What is an archive? Canadian archivist Terry Cook portrayed the archive as a ‘ “house of memory” ’, and through it, ‘society may be nursed to healthy and creative maturity’. British archivist Louise Craven suggested that archives represent identity, heritage and culture. However, the functions and purposes of an archive are not fixed - they are malleable and transmutable. A fashion archive is one type of archive possessing the major features that Cook and Craven described, yet in the fashion industry it plays several differing roles. China can be considered a relative latecomer within the competitive global fashion market, as it first developed into a major manufacturing centre in the 1980s. It’s only since the mid-1990s that Chinese brands have started to encompass more elements of the global fashion industry, and within this new environment fashion archives are steadily developing. This project addresses the archive, and asks the following main research questions: What is a fashion archive in China? And how do Chinese fashion professionals understand history through their archives? These questions lead to an investigation of how Chinese fashion professionals are writing their own history through the creation and use of archives. This research will unveil how Chinese fashion professionals understand history through fashion industry practice, based on the analysis of their methodology of creating history and historical records through their activities. This project will use interviews with a broad selection of Shanghai fashion professionals to unravel the definitions and roles of fashion archives within the contemporary Chinese fashion system, leading to an understanding of the conditions within which fashion archives are emerging in China. This reevaluation of the nature of the archives may help to reveal the logic of history and memory-making in the Chinese fashion system.