Story by Editor-in-Chief Carolina Ogliaro
Audrey Long speaks about clothing the way others speak about literature: with attention to intention, subtext and consequence. In her world, a garment is never decorative. It arrives at a moment, performs a function and leaves behind an impression that lingers long after the scene has ended.
Her archive, XOXO, Poship Girl, is devoted to a specific and strangely under-examined phenomenon: the clothes worn on television that taught viewers how to feel before they taught them how to think. They are remembered not for extravagance, but for the accuracy with which they served a moment, the blazer that announces ambition before the character dares to articulate it, the dress that marks a private turning point no dialogue could quite capture.
Long approaches these pieces neither sentimentally nor academically. She treats them as narrative instruments, shaped by the psychology of character and the instincts of costume designers who understood that clothing could do the emotional labor of a scene. A look does not endure because it was extravagant, but it endures because it appeared at exactly the right moment and carried the right amount of meaning.
What distinguishes her work is not simply research, though it is exacting, but discernment. She understands that repetition is the true measure of impact: the outfit remembered without prompting, recreated years later, softly absorbed into personal memory. Television fashion, in her reading, did not merely reflect taste but it rehearsed identity, offering viewers a visual language for longing, ambition and self-invention.
In examining these garments today, Long is not attempting to revive the past. She is identifying the moments when clothing slipped beyond trend and entered collective consciousness. Her archive does not ask what was popular. It asks what stayed.
This interview is a study in how fashion becomes memory and why some clothes, once seen, never leave us again.
Your work transforms screen‐worn garments into objects of cultural memory. How do you discern which pieces hold true emotional resonance and which are ephemeral,destined to vanish from memory?
I look for pieces that outlive their airtime. True resonance reveals itself through repetition: the outfit remembered without prompting, the look that resurfaces years later in essays, memes, Halloween costumes, and private Pinterest boards. Ephemeral fashion is often loud in the moment but silent in hindsight. The pieces that endure tend to appear at narrative fault lines: a breakup, an ascent, a moment of irreversible self-awareness. Those garments don’t simply clothe a character; they condense a feeling the audience learned to recognize as their own.
Each dress or blazer you preserve once existed in a story told on television. Do you approach these pieces as a historian cataloging events or as a storyteller interpreting character?
I think of myself less as a cataloguer of facts and more as a translator of character. Dates, episodes, and designers matter, but they’re scaffolding. What interests me is intention: why a costume designer chose restraint instead of excess, or authority before it was earned. A blazer can announce ambition long before dialogue does. A dress can soften a character the audience is being asked to forgive. The XOXO, Poship Girl archive is rigorously factual, but its presentation is interpretive by design.
Pop culture nostalgia shapes how a generation perceives style. What have you learned about the emotional power of fashion from the shows you curate?
Television teaches us how to feel through clothes before it teaches us how to read subtext. Long before viewers understand plot mechanics, they understand outfits. Shows like Gossip Girl and Sex and the City didn’t just sell silhouettes; they modeled desire, ambition, intimacy, and self-invention. Fashion became a shorthand for longing and belonging, a way of rehearsing identity before life required it.
You began this business in your early teens, turning fandom into a global archive. How did youth allow you a perspective that more seasoned insiders might overlook, and how do you guard that freshness now?
Starting young meant I hadn’t yet learned what was supposed to be dismissed. I didn’t know which references were considered “serious” and which were trivial, so I treated everything with equal curiosity. That absence of hierarchy allowed me to see television wardrobes as legitimate cultural artifacts early on. I protect that perspective now by staying loyal to instinct. I still ask how something feels before I ask how it will perform or be received.
Clothing in television exists at the intersection of fantasy and aspiration. How do you translate those iconic, sometimes heightened, costumes into a lived, wearable form for your collectors?
Television fashion is often heightened, but the goal isn’t to neutralize it. It’s to contextualize it. I show collectors how a piece functioned onscreen and then how it can function again. Styling, narrative framing, and restraint are key. When people understand the emotional logic behind a garment, it stops reading as costume and starts reading as intention.
Archival fashion requires patience, connoisseurship and a particular intuition for what will endure. How do you balance instinct with rigorous research when selecting pieces for your archive?
Instinct tells me where to look. Research tells me when to commit. I trust the initial pull toward a piece, then test it against production history, designer timelines, and narrative significance. Fashion that endures usually survives both desire and scrutiny. If it holds up under pressure, it earns its place.
It is said that clothes “carry the spirit of those who wore them.” When you handle a piece, do you feel the aura of its past life, and does that affect how you present it to the world?
I don’t experience that mystically, but I do experience it emotionally. Knowing what a garment witnessed onscreen changes how you handle it. That awareness informs how I photograph it, how I write about it, and how I introduce it to someone new. Presentation becomes an act of respect rather than promotion.
Your Instagram presence feels more like an editorial lens than an influencer feed. How do you navigate the tension between visibility, trendiness, and the deeper work of building a lasting fashion archive?
Social media is a tool, not the work itself. I use it editorially because the archive deserves framing, not constant reinvention. Visibility matters, but trend-chasing erodes meaning. I’m more interested in building a visual language that feels consistent and referential, even if that means moving slower than the algorithm would prefer.
Do you see television fashion, once dismissed by traditional critics, as deserving the same scholarly attention as haute couture? If so, how do you argue for its significance without diminishing its playful allure?
Absolutely. Television fashion shaped taste at scale, often more powerfully than couture ever could. The challenge is to examine it seriously without stripping it of pleasure. Its accessibility and playfulness are central to its cultural power, not something to apologize for.
As you continue to grow your archive and influence, do you imagine a world where
Fashion is defined by memory and history rather than the next season’s trend? How would you like your work to shape that legacy?
I imagine a future where fashion is valued for what it remembers, not just what it replaces. If my work contributes to that shift, I hope it encourages people to see clothing as narrative inheritance. Not simply something new to acquire, but something meaningful to carry
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Audrey Long’s archive operates without urgency. Pieces are not positioned as rediscoveries, nor framed as corrections to fashion history. They are presented with the assumption that their relevance is already established, that anyone who recognizes them needs no explanation.
The methodology is consistent: identify what has persisted, verify its provenance, and allow it back into circulation with as little interference as possible. Some garments carry an obvious charge, attached to scenes replayed endlessly. Others resonate in a more soft way, recalled not for spectacle but for timing, for when they appeared and what shifted immediately afterward.
There is no attempt to resolve television fashion into a thesis or to extract a lesson from it. What remains instead is a record of decisions, by costume designers, by audiences, and by Long herself, about what continues to hold attention once novelty has passed and carries momentum into collective memory.
