a place for storing things; instead, archives are entities that create meaning in general through selection, order, and interpretation.[2] Through the figure of the “archon”—a guardian who makes decisions regarding the access to and interpretation of the holdings—Derrida describes the archive as the expression of archontic power: the authority that decides what is preserved and what is forgotten and under what conditions the past becomes legible in the first place. He writes that “the archontic principle of the archive is also a principle of consignation, that is, of gathering together.”[3] The archive is thus not so much a passive storehouse as it is an operative apparatus in which power, knowledge, and temporality interlock with one another. Against this backdrop, I propose that Dead White Men’s Clothes (DWMC) should be read as an archive, but not in the classical sense of collecting, stabilizing, and preserving. Instead, it is a dynamic, circulating archive that acquires its shape from the flows of global commodities.
The term “Dead White Men’s Clothes” (obroni wawu), which is used in Accra, Ghana, to refer to imported secondhand clothing, isn’t just a category of commodities; it is a specific epistemic order in which clothes are read as what is left of another kind of consumption that is, for the most part, invisible. Roughly 15 million articles of clothing arrive at the Kantamanto market in Accra each week.[4] This is not a marginal phenomenon; rather, it is an integral part of a global supply chain. The market is a logistic hub where the consequences of Western overproduction materialize. That this infrastructure serves as an informal solution for a systemic problem without being recognized as such points to what the activist Liz Ricketts describes as “waste colonialism.”[5]
The artist Jojo Gronostay, who founded DWMC, intervenes in this constellation by not only documenting the circulating pieces of clothing at the Kantamanto market in Accra, but also by reintegrating these into the production of images and value. Transporting the clothing back to the global north to an exhibition space is not simply a reversal in directions; it is also a shift in the conditions in which they can be read. What was seen as excess before now appears as curated stock, while what had previously been circulating as leftovers become the carriers of aesthetic and discursive meaning.
The direction of movement can be productively interwoven with the current phenomenon of so-called “archival fashion”—a term that describes the selective canonization of fashion collections from the 1990s and early 2000s, especially from avant-garde labels like Raf Simons (pre 2007), Yohji Yamamoto, Helmut Lang (pre 2005), Rick Owens (primarily the main line), Walter Van Beirendonck, Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons Homme Plus), Martin Margiela, and Carol Christian Poell. This canon is not so much historically coherent as it is the result of processes of selecting and evaluating after the fact. The emergence of a Gen Z collecting culture has brought a new figure to the stage: the (mostly male) archival fashion collector as a contemporary archon. Archontic power is thus exercised through the practices of collecting, categorizing, and evaluating, which are based on highly specialized codes and forms of knowledge: A community of self-proclaimed fashion archivists decides which pieces are desirable, how these should be historicized, and what economic value they possess. Here, the archive doesn’t act as an institutional site, but as a decentralized, market-driven structure of expertise, platforms, and desires.
However, after only roughly one decade, this form of archiving is already experiencing a crisis: Thanks to the increasing platformization and commodification, archival fashion has grown from a specialized subculture of collectors into a broader market segment. Prices are rising and codes are becoming reproduceable, while speculation and fraud are becoming more obvious. The fragility of this order can be seen in the canonization and documentation of clothes as “archival” in hindsight based not on a known and documented origin, but on speculative narratives that are amplified by the hype generated on commercial platforms.[6] In this case, the archive loses its stability and becomes part of the same logic of circulation that it originally attempted to stabilize.
At first glance, the looks presented by DWMC in the showroom can hardly be distinguished from the trophies so feverishly collected by the archival fashion scene. And this is precisely its destabilizing aspect. What appears here to be the result of decisions regarding the exhibition was once a deliberate aesthetic strategy of designers like Martin Margiela and Carol Christian Poell, who used it for provocation in a system that preferred newness and perfection in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The labels that collectors of archival fashion idolize were often subsumed by the fashion press under the term “deconstructed fashion,” which loosely refers to Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. A specific relationship with transience was articulated in their design: Traces of use, aging, and fragmentation were celebrated as signs of authenticity and were attributed economic value. However, this gesture has since become established and become its own style—a coded aesthetics with clearly identifiable references, collecting practices, and market value.
That DWMC’s “collections” (discarded clothes from the secondhand streams of Accra) are so visually close to this aesthetics demonstrates that signs of history, wear and tear, and authenticity are not independent of the circulation of commodities, but are created by it. At the same time, that this circulation doesn’t flow glitch-free by any means also becomes clear: Traders in Kantamanto are increasingly noticing that the majority of clothes that arrive are unfit to be sold and must be weeded out—with serious ecological consequences.[7] This also transforms the micro economy of archival fashion into a precarious intermediary stage: What is collected, maintained, and traded as an investment today can become part of the global stream of secondhand clothes tomorrow that not only must be further distributed but—as is becoming more often the case—disposed of.
In this sense, the DWMC art and fashion project can be read as a counter archive. Its archontic power consists of reorganizing the conditions under which value is attributed in fashion: not as a way of fixing meaning, but as the visualization of a global circulation in which value, history, and materiality become constituted in the first place.
Monica Titton
[1] See Sara Callahan, Art + Archive. Understanding the Archival Turn in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022).
[2] See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
[3] Ibid., 3.
[4] See Liz Ricketts and Branson Skinner, Stop Waste Colonialism! Leveraging Extended Producer Responsibility to Catalyze a Justice-led Circular Textiles Economy (Accra: The Or Foundation, 2023), 8. This estimation results from observing the flow of containers and bales of clothing and from analyzing trade data and is based on an average of 5.25 pieces of clothing per kilogram.
[5] See ibid.
[6] For more on the retroactive upgrading of lines that are hardly canonized, see the so-called Issey Miyake Sport case in which a commercially unsuccessful sportswear line from the 1980s became reclassified as “archival” through reselling and platform practices and was then traded at exorbitant prices. Documented in “The Archive Fashion Problem,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vtoXzhscOc.
[7] See Mary Sarkodie (representative of the traders of the Kantamanto market) in a conversation with Clare Press, “Update after the Kantamanto Fire,” in: The Wardrobe Crisis Podcast, episode 249, https://thewardrobecrisis.com/podcast/ep-249-update-after-the-kantamanto-fire.
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