Iris Acevedo Brings Vintage Fashion to Life

Iris Acevedo brings a distinctive eye to fashion, blending 15 years of New York and Miami industry experience with a deep love for vintage, storytelling, and personal style. As the creative force behind Ace Archive, she curates pieces with emotion, history, and attitude celebrating fashion not as a trend, but as a form of identity, memory, and self-expression. Through her work, Iris shares a philosophy rooted in intention, individuality, and the belief that the most powerful looks are the ones that feel truly authored.

With 15 years of experience in New York’s fashion industry, how has your eye for style

evolved, especially when it comes to vintage fashion?

I think my eye for style has become more precise and more controlled over time, but never more trend-focused. I was never creatively interested in trends. Spectacle, yes. Emotion, absolutely. But not trends.

Clothing has always spoken to me. A piece will immediately start telling me a story. I’ll see a fuzzy Bordeaux cropped sweater with a slight cap sleeve and instantly think, “Russian spy in a Parisian café,” and suddenly I know it needs a black leather pencil skirt, chic knee-high dress socks, and elevated Mary Janes. That instinct has always existed for me.

What’s changed is that now the dialogue between me and the garment feels more refined. I understand proportion, tension, construction, and visual psychology on a much deeper level than I did years ago. The storytelling is still there, but it’s become sharper and more intentional.

Working in fashion production and development also changed my relationship with clothing entirely. Once you understand how garments are actually made, sourced, and marketed, you become much more aware of the difference between fashion designed for consumption and fashion designed with identity in mind.

That’s part of why I’m so drawn to vintage. Vintage still carries emotional residue. You can feel the era, the ambition, the woman who might have worn it, the cultural mood surrounding it. A lot of modern fashion feels very optimized to me-the construction of modern garments is different. Vintage still feels alive!

What draws you to a vintage piece when you’re sourcing for Ace Archive, is it the era, the

construction, the story, or the feeling it gives you?

It’s honestly the feeling first. A piece either has charge to it or it doesn’t.

Garments have always spoken to me visually and emotionally before they speak to me logically. I can look at a piece and immediately start building a world around it. I’ll see a leopard pencil skirt and instantly imagine it with a sheer black blouse, smudged liner, heavy gold jewelry, and a woman who fully understands that animal print is a neutral.

I’m very drawn to pieces that live somewhere between glamour and danger. There has to be tension involved- rock glam, dark feminine, pinup, moody disco, soft goth, always some noir bombshell energy. Even when I source something delicate, I still want it to feel like it has a pulse underneath it. A bit of teeth, if you will. 

I also have a very exacting relationship with color. Certain tones emotionally register for me immediately; oxblood, bone ivory, espresso, plum, deep olive, tobacco, black. I’m almost never sourcing randomly. I’m thinking about how a piece enters the larger visual language of Ace Archive and the woman buying from it.

She’s confident, a little theatrical, probably overdressed on purpose, and completely comfortable being the main character in the room. So, when I source, I’m not just thinking about the garment itself. I’m thinking about the life someone is going to have in it.

I include handwritten notes with Ace Archive orders that say, “Congratulations, and I hope you make wonderful memories together,” because honestly, that’s how I see clothing. The best pieces become part of your personal mythology.

You curate and reconstruct vintage garments with a historian’s eye. How do you balance

preserving the past with reshaping pieces for a modern wardrobe?

When I reconstruct a piece, I still try to honor the lines and psychology of the era it came from. The time period almost starts think-tanking around me when I’m working. I’ll remember cultural movements, silhouettes, music, social dynamics, films, even the way people occupied their bodies during that time, and all of that informs how I approach a garment.

Fashion is deeply anthropological to me. Understanding why house dresses had front pockets, or recognizing a specific vintage J.Crew tag from a certain era, matters because clothing quietly documents how people lived, worked, desired, rebelled, and presented themselves to the world.

At the same time, I don’t believe fashion should remain frozen in preservation. I recently sold a pair of plaid trousers with side stripes that immediately made me think of a greaser in a leather jacket somewhere in mid-century America. I hand-painted an Americana-inspired flaming heart onto the thigh in acrylic because it felt like a continuation of the garment’s attitude rather than a contradiction of it. The revision flowed. Reinvention not erasure. 

That’s usually my goal when I rework a piece-not to erase its history, but to continue the conversation.

How would you describe your personal styling philosophy, and what role does vintage play in creating a look that feels unique and intentional?

I think personal style should reveal something truthful about a person rather than simply proving they’re aware of trends. The women whose style stays with me never look overly calculated to me. They look authored. Personal style is timeless-you can’t place it in time. Think about true style icons-Iris Apfel, Diana Ross, Maria Felix-what’s the common denominator? Many of their looks, whether maximalist or mod, stand the test of time. You look at one of their editorial outfits and think “I’d wear that now.”

I’m very interested in the psychology of image and the way clothing communicates before someone even speaks. Fashion can signal sensuality, rebellion, intellect, humor, discipline, power, softness-sometimes all at once. I think that’s why I approach styling almost anthropologically, too. I’m always paying attention to tension. The push and pull between polish and danger, glamour and restraint, masculinity and femininity, nostalgia and modernity.

Vintage plays a huge role in that because it interrupts sameness. We’re living in a time where algorithms feed everyone the same references at the same speed, and people are starting to look strangely identical because of it. We’re looking homogenized, even across cultural lines.

Vintage reintroduces personality. It gives people the ability to build a visual language that actually belongs to them. A worn leather jacket, an overly dramatic faux fur, a perfectly cut ’90s slip dress-those pieces carry memory and attitude already. They ask something of the wearer.

I also think style becomes most interesting when it feels slightly self-aware. A little deconstructed. A little intentional. I’m not particularly interested in looking “perfect.” I’m much more interested in presence.

Vintage shopping often feels like treasure hunting. What has been one of your most

unforgettable finds, and why did it stand out to you?

One of my most unforgettable finds was a 1970s Bill Blass piece I found in my mid-20s. It was this incredible romper with an exaggerated wide leg that moved almost like a gown when photographed. I remember being completely geeked out over it because the Battle of Versailles is one of my favorite moments in fashion history.

I love the idea that these American designers-Bill Blass, Halston, Stephen Burrows, Oscar de la Renta-walked into a world that largely dismissed American fashion as unsophisticated and completely changed the conversation. That moment reshaped how global couture viewed American designers forever. A real shakeup of a hierarchy. 

So, finding a Bill Blass piece from around that era felt almost emotional to me. It wasn’t just a garment. It felt connected to this larger cultural shift in fashion history that I deeply admire.

Another piece I still treasure is a black-and-gold Bob Mackie camisole with metallic threading that I found in my early twenties and still own now. The second I saw it; all I could think was “Cher.” The first time I wore it, I styled it with a fuzzy leopard belt, a second-skin slit skirt, and heels that matched my red hair at the time. It made me feel completely transformed in the way only certain clothes can. It’s still very much in rotation and I still love it as deeply!

That’s the magic of vintage for me. The best pieces don’t just reflect style; they carry fantasy, memory, and cultural mythology inside them.

For someone who wants to start incorporating vintage into their everyday style, what advice would you give them on choosing pieces that feel authentic rather than costume-like?

Before you even step into a thrift store, edit your closet first. Reconcile who you are with what’s actually hanging in there. Have that reckoning! 

The pieces you “like” but never wear? Those probably aren’t you. You admire them, but they don’t belong to your visual language. The pieces you haven’t touched in years? You may have simply outgrown them as a person.

Then, look at what you repeatedly reach for in your closet. What silhouettes do you wear over and over? What colors dominate your closet naturally? Are you drawn to soft lines or razor-sharp tailoring? Florals or geometric prints? Muted neutrals or saturated color?

I always tell people to zoom out and study themselves (see? Anthropology!). Take notes. Make a mood board from the clothes you already genuinely wear, not the fantasy version of yourself you think you should be dressing as.

Once you understand your own visual patterns, shopping vintage becomes much easier because you stop buying randomly and start curating intentionally. There’s something very powerful about realizing, “That Emilio Pucci is beautiful, but I’m actually a Vivienne Westwood.”

I think people look costume-y in vintage when they shop for eras instead of shopping for themselves. The goal isn’t reenactment. The goal is authorship. Collaborate with the garment, don’t let it own you!