Academy of Archivists

We’re not your usual marketing company.  In fact, we don’t even like the word marketing, but we figured we had to give you something to hold on to. We use things like a quick and biting wit, the element of surprise and an eye for talent and beauty to light our path through the jungle of oversaturated branding.  We can do cool things on a tight budget.  We figure you can do a lot with a little, and sometimes less is more... but don’t worry, we could rock your big bankroll, too.  We can’t sum up who we are in one sentence, but if we tried, we’d say something like, “The Academy of Archivists is an independent modern resource working outside of traditional lines for companies, brands and artists in the creative fields.” And if we had to make a list of what we do, we’d mention digital solutions, virtual identities, event planning, marketing (there’s that word again!) and branding, art direction, and visual research, to name a few. We can tell you that what we do for you, and with you, will make your company better. Need help? info@wearchive.info

ESSAYS : Rough Luxe or The New Antiquarians Recently, my husband and I purchased a house.   It’s contemporary and modern, my husband’s dream.   I’m more an off-the-grid kind of girl (at least that’s the fantasy).  The other day the latest issue of Sunset Magazine was sitting on my eco-marble Corian kitchen island, open for days to this article about a young, hip couple and their two toddlers living the pioneer life as caretakers to a real Homestead in Montana.  Finally my husband asked me if I was trying to give him some kind of hint regarding my unhidden desire to move out of L.A. to raise Bantam chickens and rescue horses. Suffice it to say, I will not be going for the mid-century modern look in our home.  A few months ago I discovered this site called Pinterest, which is basically crack for people who like to rip pages out of magazines and save them for “future inspiration”.  Pinterest lets you pull images off of any site and save them to a virtual pin-board.  This is an exceptional tool for anyone who has clients they need to show visual imagery to, or for crazy people like me, who now has 29 boards.  Yes.  29.  You can see them here: www.pinterest.com/alisonw. I pinned images of vintage pieces and furnishings with texture and grain, things that reference history and tradition without adhering to a particular style.  And yet, somehow they all seemed to go together, finding their own cohesion.  I was wondering how that was happening…until I came upon a mention from The Future Laboratory about the new trend of Rough Luxe.  “Rough luxe is, at first glance, a study in Contradictions, an attempt to reconcile the antique or the just plain old with the contemporary, the accumulated with the newly acquired, the decrepit with the pristine. It’s artful dissonance. For those who have come to think of luxury as smooth, shiny, polished, refined and expensive, rough luxe will undoubtedly come off as unfinished, unplanned and somewhat chaotic,” writes the Wall Street Journal. “It’s way more than anti-modernism, this sort of deep spelunking into the past,” she said. “It’s not aspirational and it’s not nostalgic. It’s a fantasy world that is almost entirely a visual collage. It’s a stitched-together, bricolage world, an alternative world,” said Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology, in an article in the New York Times. My favorite description of this style was the adjective “autobiographical” to describe this style, as used in the WSJ article by Murray Moss, co-founder of Manhattan’s amazing store Moss, and Francois Halard, an interiors photographer. Autobiographical is a word that suits this style, and this era, so well.  With a culture that is flooded with product of all sorts and kinds, indescribable and infinite, it isn’t enough to say something is luxurious or valuable just because it costs a bundle; just as it something that costs very little may have immense personal value.  This blending of high/low is not new, but this idea of curating one’s life and home to reflect a personal story  - or an exterior expression of one’s inner life - is. I am interested to see how this trend establishes itself across culture.  We see it indubitably in the world of fashion and design, but we are also seeing it in foods with the Slow Food and Locavore movements, hotels like the Ace Hotels or London’s new Rough Luxe Hotel  (I particularly like their description of their hotel: “Guests at a Rough Luxe hotel might share a bathroom or have a small room or a small shower cubicle, but the luxury is in the choice of the wine, the bed linen, the art on the walls and the people looking after you”), and even in the way brands are marketing themselves such as in the Levi’s “Go Forth” campaign, especially their “O!Pioneers” spot featuring a poem by Walt Whitman.  I could see this repurposing, this identification to what’s come before, being something that reinvigorates us as a culture, especially in these shaky economic times.  I, for one, welcome a little warmth and personality.

ESSAYS : Rough Luxe or The New Antiquarians

Recently, my husband and I purchased a house.   It’s contemporary and modern, my husband’s dream.   I’m more an off-the-grid kind of girl (at least that’s the fantasy).  The other day the latest issue of Sunset Magazine was sitting on my eco-marble Corian kitchen island, open for days to this article about a young, hip couple and their two toddlers living the pioneer life as caretakers to a real Homestead in Montana.  Finally my husband asked me if I was trying to give him some kind of hint regarding my unhidden desire to move out of L.A. to raise Bantam chickens and rescue horses.

Suffice it to say, I will not be going for the mid-century modern look in our home.  A few months ago I discovered this site called Pinterest, which is basically crack for people who like to rip pages out of magazines and save them for “future inspiration”.  Pinterest lets you pull images off of any site and save them to a virtual pin-board.  This is an exceptional tool for anyone who has clients they need to show visual imagery to, or for crazy people like me, who now has 29 boards.  Yes.  29.  You can see them here: www.pinterest.com/alisonw.

I pinned images of vintage pieces and furnishings with texture and grain, things that reference history and tradition without adhering to a particular style.  And yet, somehow they all seemed to go together, finding their own cohesion.  I was wondering how that was happening…until I came upon a mention from The Future Laboratory about the new trend of Rough Luxe. 

“Rough luxe is, at first glance, a study in Contradictions, an attempt to reconcile the antique or the just plain old with the contemporary, the accumulated with the newly acquired, the decrepit with the pristine. It’s artful dissonance. For those who have come to think of luxury as smooth, shiny, polished, refined and expensive, rough luxe will undoubtedly come off as unfinished, unplanned and somewhat chaotic,” writes the Wall Street Journal.

“It’s way more than anti-modernism, this sort of deep spelunking into the past,” she said. “It’s not aspirational and it’s not nostalgic. It’s a fantasy world that is almost entirely a visual collage. It’s a stitched-together, bricolage world, an alternative world,” said Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology, in an article in the New York Times.

My favorite description of this style was the adjective “autobiographical” to describe this style, as used in the WSJ article by Murray Moss, co-founder of Manhattan’s amazing store Moss, and Francois Halard, an interiors photographer.

Autobiographical is a word that suits this style, and this era, so well.  With a culture that is flooded with product of all sorts and kinds, indescribable and infinite, it isn’t enough to say something is luxurious or valuable just because it costs a bundle; just as it something that costs very little may have immense personal value.  This blending of high/low is not new, but this idea of curating one’s life and home to reflect a personal story  - or an exterior expression of one’s inner life - is.

I am interested to see how this trend establishes itself across culture.  We see it indubitably in the world of fashion and design, but we are also seeing it in foods with the Slow Food and Locavore movements, hotels like the Ace Hotels or London’s new Rough Luxe Hotel  (I particularly like their description of their hotel: “Guests at a Rough Luxe hotel might share a bathroom or have a small room or a small shower cubicle, but the luxury is in the choice of the wine, the bed linen, the art on the walls and the people looking after you”), and even in the way brands are marketing themselves such as in the Levi’s “Go Forth” campaign, especially their “O!Pioneers” spot featuring a poem by Walt Whitman. 

I could see this repurposing, this identification to what’s come before, being something that reinvigorates us as a culture, especially in these shaky economic times.  I, for one, welcome a little warmth and personality.



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