Murakami returned to Vuitton. McQueen reissued the Skull Scarf. When growth slows, the houses dig, and what they pull up is a memory you didn’t know you’d buy.

The most important new handbag of 2025 came out in 2003.

In June, Louis Vuitton re-released its Takashi Murakami collection, Multicolore Monogram, Cherry Blossom Speedy, Panda charms, the entire turn-of-the-millennium fever dream, twenty-two years after Marc Jacobs introduced the original. Zendaya fronted the campaign. The bags sold inside of a week. Within a fortnight, the original 2003 Multicolore on the resale market, which had been quietly declining for a decade, doubled in value. A piece of vintage Vuitton suddenly read as an inheritance, not eBay.

I couldn’t help but wonder: when did the only direction in fashion become backwards?

The answer is when growth got hard. Luxury sales softened in 2024. The aspirational customer paused, the Chinese market hesitated, and the wholesale channels contracted. The houses needed a story that did not require persuading anyone of anything new. Heritage was already inside the building, fully paid for, gathering dust in an archive in Suresnes or Florence or Saint-Ouen. The strategy more or less wrote itself.

Photo: Alexander McQueen reissued Skull Scarf, 2025

Alexander McQueen reissued its mid-2000s Skull Scarf, a piece that defined the brand under Lee McQueen himself and that had been quietly retired for years. The reissue is identical to the original in scale and silk, with one small differentiation in the selvedge for collectors. Coach has been mining its 1970s archive, Bonnie Cashin’s Cashin Carry, the Court bag, and the Tabby, a 1973 silhouette revived in 2020, which now anchors the entire brand. Schiaparelli, under Daniel Roseberry, has rebuilt itself almost entirely on Elsa Schiaparelli’s surrealist motifs from the 1930s. Bottega Veneta reissued the Cabat, the unstructured Intrecciato tote it discontinued in 2018; it is now the most difficult Bottega to source.

Photo: Coach Tabby bag 2025 campaign

The reason this works is psychological as much as commercial. Nostalgia, as a category of feeling, requires authority. A house with a hundred and seventy years of archive can credibly sell you the past because it owned the past. A startup cannot. Murakami x Vuitton is the master case: the collaboration is twenty-two years old, which means the customer who bought one in 2003 is now forty-five, the customer who wanted one but could not afford it is also forty-five, and the customer who is twenty-two is encountering it for the first time as a piece of recovered modernism. Three audiences. One bag. Same warehouse.

The cynical reading is that heritage is the cheapest possible R&D. A reissue requires no new sketch, no new mood board, no new fitting cycle. The mold exists. The customer exists. The marketing writes itself. The romantic reading is that fashion, like cinema and architecture, has phases when the most interesting move is to look honestly at the past and admit, without irony, that it was correct.

Photo: Bottega Veneta Cabat Tote Reissue

Both readings are right, and the math is gorgeous. Vintage Vuitton at auction outperformed the S&P 500 in three of the past five years. The Hermès Birkin, in certain sizes, outperformed gold. Archival demand from collectors has built a secondary market the houses no longer ignore, they participate in it, with brand-run resale, archive exhibitions, and museum-grade documentation that flatters the original collector and re-trains the new one.

The future of luxury, for the next eighteen months, will look suspiciously like its past. Murakami is back. The Skull Scarf is back. The Cabat is back. The catwalks of Milan and Paris read, with surprising frequency, like a well-curated estate sale. Nostalgia is the most expensive thing on the rack. The houses understood that before we did. They always do.

Photo: Schiaparelli Archival Surrealist look by Daniel Roseberry