Feature

Collectible Gucci

The wearers exist as a collector species because of the very corporate fashion hegemony that Ford did so much to create. When he designed a dress, it was photographed for every magazine, paraded down some red carpet somewhere by someone terribly famous, and photographed some more. It was knocked off before it even made it to a store. And so everyone with a sense of individuality in her style turned to vintage stores for things she wouldn’t see coming and going. The other kind of collector fixates on the objects themselves, on their detail, on their significance in the unfurling ribbon of fashion history. “That’s the Hamish collector,” says Mark Walsh, a collector and dealer who sells to individuals as well as major museums. “He collects for collecting’s sake.”

Walsh’s clients may not all fit that description, but he certainly does. “People who wear make us cringe,” he says. “They want to, like, sweat all over a Vionnet. They do a couple of seasons, and then they’re gone and their stuff is back at auction, or resold at Ina.”

Matters of wear aside, abundance is a factor in determining what the value of Ford’s pieces will be. “It’s not couture; it’s ready-to-wear, so there’s a different degree of importance,” says Cameron Silver, the owner of Decades, a shop in L.A. with regular trunk shows here at Barneys. “These clothes were mass-produced, so it’s not like getting a rare Dior piece from 1955.” The ubiquity of all that Gucci—with the exception of handworked pieces, like a delicate feathered minidress, or the hand-beaded jeans that were produced in far smaller numbers—will keep prices for Ford collectibles lower than those of comparable but older pieces. “Everything relevant to designers used to be quite different,” says Rita Watnick, who owns Lily et Cie, a Beverly Hills collectibles shop with a red-carpet clientele. “With Norrell or Galanos or Trigère, it was more likely that they only made several dresses, or even just one. Now we have this very mass, very corporate-conglomerate notion of what luxury is, and so we make tons of ‘the’ piece. Which means that as a collector, I don’t need to run out and get them. In fifteen or twenty years, I’ll decide if I’m interested. There’ll be plenty around.”

Still, if Ford never designs again and becomes, as some have predicted, the next Joel Schumacher (the movie director is another fashion-world dropout), his prices will increase significantly. If he goes on to Versace, or some other house, and keeps creating iconic pieces for decades to come, the early ones will still have special value, in the way that the few collections Karl Lagerfeld produced for Chloé in the seventies are desperately sought-after now. And if the museum world decides to promote Ford, that will have its own impact on collectible prices. “It translates something accessible that you saw in Colette into an art object,” says Walsh. Ford himself seems to have planned well for this possibility. “He was always very into museum placement,” Walsh continues. “A lot of designers don’t think of that. He was conscious of his place in fashion.” The Met already has a comprehensive Ford collection, but there won’t be a show quite yet. “The museum doesn’t allow monographic shows on living designers,” says Koda, “because there’s the sense that not all fashion is art. A good portion has to be about commerce.”

Like museums, collectors would be wise to have patience; the real money is to be made by hanging on to the clothes for a long time—Walsh suggests it’s a good twenty years before a piece comes to its full value—though, of course, there are defining events that make prices rise and fall. “Back in the eighties, a Balenciaga could be purchased at auction for less than it sold for originally,” says Koda. “The surge in the market right now is being precipitated by the wearables market. You can still get important historical garments for very little if they are more extreme. The value of a Fortuny that is black is higher than the cost of a Fortuny in a sumptuous color, because it is more wearable.”

Wearability may, in the end, wind up affecting availability. “A lot of people really liked these clothes and actually wore them out,” says Valenti, “which means they’re more likely to just give them to Goodwill rather than consign them.” Once things are given to large charities, they can really wind up anywhere: Chicago, Tulsa, Bismarck. And if they don’t sell there, they are often shipped as part of relief packages to Third World countries. “Oh, God,” Valenti says, considering the possibility. “Do you think there’s some poor Ethiopian or Somalian woman wearing one of the jersey dresses? It’s probably all cut up.”

Tom Ford's Look
Images from recent Gucci collections