Reimagining Heritage: Kris Van Assche’s Radical Minimalism in Fred Perry’s Uniform Code.

Fashion’s current obsession with the archive is not about history; it is about risk management. The past, endlessly recycled, offers a ready-made vocabulary that guarantees recognition while neutralising uncertainty. Logos are enlarged, references thickened, narratives simplified. What results is not memory but simulation: garments that gesture toward meaning without carrying any of its original conditions. Against this backdrop, Kris Van Assche’s collaboration with Fred Perry does something quietly subversive - it refuses to perform the archive at all.

This refusal is the collection’s most radical gesture. Rather than treating Fred Perry as a site of cultural myth, Van Assche approaches it as a working structure: clothing designed for repetition, wear, and social circulation rather than spectacle. There are no winks to subculture, no exaggerated callbacks, no curatorial footnotes stitched into the seams. The archive is not quoted because it is assumed - embedded in proportion, restraint, and function rather than surfaced as reference.

When everyone’s busy recycling the past, here’s a quiet reminder that sometimes less nostalgia means more edge.

This distinction matters. Most archival fashion today mistakes visibility for relevance. Heritage is flattened into recognisable motifs that can be consumed instantly and forgotten just as quickly. In this economy, history becomes decorative - a texture rather than a force. Van Assche’s intervention rejects this logic entirely. His work suggests that Fred Perry’s cultural weight was never located in its symbols alone, but in the behavioural discipline its clothes imposed and enabled. What made them powerful was not what they signified, but how they were used.

By stripping the collection of overt nostalgia, Van Assche exposes the hollowness of archive-as-content. There is no attempt to dramatise the brand’s past or to stage a dialogue with it. Instead, the clothes operate in a deliberately reduced register, one that assumes intelligence rather than demanding attention. This is not a revival. It is an extraction - of form from myth, of structure from story.

The silhouettes are telling in this regard. Adjusted rather than exaggerated, they resist the contemporary tendency toward archival distortion: the oversizing, the theatrical proportions that signal “relevance” through excess. Here, clarity replaces amplification. The garments hold shape without insisting on presence. They do not announce themselves as statements, and in doing so, make a sharper one.

This restraint also reads as a critique of how masculinity is currently styled in fashion. Much of today’s menswear oscillates between caricature and costume - either bloated with irony or embalmed in reverence. Fred Perry, historically, occupied a narrower but more exacting space: clothing that encoded authority without power, belonging without permission. Van Assche does not romanticise this position, but neither does he dilute it. The result is a masculinity that is composed rather than performed - one that allows contradiction without theatrics.

What emerges is a rare alignment between designer and brand logic. Van Assche has long been preoccupied with systems - uniforms, codes, the quiet rules that govern how clothing mediates social behaviour. Applied to Fred Perry, this sensibility does not modernise the archive so much as deactivate its mythology. The brand is returned to its operational core: clothes meant to be lived in, not explained.

In a cultural moment where fashion increasingly performs as narrative packaging - collections built to be decoded, captioned, and archived again - this collaboration insists on something unfashionable: durability as relevance. Not longevity as lifestyle rhetoric, but durability of form, of use, of restraint.

This is why the collection feels pointed without being polemical. Its critique is structural rather than declarative. By refusing to dramatise the archive, it exposes how exhausted that gesture has become. By offering clothing that works rather than performs, it reminds us that meaning in fashion was never generated by reference alone.

If most archive-driven collaborations trade in reassurance, this one trades in discipline. And in doing so, it makes a sharper claim than any revival could: that relevance is not inherited, quoted, or staged - it is maintained.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Fred Perry.