American fashion has always had a complicated relationship with its own history. It moves quickly, reinvents itself constantly, borrows from the street and the runway with equal enthusiasm, and rarely stays still long enough to consider what it has already created.
At the start of New York Fashion Week, eBay and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) offered a different proposition: look back, not out of nostalgia, but to understand how American fashion arrived here.
Endless Runway: The Archive transformed decades of design into a one-night exploration of the clothes, designers and cultural moments that helped define American style. Curated by acclaimed editor and stylist Carlos Nazario, the immersive exhibition assembled more than 150 rare and archival pieces, creating a physical timeline where fashion history could be experienced rather than simply referenced.
It was less about presenting old clothes behind glass and more about examining the relationship between fashion and memory.
When Clothes Become Cultural Artifacts
The most compelling pieces in an archive are rarely important because of design alone. They accumulate meaning through the people who wore them, the moments in which they appeared and the cultural conversations surrounding them.
That idea ran throughout Endless Runway.
Among the archival highlights was a vintage Bob Mackie beaded silk gown worn by Miley Cyrus during The Voice in 2017. Another piece carried an entirely different kind of celebrity history: the Marc Jacobs Fall 2001 black jersey trompe l’oeil dress worn by Winona Ryder during her highly publicized 2002 shoplifting trial.
There was also a Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis American flag sweater famously modeled by Julia Roberts, connecting the designer’s provocative early work with a distinctly American visual symbol.
A Tom Ford for Gucci Spring/Summer 1996 mini dress represented another pivotal era, when Ford’s sensual approach to glamour helped reshape the international fashion conversation of the 1990s.
Michael Kors Collection reached into its own history with a crystal-embroidered slip dress originally created in 1990 and later recreated for the house’s 40th anniversary collection.
Seen together, the garments illustrated something fashion understands particularly well: clothing can outlive the season for which it was created.
A dress can become associated with a celebrity. A sweater can become shorthand for a designer’s point of view. A runway piece can eventually become a collectible. Years later, those same objects can tell us something about the era that produced them.
The American Fashion Archive Is Bigger Than One Aesthetic
Part of what made the exhibition significant was the range of designers represented.
American fashion has never belonged to one school of thought. It can mean the polished sportswear associated with legacy houses, the theatricality of designers who embraced spectacle, the experimentation of downtown New York, the influence of streetwear, or the designers who continually challenge conventional ideas of luxury.
Pieces available through the accompanying auction included contributions directly from the archives of Calvin Klein Collection, DVF, Jason Wu, Michael Kors Collection, Proenza Schouler, Tommy Hilfiger, Vera Wang and Willy Chavarria.
Additional archival finds sourced through eBay expanded that story through designers including Anna Sui, Bob Mackie, Donna Karan, Halston, Isaac Mizrahi, Marc Jacobs, Ralph Lauren, Todd Oldham, Tom Ford and Virgil Abloh.
That breadth matters.
Together, those names represent dramatically different interpretations of what American fashion can look like. Minimalism sits beside glamour. Uptown sophistication exists alongside street culture. Traditional luxury shares space with designers who disrupted the very definition of luxury.
Rather than attempting to reduce American fashion to a single aesthetic, Endless Runway made the case that its identity has always been found in the collision of many.
Fashion History You Could Actually Own
The retrospective also challenged one of the traditional boundaries surrounding fashion archives.
These pieces were not simply there to be admired.
From inside the exhibition, Jenna Lyons hosted an eBay Live auction that allowed collectors and fashion enthusiasts to bid on select pieces from the Archive in real time. Guests could follow the sale from within the space, while viewers elsewhere could participate digitally, turning what might traditionally have been a closed fashion-industry experience into something accessible beyond the room.
The auction also created an interesting shift in how fashion history changes hands.
An archival garment can begin as a designer’s creative idea, become part of a runway collection, enter a private wardrobe, surface years later on the resale market and eventually become recognized as an important artifact from a particular moment in fashion.
Resale, in that sense, becomes more than commerce. It can become a form of preservation.
Designers Joseph Altuzarra and Claire Sullivan joined Lyons during the live auction to explore that connection from their own perspectives. Altuzarra spotlighted an archival Altuzarra dress from 2015, while Sullivan brought attention to a vintage I ♥ NY T-shirt from the 1970s.
Placed within the same conversation, the two pieces reflected the expansive definition of American fashion that the exhibition embraced. One came through the traditional designer system. The other emerged from popular visual culture. Both carried stories worth preserving.
Proceeds from the eBay Live auction benefited the CFDA, connecting the preservation of fashion’s past with support for its broader creative community.
The People Looking Back, and Forward
The evening drew a cross-section of fashion, entertainment and culture, including Carlos Nazario, Jenna Lyons, Heron Preston, Joseph Altuzarra, Claire Sullivan, Naomi Watts, Kai Schreiber, Carolyn Murphy, Natalia Bryant and Coco Rocha, among others.
Their presence reinforced another reality about archives: history changes depending on who is looking at it.
For an established designer, an archival piece might represent an earlier creative chapter. For a stylist, it can become a reference point. For a collector, it may be an object of rarity and craftsmanship. For a younger generation discovering a designer through resale, the same garment can feel completely new.
That cycle has become increasingly important as vintage and archival fashion continue to influence contemporary wardrobes.
Pieces once considered unmistakably tied to the 1990s or early 2000s are being rediscovered by consumers who may have been children, or not yet born, when those collections first appeared. Silhouettes return. Styling ideas are reinterpreted. Forgotten collections suddenly become coveted.
Fashion’s archive is no longer sitting quietly in storage.
It is circulating.
An Endless Runway, Indeed
There was something particularly fitting about beginning New York Fashion Week by looking backward.
Fashion Week is designed around the next collection, the next season and the next idea. The industry’s attention is almost permanently fixed on what is coming.
Endless Runway: The Archive offered a reminder that the future of fashion does not emerge in isolation.
Every designer inherits references. Every generation rediscovers something. Every supposedly new silhouette exists within a much longer conversation about identity, culture, craftsmanship and personal expression.
Through Carlos Nazario’s curatorial perspective, more than 150 pieces became evidence of that conversation, connecting names as varied as Halston, Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs, Vera Wang, Tommy Hilfiger, Virgil Abloh and Willy Chavarria.
Some pieces became famous because of the runway.
Others became famous because of who wore them.
And some became important only after enough time had passed for fashion to understand what they represented.
That may be the most compelling idea behind Endless Runway. An archive is not where fashion goes when it is finished.
Sometimes, it is where fashion begins again.
