When Marc Jacobs presented his Spring/Summer 2026 collection titled Memory. Loss., he did more than reference the past, he structured the present around it. In his show notes, he described memories as a generative force –– something that forms what we create and what we choose to carry forward.
The references were not limited to the historical touchpoints that usually inspire designers. There were nods to Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian dress or Prada's 1990s runway aesthetics. However, the strongest citations were autobiographical. Jacobs revisited his own archive: The Grunge Collection for Perry Ellis (1993), Marc Jacobs Fall/Winter 1995, Spring/Summer 1998 and 2013, and Marc by Marc Jacobs Spring/Summer 2003.
This collection was not merely about recollection from season to season, it was about a return. The reason why this collection received so many positive reviews is simple: Marc Jacobs showed us something we all miss and are nostalgic about. The designer offered us a recognition. Jacobs not only revisited his past –– he stirred ours. When the archive resurfaces, so did the context in which we once encountered it –– the version of ourselves that no longer exists in quite the same way. Memory. Loss. suggested that memory is structural rather than simply sentimental.
And this leaves us with the question: if one of fashion’s most forward-facing minds builds the future by revisiting his own past, are we not doing the same? If Marc Jacobs reworks his own creation, not letting go of the memories, or rather, his earlier garments, why would we feel compelled to distance ourselves from our own nostalgia?
Designers are not the only ones who archive themselves through clothes. Open your wardrobe and take out every piece you haven’t been wearing in months just because it no longer feels like you. Perhaps it belongs to another aesthetic, relationship, or stage of life. Why does it remain?
Psychological research by professor Kiara R. Timpano and researcher Jamie H. Port (2020) suggests that attachment to meaningful objectsis not regression, it is regulation. In their study on nostalgic memorabilia related to clothing, researchers Masuch and Hefferon (2018) propose that “dress memorabilia” reinforces self-continuity by acting as a memory-storage complex. Clothes become physical evidence of who you were, who you are, and who you are becoming. The memories they hold, in this sense, are a part of a larger picture that stabilises identity. One cannot simply throw away part of their identity. What if it all falls apart?
Clothing as a repository of memory operates differently from a photograph or a souvenir. It does not simply document a moment –– it represents the period we lived through in this piece. It moved with your body. It absorbed the season, the emotion, the gesture, the feeling. It belonged to you in some period, and in doing so, it tells the story of who you were in it.As scholar Robyn Gibson writes in The Memory of Clothes:
Garments are layered with meaning because they witnessed our becoming.
Study by Lia Godoy Fuster and colleagues on heirloom coats and jackets echoes this idea. Such garments are relics associated with an emotional value. They hold affection related to the history they carry. A jacket you received at fifteen is still in your closet because it carries a story. The value of this garment lies not in trend longevity but in emotional affection for it. It is already a chapter rather than a piece of clothing.
To discard it feels disproportionate, disrespectful, and almost violent. Perhaps this is because clothing complicates the boundaries of the self. We often speak of fashion as an external expression. Yet, the garments we keep suggest something more intimate: they are the formation of us.
Clothes are a physical representation of your life happening. You are not keeping just clothes in your closet.
We all wish we could go back sometimes to the good moments, to touch the memory, because it seems like it will calm down our nostalgia. And maybe clothes simply give us this sense of touch, a tangible connection with a specific moment. As Gibson states, “In telling and talking about clothes, we reveal much about ourselves, our lives and the experiences that we drape around our bodies.”
And yet, nostalgia is a double-edged sword.
Nostalgia reshapes the past, smoothing edges and editing its complications. The garment becomes less about who we were and more about who we believe we were.
Clothes can unfold the past we hold on to. If clothing stabilises identity, letting it go can feel like destabilisation. Without the material anchor, are we still connected to that previous self?
The thing is that we often forget: we carry our past selves with us regardless. We are the coexistence of the past, present, and future in a single body. The body does not require proof of who we are, it is already evidence. The memories we carry are not located in cotton fibres or wool linings, but woven into our reflexes, our preferences, our fears, and our confidence.
Perhaps the difficulty of letting go lies in our mistrust of memory, our doubt that the person we were still meaningfully belongs to us. We fear that without the physical object, the moment will dissolve. Clothing becomes a safeguard against forgetting.
Yet forgetting is not always erasure. At times, it is a transformation.
“We allow our senses and instincts to guide us, respecting the appearance of these thoughts by preserving them,” Jacobs says. But memories can trick us into confusing preservation with permanence. There is a point when the coat stops representing memory and starts representing hesitation, when the blouse from a previous career quietly questions the current one, when the dress from a relationship feels less like tenderness and more like refusal to accept its ending.
Letting go of such garments is not a betrayal of the past. It is acknowledgement that the past has completed its work. And maybe we should work on differentiating our past selves from our present selves.
Marc Jacobs writes that hope is work. On the runway, this work meant turning archival memory into something new. In a personal wardrobe, it may mean trusting that identity does not collapse without material confirmation. Memory can live within us rather than hanging before us. Your former self can remain meaningful without determining who we must continue to be.
Maybe the real question is not why we keep garments we no longer wear, but whether we trust ourselves to continue without them. Maybe it is time to create something new from these memories.
Open your wardrobe. Take those clothes out. See them not as objects, but as memories you have been carrying. Each piece represents a former version of you –– the one who believed, loved, hoped, and lived. They were you, but that doesn’t mean they belong to who you are becoming.
At this point, clothes are no longer about fabrics. They are about which past self you wish to remember, which can remain integrated within you, and which you are ready to let go of. You may realise that you do not need the garment to remember. A thought may be enough.
Biblioghaphy:
1. Gibson, R. (2015). The memory of clothes. In SensePublishers eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6209-953-1 ;
2. Fuster, L. G., Jacob-Dazarola, R., Errazuriz-Infante, T., Flaten, R. G., & Munoz, F. (2024). Heirloom coats and jackets: The importance of affection for the design of emotionally durable garments. The International Journal of Design in Society, 19(1), 147–164. https://doi.org/10.18848/2325-1328/cgp/v19i01/147-164;
3. Masuch, C., & Hefferon, K. (2018). ‘It’s like a souvenir of something that was important’: The role of nostalgic memorabilia in psychological well-being. International Journal of Fashion Studies, 5(2), 347–361. https://doi.org/10.1386/infs.5.2.347_1;
4. Timpano, K. R., & Port, J. H. (2020). Object attachment and emotion (Dys)regulation across development and clinical populations. Current Opinion in Psychology, 39, 109–114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.08.013 ;
5. Why We Romanticize the Past. (2021, April 2). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/smarter-living/why-we-romanticize-the-past.html.
Photo Credits:
1. MARC JACOBS | BY ALEXANDRA ARNOLD
2. MARC JACOBS
3. MARC JACOBS | BY MATTE
4. MARC JACOBS | BY ALEXANDRA ARNOLD
5. MARC JACOBS | BY MATTE
7. MARC JACOBS | BY ALEXANDRA ARNOLD
8-9. MARC JACOBS | BY MATTE
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