Time will tell

How much can a piece of paper destined to be thrown away be worth?

In the case of an invitation to a John Galliano fashion show, more than £2,000.

The Financial Times recently told the story of Tim Blanks, editor-at-large at The Business of Fashion, and his collection of more than a thousand fashion show invitations. Some have now become true collectors’ items: one for a 1998 John Galliano show sold for £2,210.

Invitations created to grant access to an event lasting only a few minutes have, over time, become fragments of fashion history.

But Blanks had not kept them because he expected them to become valuable one day.

And that is where the story becomes interesting.

Before it became history

Blanks kept them because he was there.

They were the physical traces of shows by John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Dries Van Noten and Raf Simons. Events he had attended at a time when no one could yet know what place they would eventually occupy in fashion history.

He kept them because, to him, they already meant something.

Time did the rest.

Attention is a form of capital

Blanks’ story says something that goes beyond collecting.

Those invitations were created as tools of access, but over time they became objects capable of telling the story of an era.

From the late 1990s onwards, fashion houses increasingly began to transform them into extensions of their creative universe: small objects that anticipated, evoked or distilled the identity of a collection into a minimal form.

Today, in the age of digital invitations and QR codes, physical invitations have become even rarer.

Blanks had not predicted any of this. He had simply paid attention.

And perhaps this is where the story takes on a broader meaning: some things gain value because someone was able to recognise their importance before it became obvious.

A property also needs to be read

In luxury real estate, this ability carries particular weight.

A property can be described through square metres, address, finishes and amenities.

But the elements that truly define its identity can be far less obvious.

A room with unusual proportions.A terrace that cannot be recreated. A distinctive view. An architectural feature that has remained intact while everything around it has changed.

These are qualities that a property listing can describe, but can rarely convey in full.

Context is what gives them weight.

And this is where experience becomes something more than knowledge of prices: it is the ability to recognise what sets one property apart from another and to understand the meaning of that difference before it becomes obvious.

Because in luxury real estate, knowing the market does not simply mean knowing which properties are available.

It also means knowing how to recognise the ones that deserve a closer look.

It is the same perspective Krhome brings to property selection: looking beyond what is immediately visible to recognise what deserves to be seen twice.