Introduction
Karim Fares is the founder and designer of Archivio J.M. Ribot, an Italian clothing research project built through antique textiles, found garments and traditional hand production. An avid traveller and collector, he began by altering vintage clothing and studying old tailoring before developing a continuing system of limited editions and one-of-a-kind recomposed pieces.
The project took its name from a label found inside a pair of 1920s French wool trousers in Provence. Fares adopted that previous owner’s identity instead of naming the label after himself, using the discovery to frame clothing as an object that can move between people and periods. By Autumn/Winter 2019, Archivio J.M. Ribot was publicly organised through its limited-edition main capsule and the Riforma recomposition line.
Fares continues to direct the clothing, textile development and collaborative projects, including the Memoriae Cavsa capsule with Ink Clothing. His interviews connect the practice to Rome’s layered and deteriorating architecture, European and Arab cultural references, and a deliberate resistance to accelerated marketing and constant online explanation.
Design ethos
Fares works by collecting cloth, buttons, tailoring fragments and complete garments whose age is already visible. He studies their original construction and then decides whether to preserve, cut, reproduce or recombine them. The resulting pieces retain earlier seams, worn surfaces and repairs as active elements, allowing the material’s previous use to guide the new silhouette.
His tailoring is soft, layered and irregular. Jackets, shirts, waistcoats and trousers are assembled through slow sewing, hand stitching, patching, relocated pockets and incomplete-looking thread ends. Riforma pushes this method towards more pronounced transformation, using early twentieth-century menswear components to build cropped tops, dresses and other cross-gender forms.
Memory in Fares’s work is physical rather than illustrative. References to Tarkovsky, Maria Lai, letters and travel photographs become construction devices or surface interventions instead of decorative themes. Finite antique materials keep production small, while newly developed fabrics reproduce qualities that cannot be sourced reliably without presenting copies as historical originals.
Disclaimer
Career history
2026
Archivio J.M. Ribot marked its first decade during the Autumn/Winter 2026 Paris showroom period. The anniversary confirmed the continued activity of Fares’s independent archive-clothing practice after approximately ten years of limited editions, Riforma pieces and specialist international distribution.
2023
From 2023, Archivio J.M. Ribot extended its archive practice through documented collaborations that combined limited clothing with scent and small handmade objects. Memoriae Cavsa with Ink Clothing joined exclusive jacquard garments to perfume and mohair figures dressed by the Archivio team, without establishing a permanent furniture or object division.
2019
Riforma became a continuing internal programme for unique garments made from early twentieth-century clothing parts and vintage hardware. Its recomposition method changed original functions and gender codes while retaining old seams, pockets and evidence of use.
2016
During its formative period, Archivio J.M. Ribot developed a two-part clothing system based on finite antique textiles and the recomposition of existing garments. By 2019, the distinction between limited-edition Archivio pieces and one-of-a-kind Riforma work was publicly established.
2016
Karim Fares established Archivio J.M. Ribot around 2016 after years of collecting and altering antique clothing. He adopted the name from a label found inside 1920s French trousers and built the project around limited production, traditional Italian making and the continued use of aged textiles.
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