RL: How did you get into this business, and what does the day-to-day work look like – are you working around the clock?

JAC: Okay. Yes, I tend to work around the clock, but we can get back into that after I try to give you the quick synopsis of how I got into this. The ‘Digital Archivist’ is actually the name of my archiving software that I created. It's what we use to catalog all of our clients' collections. My business itself is called The Wardrobe. I started my career as a fashion journalist. I was a journalism major at NYU undergrad, and all I wanted to do was work at Vogue. I started in the industry while I was still in school. My first internship was at City Magazine with Christene Barberich, who then went on to found Refinery29. I worked for a bunch of different startups, and I kind of came close to working at Vogue. I was working on a startup for I think it was going to be like the U.S. version of GALA magazine, maybe. I don't remember who published that. This is going back like 25 years ago. But I was working on this start-up and this woman Katrina Szish was working with me and she said, “Listen, I don't know what you want to do, but I just left Vogue, you know, I'm freelancing now, and the woman who replaced me needs an assistant and I think you'd be great.” I was like, “Yes, this is amazing.” My dream job is falling into my lap! I go to Barney's, buy a new outfit, and don’t get the job. But I was still hellbent on Vogue. I was like, how can I stand out? What can I do to make Anna Wintour notice me? Okay, I'm gonna get my Master's in the History of Fashion and Textiles at FIT. I will know everything there is to know about the history of fashion. I will be an amazing fashion journalist because I'll understand all of the historical importance and context of everything. I'll try to intern at the Costume Institute, and I'll just have this rock-solid resume that they can't ignore. Very naive, I didn't realize that that probably wouldn't matter. The program I pursued in grad school was actually a Museum Studies program. While you're learning the history of fashion, you're also learning how to care for pieces vis-à-vis collections management and conservation work; how to mount an exhibition, all about different fabrics and textiles, etc. You even get a cursory course in the history of design. Like furniture and architecture’s greatest hits. Most people who do this program want to work in a museum, and what I quickly realized was that working in a museum was similar to working in publishing. At a magazine, you generally had to wait for somebody to die or retire in order to move up the masthead. It’s basically the same career trajectory in a museum. The pay in museums was equally atrocious to the pay in journalism, but I had in the back of my head, like, “Oh, this is kind of cool. No one's doing this as a business. You know, maybe this could be a consulting business at some point.” But truly, I just wanted to go back to publishing. When I graduated, I interviewed at Style.com with Candy Pratts Price, who was a legendary editor.

I believe she worked at Bloomingdale's in the 70s and had a part in their amazing window displays. She also had worked at Charles Jourdan, and my mom was their house model in the 70s, so I felt very hopeful! But I also interviewed with Tom Ford’s new company at the time; he was looking for an archivist, and he had recently left Gucci. Truth to be told, I didn't want an archiving job. I had kind of fallen into doing a few archive projects while I was in school, and I was like, “ugh”, my experience was not amazing. For one of them, I worked in a horrible, filthy warehouse all summer without any air conditioning (NB: that was not a proper archive! The gallery that was hosting the show I was working on gave us their kind of stepchild warehouse where they sent pieces that artists had not picked up after shows to use to go through this designer’s archive in preparation for this exhibition. It was not really a proper art storage place.) I also worked in Calvin Klein’s original dreary basement archive, vacuuming garments all day.   Archiving can be physically demanding work. You're moving heavy boxes around all the time and sweating. On my first day at the Calvin archive, I wore a cute outfit and Louboutins. Big mistake. Archive work is less “fashion” and more utility clothing, lol. Long story short, Tom offered me a job and I did not go to Style.com. I thought to myself, well, maybe if I do a really good job for him, he'll tell Anna Wintour about me in a couple of years! I started working in-house for Tom, and I got pregnant with my son almost immediately. It was a kind of a great race to do everything and get everything up and organized before I went on maternity leave. I came back and worked a little bit after my son was born for maybe like a year or two. At that point, I had set up everything Tom had at the time I was hired, and also started to collect back his designs from his tenures at Gucci and YSL. I said, “I don't think you need me full time. I still want to work for you a couple of days a week, but I'd like to start my own business and offer my services to other designers and collectors.” At that point, I was thinking, there are probably wealthy women in New York City who would be excited to have “Tom Ford's archivist” help them with their closet. Still thinking, like very small, though. But that's how it all started. I was lucky that Tom gave me his blessing, and Tom Mendenhall, his CEO at the time, and Lara Modjeski – his Director of Brand Image, were instrumental in making that happen for me. So I worked for several designers, including Jason Wu, Proenza Schouler, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, PVH Archives, Ralph Rucci, Marc Jacobs, and Gabriela Hearst. Then, about 12 years ago, I started to get calls from entertainers, which was especially exciting to me because you know that I love the nexus of music and fashion a lot. Now, I primarily work with entertainers, and it's wild because I can't even disclose publicly who the vast majority of my clients are. I got a call yesterday from somebody who was like, “You know, I knew you were the person [to hire] because I couldn't tell from your Instagram who you work with, and I love that.” and it's so funny because archiving is not that serious, but it's like these, kind of cloak and dagger secrets. I can't publicize the majority of the things I take care of on a daily basis, but they are pretty exciting.

But anyway, do I work around the clock? Yes. You know, I run my own business, so I've answered the phone at 3 in the morning before when a client decided they wanted every shoe sent to a tour on another continent. So yeah, I'm used to fielding requests like that. On a day to day, I might be doing an intake for a client where we're photographing, cataloguing, and digitizing everything that they're archiving. Then, we spend time ensuring all of that stuff is repaired, cleaned, and stored properly. Is it safe to hang? Does it need to be stored flat in an archival box? Does it mean that neither of those things will work, and we need to put it on a dress form for storage? We research the pieces to have as robust a cataloging record of them as we can, etc.

RL: Might I ask how big how many square feet this place is? 

JAC: 30,000… but I should say that some of my clients have private rooms, so it's as if they have a little mini museum. My team and I are like the collections managers and curators of their personal museum. We also have a managed storage room that only we can go into, and that's for people who have a rack of clothes or two that they want to preserve, but they don't necessarily need, like a 5,000 square foot room dedicated just to them. But there's a lot of confusion around what I do because I get calls all the time from people who are like, “Can I borrow from your archive? Do you have anything special that so-and-so can wear?” And I'm like, “Well, no.” I could put you in touch with the publicist of my client, but a lot of people don't realize that we maintain the personal archives of our clients. 

RL: Yeah, you can’t just pick and pull 

JAC: Essentially, yes, but it's wild because we have clients that are like, “Yes, this is a museum, we're preserving it.” I have clients who send me things right from the runway; they know that they're saving, that they're maybe going to donate to an institution eventually, or something like that. Then in other circumstances, it's more of a lending library, because people pull all the time, designers go all the time to inform whatever they're working on this season, and a lot of entertainers wind up pulling a lot. People might think that things come to us to die, but it's not true. Clients might have tons of looks that were made for a tour that didn't get used, and they want to try to repurpose them and use them for another tour or another event. They might say, “Okay, we know that so and so feels comfortable dancing in this kind of shoe, so we wanna see how the shaft is boned. We wanna see what kind of zippers were used on those body suits, et cetera, et cetera”. So there's a lot of in and out, and in essence, sample tracking. 

RL: Working in some fashion designer brands' archives, what has this industry and the big-name brands taught you the most? 

JAC: That there is nothing new under the sun. I'm sure you've heard that quote before. But, you know, even if something is unique, and like *the* new idea, usually it has ties to the past in some way. In fashion, there's a lot of value in these archives. It depends on the client – I just kind of explained some of the ways it's important for an entertainer. Things that they've worn in public are highly valuable, and, you know, they'll probably have an institution dedicated to them one day. (Think Graceland or Paisley Park.) Maybe these things are eventually gonna go to the Costume Institute or the Smithsonian. For a designer, of course, preserving their archives is a way of securing their legacy, but they also use archives because, a lot of times, they revisit ideas from their past seasons. Even if it's not something that you've seen before, it might be something that was canceled, like the idea wasn't fully developed, and they want to go back to it and try it again, or change it slightly, or whatever. I mean, it's probably not a secret anymore, but most designers use vintage as inspiration. A lot of them have vast vintage inspiration libraries. They go out and buy things, collect things, and then they kind of take these ideas and synthesize them into their own work. For PVH, for example, in addition to helping with the Calvin and Tommy archives proper, we organized and digitized the vintage collections of all of the brands under the PVH aegis, and created one huge vintage inspiration library that anybody who works for the company can go and utilize. I don't remember how many thousands of samples it was, but pretty much every decade, genre, designer, whatever you could think of – even ethnic clothing and uniforms –  they have. A lot of times, they go out and different design teams would buy the same things over and over again. We’d be like, “You don't need a hundred military jackets that look the same,” it's a waste of money. It's a waste of resources. You guys don't even know what you have. Let's put it all in one place, organize it, and digitize it. 

RL: I have a boatload of magazines. I'm a collector, and I have a scanner, and so you say digitized, and I hear that. I know it's kind of boring too, like it's repetitive. Maybe not for you, I can't say that, but like I have to sit down and scan all these images every day. 

JAC: It does. I mean, with the clothing, obviously we're photographing it, and when I say digitizing it, we're photographing it, cataloguing it, and then pairing the photo to the information that's in the database. But I think it takes a certain personality type to do it happily. I can sit there and catalog stuff all day, and other people are like, “This is so mind-numbingly boring, how do you do this?” My husband and I work together, and he does all the photography, and also maintains everything in the warehouse, like he’s the one dealing with the HVAC and everything that makes the bones of the facility appropriate for housing archives. He'll be like, “I haven't gone outside all day. I have to get out of this place. I'm depressed from not seeing the sun,” and I'm like, “What?”, like I don't even notice. 

RL: You initially wanted to be a fashion journalist. How come you changed your mind to a completely different career in the fashion industry, and was that transition easy?

JAC: I kind of fell into it, but like it was because it kind of just happened and I was rolling with it, you know? 

RL: Did Tom reach out to you and say, “This is what I want.” How did he find you? 

JAC: Well, it was his people, let's say. The director of his brand image. They approached the woman who had been in charge of my program at FIT… and she recommended a few of us. 

RL: Do you know any of the other people you were in school with?

JAC: Yeah, of course. There were like 20 people in the entire program.

RL: Oh, wow, okay, so it was very intimate.

JAC: Yes, so now it's changed. NYU had a program, so does Parsons, and I feel like they are all expanding now. I always thought FIT was the superior program because there's a museum associated with it, and we were able to utilize it as part of the program. Parsons was great for the theory, but when people would come and intern with me or work for me, they didn't have a lot of the technical hand skills that we learned at FIT. Everybody wants to be a curator, but truly, those jobs are so few and far between. People in the field are better served by taking the conservation route – I’m always looking to hire people with practical skills. People approach me constantly and lead with “I’m so interested in the history of fashion”. Well, yeah, you should be.  But what skills do you have that I can utilize in caring for these pieces?

RL: You're from New York, so it was pretty easy to just go into the city and go to school, right? You're familiar with all the surrounding areas.

JAC: Oh, for sure, yeah, born and raised New Yorker.

RL: I read you on the Entertainment Tonight Show and the Today Show. How impactful was that for you?

JAC: It didn't matter because that was before I had my company, and this was back when I was like 24 or 25. I was the senior fashion writer for Life & Style and part of the launch team. When I started there, it was pitched to me as a weekly version of InStyle, that it would be kind of a servicey, but very fashion-forward. It was really like a kind of watershed moment for tabloid culture. It was when Rachel Zoe was styling Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie, and that kind of  Boho moment, and it quickly devolved into a magazine that covered all of that kind of stuff. Not knocking it, but “Who Wore it Better” wasn't really what interested me personally. I didn't want to keep writing about that kind of stuff. Since I was their Senior Fashion Writer, they sent me for media training and to be able to go on shows and talk about general trends and red carpet fashion as an expert, so that was the genesis of that. 

RL: So I listened to you live on Liv Perez? 

JAC: “Let's Get Dressed” is her podcast.

RL: I heard you two discussing what people are archiving the most these days. You gave out names like Peter Mullier for Alaia, McQueen, Dior by Galliano, and even Jonathan Anderson's Loewe. I was like, “Okay, yeah, we do think about a decade in advance or even longer.” But I'm curious, name some older designers that people are fond of, that they like to collect.

JAC: Yves Saint Laurent, always. It's funny, the way things are so cyclical. I personally think his best work is up until like, the early 80s. But now I'm seeing younger people interested in his late 80s, early 90s pieces, which are very bourgeois looking. But like I said, there's only a finite amount of this stuff, so I guess people are making do with what they can find in the market!  Ossie Clark is another favorite of mine personally.  I collect his work, as do many other people. Thea Porter was another great 70s designer. All of the 60s designers like Courreges, Rabbane, and even original Balenciaga from the early 60s.

RL: Love Courreges, the “Space age.” What about like 1930s, 1940s, we got Elsa Schiparelli, Coco Chanel?

JAC: That stuff is really hard to find, of course, you know? Some of it is 100 years old. Most of that is in museum collections at this point. It's interesting. There’s so much fascination with older names. I saw that they have revived the Jean Patou label. I imagine that most people buying it don’t realize he was famous for making knitwear and tennis clothing after World War 1, and that he is long dead?

RL: What do you know about Claire McCardell?

JAC: Claire McCardell was an amazing American designer. She was doing super modern things in the 1950s. Like I'm not a huge fan of that 50s look of like the tiny waist and the restrictive clothing and the very matchy matchy look, but she was doing really kind of functional, modern pieces. You can see some of it reflected in Phoebe Philo’s Celine. Bonnie Cashin was another great American mid-century designer.  

RL: What is the oldest piece of clothing in your wardrobe, and how have you been able to maintain it? 

JAC: Okay, so I have items that are older than I have collected over the years, but the oldest thing that I own personally that I've had forever is a Rolling Stones T-shirt that I've had since the early 90s. I got it in the East Village, and the thing has holes, it's sheer, it's like totally see-through now. I have to be careful, how and where I wear it, but she has just stayed the course with me. You know, she survived every move, every boyfriend, whatever. In terms of my personal vintage. I have things from the 60s that are the oldest pieces, and, you know, you want to take into account how you're storing them? Like I mentioned earlier, “Is it safe to hang? Should it be stored flat, keeping it clean, keeping the environment around it clean?” I just did an interview for T, the Style Magazine. I was like, “I can't impart how important it is to clean all the dust in your closet because moths and bugs and stuff are attracted to it. That kind of stuff is really bad for your clothes, not just the bugs themselves, but dust has a kind of gritty hand to it, and it can abrade the fabric over time, especially if the humidity in your space fluctuates a lot. So, keeping things clean and trying to keep them in a stable environment, where the temperature and humidity are as consistent as they can be. People often want to store things in attics or basements, and those are like the two worst places. 

RL: That checks out. People don't know what they're doing.

JAC: No, I mean, look, it makes sense. You're like, “I have this extra room in my house. I'll keep this extra stuff there – out of the way.” Then all of a sudden the basement's flooded, or the attic's 800 degrees. The attic swings wildly. If you live in a place that has seasons, the attic is a million degrees in the summer, and then it's freezing in the winter.  It’s actually worse than the basement. 

RL: Moving on to music, might I ask who your favorite musicians are and how they've inspired you, your work, and your wardrobe?

JAC: Absolutely. I love all different kinds of music and all different genres. But, I'm a big classic rock girl. The Stones, Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, Led Zeppelin. I also love Motown and 70s R&B and Soul, the Commodores, and James Brown. I mean, I could go on forever. If you give me a genre, I could tell you who I love, but classic rock probably had the biggest impact on my wardrobe. I wrote my master's thesis about the Rolling Stones' wives and girlfriends because they have been so instrumental in how we dress, even still today. Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Bianca Jagger, Jerry Hall. Maybe Jerry has not had as much direct influence on the way that we dress as the other women have, but her photos with Helmut Newton, Norman Parkinson are very influential. They were all extremely unique women who influenced how the boys in the band behaved and dressed.

RL: Collecting is a skill. Can you elaborate on that?

JAC: Right, so you need to be aware of the trends. Things are cyclical, the same way they are in any other business – whether you're talking about art, architecture, interior design, or contemporary fashion, there are trend cycles. You need to be able to tell what's going to stand the test of time, understand which designers are going to be impactful in the course of the history of fashion, which pieces within a designer’s canon are the ones worth collecting, et cetera, et cetera. Similar to collecting art, you know? You also need to understand construction, fabrics, techniques, authenticity, provenance, etc. But that said, for the lay person, it's important to always collect what you love. I think if you're just a fashion-obsessed person and not doing this as a business, whether it's art or fashion, you should just be buying the things that speak to you that you love.

RL: Name a radioactive piece currently sitting in your cart?

JAC: I had to think about it because there's nothing radioactive in my cart right now, but it's more about how things that were very trendy, a few years ago, of that moment and time. Nobody wants that piece anymore right now, and therefore, you could probably get it for under $100 on eBay or the RealReal. That said, like, within my own archive and pieces, I've been revisiting a lot of my lates 00s and early teens pieces again, and I'm like, “Oh, this is so great”, like a lot of my Proenza stuff, Chloe stuff from that moment, even some of my personal Tom for YSL and Gucci pieces. I've been enjoying trotting those things out again, and I'm also like, “How can they be 20 years old already?”

RL: What is your favorite element on the periodic table and why?

JAC: Great question. I assume you did this because you read that I needed to take college-level chemistry as a prerequisite for my Master’s degree…Carbon.

RL:  What is your most treasured Gucci by Tom Ford collection? 

JAC: Oh my God, okay, so 1999. Spring/Summer or Autumn/Winter, those are like my two favorite seasons, and for YSL, it would be Autumn/Winter 2003. It was inspired by the movie “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant”.   

RL: So, what is your favorite film?

JAC: Oh my God, I don't know. I'd have to get back to you… I can't think on the spot

RL: Favorite director?

JAC: Kubrick 

RL: Oh, you're awesome. One thing you wish people knew about the fashion archiving business?

JAC: That it's not as simple as just collecting some stuff and having a rail of clothing and thinking that you're an archivist, you know? In the same vein that the word “curate” has gotten so overused, there's a lot that goes into it, you know, there's a lot of learning the history. There's a lot of science and skill behind it. I’m also a little bemused when vintage sellers refer to themselves as archivists. If you are selling clothing, you’re not archiving it, you know? No one is paying you to maintain their archive.

RL: Where do you see the business of fashion archiving in 5 to 10 years?

JAC: I think it's going to expand. We were talking about this when we first began our conversation. So many more people are interested in it now. People want to look unique, and they want to wear things on the red carpet that stand out. Plus, designers aren't even really creating many red carpet looks at this particular moment in time, but that's a whole other conversation – so vintage is the only way to do that. More and more designers see the value in preserving their archives. Even 20 years ago, only a handful of designers bothered to save their archives. So there is now more opportunity for people to have a career in the field.

Interview conducted on April 16, 2025