Vetements (Q3623)
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Swiss clothing company
- VETEMENTS
- Vetements Group
- Vetements Group AG
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Vetements |
Swiss clothing company |
|
Statements
nominated for LVMH’s Young Fashion Designer Prize
Fans of Balenciaga, Barthes, or bathos were all well served by this evening’s entertaining enough Vetements installment. We were directed to a pigeon-infested corner of a Montparnasse mall that had the same heady odor Nicole Phelpsdescribedat the breakout Vetements show at Le Depot nearly a decade ago. This once underground brand might now be overground, but it maintains the appearance of sedition.Travis Scott opened the show in a lacquer-finish black moto look, the first of many moto pieces to roar past. Gigi Hadid wore a minidress version of the yellow duct tape catsuit worn by Kim Kardashian to watch a Balenciaga show a few seasons back: the other difference was that Hadid’s tape was stamped with the DHL logo. You can unwrap that for yourself: the Gvasalia saga rumbles on.And on. The collection bickered its way through multiple chapters of looks which echoed themes seen in past collections both here and at Balenciaga. In amongst all the self-referential fraternal trolling there were some cool enough things—and Carmen Kass’s pregnant runway walk was great to see—but watching this often felt like overhearing a one-sided argument.
28 September 2024
Guram Gvasalia doesn’t do anything small. In the front row today at his first Vetements show in almost two years were Tyga, Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing, Julia Fox, the rapper Tommy Cash in a giant inflatable Life Savers costume, Antoine Arnault, and Cher, the last two of whom were there supporting their better halves, Natalia Vodianova and Alexander Edwards, who walked the runway.The collection itself was 90 looks long, the vast majority of them oversized. In Vetements’s spring 2024 collection, certain pieces were graded up 16 times, a job so big that the factory turned down Gvasalia’s request at first—but he didn’t take no for an answer then, and he showed little restraint tonight.Vodianova’s and Edwards’s show-opening suits were tailored with what looked like a padded tube through the shoulder seams and under the lapel collar, adding vertical inches to the silhouettes. On T-shirts and hoodies, the tube extended into the sleeves, like half a Hula-Hoop, a seatmate said, though I thought of pool floaties. The padded tubes almost formed full circles on a pair of trenches. Bottoms, too, were oversized. Jeans extended via split seams into long trains, a clever-if-complicated-to-wear idea I’ve never seen executed before, and dress hems were so ponderous that models gathered their skirts in their hands to make their way around the runway—a less compelling look. Evening dresses were cut from clingy jersey, but Gvasalia just might’ve cleaned Swarovski clear out of its crystals. The teddy bear coats were a lift from Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.Vetements is a decade old now, launched by Guram and his older brother, Demna, with the goal of perfecting the basic clothes of everyday life. (Demna subsequently left the brand after taking the creative director role at Balenciaga.) To scan the photos of their first collection for fall 2014 is to be reminded of just how much their ideas seeped into the mainstream and defined the look of contemporary fashion these last 10 years. But there was not much breaking new ground here in the show’s commitment to excess.In an interview inTheNew York Timeslast summer, Guram took aim at his brother, and apparently he’s still working through some family drama—or else he wants us to think he is. A humongous T-shirt read “Not Mom’s Favorite” across the chest, and an equally substantial hoodie was printed with a line fromSouth Park, “You’re a Towel,” that’s notnota veiled reference to Balenciaga’s much-memed towel skirt.
He sent out three more crystal jersey dresses, the last on Marcia Cross ofDesperate Housewivesfame, for the big finale.
1 March 2024
An hour before last night’s Marc Jacobs show, with itsBlade Runner-ish questioning about man and machines, Guram Gvasalia was on the phone from Paris talking a blue streak about AI. The Vetements designer was comparing the new technology to the Magic Eye books he was so gripped by as a kid. “They changed my perception of reality,” he said. “I thought it was such a fascinating idea: something you don’t see can exist if you just look through it.”The idea with these pictures was to do a 2020s version of those 3D effects. With AI, “people can visualize things that before would not have been possible,” he explained. “But when we still live in the real world, with Apple’s headset yet to be released, we wanted to create a physical object that would give the look and feel of an AI generated image.” The point of the exercise, much like what Jacobs was getting up to with his analog 1980s designs, was to champion the human. “At its core,” Gvasalia continued, “the collection is actually anti-AI, as quality can only be done by human hands.”Fashion is at its best when it has something to say about the world around us, when it’s not just a discussion of hemlines and heel heights. When two figures from different generations land on the same concept—both designers had their show notes “written” by Chat GPT”—you know it’s penetrated the zeitgeist.The tailor’s dummy is another relic from Gvasalia’s childhood. His grandmother had one that stood guard over her Singer sewing machine, a tool that was too valuable for young Guram to be allowed to touch. Now, of course, it’s an important tool of his own. Fashion aficionados will recall the spring 1997 Martin Margiela collection that incorporated the rough canvas of a dress mannequin into deconstructed tailoring. Gvasalia is attuned to the connection, but he emphasizes the differences. Vetements’s “canvas” is actually a high-tech 3D scan of a tailor’s dummy printed on a sustainably developed double stretch fabric.There’s a relationship, too, between the six meter in diameter ball gowns here and a collection by his brother Demna at Balenciaga. It isn’t the first time parallels between Demna and Guram’s work have emerged; here it seems entirely intentional, a confident insistence that the design language is a shared one. “They’re bigger, but I also think they’re better,” Gvasalia said. “I’m out there now… Being independent, I’ve had to limit myself with other collections, people were telling me that I need to consider the stores.
With this collection I said, ‘fuck everyone,’ I’m just going to do what I feel is right.”
27 June 2023
An hour before last night’s Marc Jacobs show, with itsBlade Runner-ish questioning about man and machines, Guram Gvasalia was on the phone from Paris talking a blue streak about AI. The Vetements designer was comparing the new technology to the Magic Eye books he was so gripped by as a kid. “They changed my perception of reality,” he said. “I thought it was such a fascinating idea: something you don’t see can exist if you just look through it.”The idea with these pictures was to do a 2020s version of those 3D effects. With AI, “people can visualize things that before would not have been possible,” he explained. “But when we still live in the real world, with Apple’s headset yet to be released, we wanted to create a physical object that would give the look and feel of an AI generated image.” The point of the exercise, much like what Jacobs was getting up to with his analog 1980s designs, was to champion the human. “At its core,” Gvasalia continued, “the collection is actually anti-AI, as quality can only be done by human hands.”Fashion is at its best when it has something to say about the world around us, when it’s not just a discussion of hemlines and heel heights. When two figures from different generations land on the same concept—both designers had their show notes “written” by Chat GPT”—you know it’s penetrated the zeitgeist.The tailor’s dummy is another relic from Gvasalia’s childhood. His grandmother had one that stood guard over her Singer sewing machine, a tool that was too valuable for young Guram to be allowed to touch. Now, of course, it’s an important tool of his own. Fashion aficionados will recall the spring 1997 Martin Margiela collection that incorporated the rough canvas of a dress mannequin into deconstructed tailoring. Gvasalia is attuned to the connection, but he emphasizes the differences. Vetements’s “canvas” is actually a high-tech 3D scan of a tailor’s dummy printed on a sustainably developed double stretch fabric.There’s a relationship, too, between the six meter in diameter ball gowns here and a collection by his brother Demna at Balenciaga. It isn’t the first time parallels between Demna and Guram’s work have emerged; here it seems entirely intentional, a confident insistence that the design language is a shared one. “They’re bigger, but I also think they’re better,” Gvasalia said. “I’m out there now… Being independent, I’ve had to limit myself with other collections, people were telling me that I need to consider the stores.
With this collection I said, ‘fuck everyone,’ I’m just going to do what I feel is right.”
27 June 2023
Under normal circumstances, Guram Gvasalia presents as the slick and canny businessman with a machine-mind for numbers and a formidable insider knowledge of the industry. This season it was jolting to hear a much, much more vulnerable man talking about the harrowing and pitiful personal memories embedded in the Vetements garments for spring. “This collection is about my life, it’s about my childhood, and my first acquaintance with fashion,” he said, standing in the raw, bunker-like concrete shell of the about-to-be-demolished Tati store in Pigalle. “It tells you every single story.”That is, about the meaning of the objects he attached to as a Georgian child refugee from a proxy war with Russia in 1992, his use of imagination as an escape, and the simultaneous repression of his socially taboo gayness, while also being assigned to the role of responsible good-boy future financial savior of the Gvasalia family. This, he said, was his “coming out” collection as Vetements’s sole creative director.“The only toy I had when I was a child after the war was this twisted teddy bear thing, here, like this jacket.” He was pointing to a tan-colored fake-furry bomber, with another one spilling out of its side. “It was so patched.” A red plaid ankle-grazing poncho reminded him of “blankets that we got in a refugee camp, because we didn’t have the clothes when we were escaping; we were stuck in the mountains for over a month. And there were no clothes, no food. Nothing.”It’s only too obvious why these memories should be resurfacing in Gvasalia’s mind now. Is he feeling re-traumatized by watching Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? “I’m super-traumatized, not just (about) Ukraine,” Gvasalia replied. “I’m traumatized with the world.”Amongst the urgent stomping march of the broad-shouldered tailored suits and super-wide distressed jeans, there were special moments that harked back to the five-year-old Guram’s first inklings about fashion. He has a vivid memory of “falling in love” with Kim Basinger in 1990 (pre-war in his family’s home, the Abkhazia region). Also, he said, “my cousin had a Malibu Barbie. I saved up all my birthday and Christmas money to buy it from her. Then I would wait for everyone in the house to go to sleep so I could play with her.”Vetements’s Malibu Barbie had a grown-up sugar pink tailored coat and fluid-legged trouser suit, and—full circle—Gvasalia had wrangled Kim Basinger’s daughter, Ireland Baldwin, to walk his show.
The twist, as in Gvasalia’s re-tread of traditional tropes, is that the tailoring was made from puffy sweatshirt material. Some of his wasp-waisted men’s jackets were also cut in sweat fabric, and disguised by tweed prints. Punk hairdos bristled with another innocent memory. I would go to school on the bus and imagine what the driver or a lady next to me would look like as punks! We didn’t have that in Georgia.”He pulled it back to the present with checkered raincoats made out of fabric that looked like the red-white-and-blue of the Tati bag pattern. Tati itself might be obsolete—the building Gvasalia chose, once a popular French shopping destination, is about to be demolished. Here’s the thing about childhood memories, trauma, and shared cultural experiences, though: They can never be erased. Sooner or later, there’ll come a time when it’s possible to transform them into some sort of creative shape that people will want to wear.
7 July 2022
Under normal circumstances, Guram Gvasalia presents as the slick and canny businessman with a machine-mind for numbers and a formidable insider knowledge of the industry. This season it was jolting to hear a much, much more vulnerable man talking about the harrowing and pitiful personal memories embedded in the Vetements garments for spring. “This collection is about my life, it’s about my childhood, and my first acquaintance with fashion,” he said, standing in the raw, bunker-like concrete shell of the about-to-be-demolished Tati store in Pigalle. “It tells you every single story.”That is, about the meaning of the objects he attached to as a Georgian child refugee from a proxy war with Russia in 1992, his use of imagination as an escape, and the simultaneous repression of his socially taboo gayness, while also being assigned to the role of responsible good-boy future financial savior of the Gvasalia family. This, he said, was his “coming out” collection as Vetements’s sole creative director.“The only toy I had when I was a child after the war was this twisted teddy bear thing, here, like this jacket.” He was pointing to a tan-colored fake-furry bomber, with another one spilling out of its side. “It was so patched.” A red plaid ankle-grazing poncho reminded him of “blankets that we got in a refugee camp, because we didn’t have the clothes when we were escaping; we were stuck in the mountains for over a month. And there were no clothes, no food. Nothing.”It’s only too obvious why these memories should be resurfacing in Gvasalia’s mind now. Is he feeling re-traumatized by watching Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? “I’m super-traumatized, not just (about) Ukraine,” Gvasalia replied. “I’m traumatized with the world.”Amongst the urgent stomping march of the broad-shouldered tailored suits and super-wide distressed jeans, there were special moments that harked back to the five-year-old Guram’s first inklings about fashion. He has a vivid memory of “falling in love” with Kim Basinger in 1990 (pre-war in his family’s home, the Abkhazia region). Also, he said, “my cousin had a Malibu Barbie. I saved up all my birthday and Christmas money to buy it from her. Then I would wait for everyone in the house to go to sleep so I could play with her.”Vetements’s Malibu Barbie had a grown-up sugar pink tailored coat and fluid-legged trouser suit, and—full circle—Gvasalia had wrangled Kim Basinger’s daughter, Ireland Baldwin, to walk his show.
The twist, as in Gvasalia’s re-tread of traditional tropes, is that the tailoring was made from puffy sweatshirt material. Some of his wasp-waisted men’s jackets were also cut in sweat fabric, and disguised by tweed prints. Punk hairdos bristled with another innocent memory. I would go to school on the bus and imagine what the driver or a lady next to me would look like as punks! We didn’t have that in Georgia.”He pulled it back to the present with checkered raincoats made out of fabric that looked like the red-white-and-blue of the Tati bag pattern. Tati itself might be obsolete—the building Gvasalia chose, once a popular French shopping destination, is about to be demolished. Here’s the thing about childhood memories, trauma, and shared cultural experiences, though: They can never be erased. Sooner or later, there’ll come a time when it’s possible to transform them into some sort of creative shape that people will want to wear.
7 July 2022
Returning to IRL runway shows in September you couldn’t fail to notice that there’s not just a new generation of designers edging into the spotlight, they’re talking to a new consumer. Today’s fashionable young people reject binaries in favor of plurality, and they seem uninterested in the old guard’s status markers—or maybe a better way of saying it is that they’ve assigned status to unfamiliar things.As a new cohort comes of age and becomes influential, it’s a destabilizing experience for the older ones. Lil Nas X, *GQ*’s Musician of the Year, put it this way in a recent cover profile by Jeremy O. Harris: “There’s a new age of celebrities, and I don’t think a lot of people are comfortable with it. But I think it’s great. I feel like it’s knocking down the walls.”Guram Gvasalia has clocked the shifts too. Though he comes at the idea from his own angle, the new Vetements collection takes on these generational and cultural changes. On a Zoom call from the company’s home base in Zurich, he was talking about Bitcoin millionaires and social media millionaires. “The early 20th century couturiers focused on industry tycoons who made money with oil, real estate, chocolate bars,” he said. “This collection is pushing to redefine the couture and the savoir faire for the new era”—for the new luxury shopper.If you see something cynical in the money prints and lotto card motifs you aren’t in on the joke. Indeed, quite a bit of taking the piss was going on here. “The Gvasalias” is printed in what looks like *The Simpsons* font on the inside of a t-shirt; that’s a nod to Guram’s brother Demna’s spring 2022 Balenciaga show. Then there’s the fact that all but one of the 72 looks features a mask—a mask not unlike the one worn by Demna at that show and also at the Met Gala, where his famous date was similarly accoutred. “The truth is in today’s world dominated by social media—and a sometimes toxic environment—you don’t need to be Kim Kardashian to need some privacy in your life,” Guram explained. For the record, he added that masks have been part of the Vetements lexicon for years.Sibling dynamics aside, there were some notable developments here, mostly involving Vetements’s signature tailoring. The opening look’s button-down, trousers, jacket, and long coat are all made from the jersey typically used for t-shirts and hoodies, a post-lockdown innovation that addresses conflicting urges to dress up and stay comfortable.
“You can throw them in your suitcase and start traveling again,” Gvasalia said. The team also experimented with “digital 3-D pattern modifications” that give straight-cut jackets a couture-ish hourglass shape. And they designed down jackets and jeans with built-in zippers so wearers can modify the silhouettes as they see fit. Other looks layer oversize tees on top of jackets and shirts, a counterintuitive idea that nonetheless looks distinctive. That brings it back around to the new gen, who have an uncanny way of making the counterintuitive suddenly look right.
25 November 2021
Returning to IRL runway shows in September you couldn’t fail to notice that there’s not just a new generation of designers edging into the spotlight, they’re talking to a new consumer. Today’s fashionable young people reject binaries in favor of plurality, and they seem uninterested in the old guard’s status markers—or maybe a better way of saying it is that they’ve assigned status to unfamiliar things.As a new cohort comes of age and becomes influential, it’s a destabilizing experience for the older ones. Lil Nas X,GQ’s Musician of the Year, put it this way in a recent cover profile by Jeremy O. Harris: “There’s a new age of celebrities, and I don’t think a lot of people are comfortable with it. But I think it’s great. I feel like it’s knocking down the walls.”Guram Gvasalia has clocked the shifts too. Though he comes at the idea from his own angle, the new Vetements collection takes on these generational and cultural changes. On a Zoom call from the company’s home base in Zurich, he was talking about Bitcoin millionaires and social media millionaires. “The early 20th century couturiers focused on industry tycoons who made money with oil, real estate, chocolate bars,” he said. “This collection is pushing to redefine the couture and the savoir faire for the new era”—for the new luxury shopper.If you see something cynical in the money prints and lotto card motifs you aren’t in on the joke. Indeed, quite a bit of taking the piss was going on here. “The Gvasalias” is printed in what looks likeThe Simpsonsfont on the inside of a t-shirt; that’s a nod to Guram’s brother Demna’s spring 2022 Balenciaga show. Then there’s the fact that all but one of the 72 looks features a mask—a mask not unlike the one worn by Demna at that show and also at the Met Gala, where his famous date was similarly accoutred. “The truth is in today’s world dominated by social media—and a sometimes toxic environment—you don’t need to be Kim Kardashian to need some privacy in your life,” Guram explained. For the record, he added that masks have been part of the Vetements lexicon for years.Sibling dynamics aside, there were some notable developments here, mostly involving Vetements’s signature tailoring. The opening look’s button-down, trousers, jacket, and long coat are all made from the jersey typically used for t-shirts and hoodies, a post-lockdown innovation that addresses conflicting urges to dress up and stay comfortable.
“You can throw them in your suitcase and start traveling again,” Gvasalia said. The team also experimented with “digital 3-D pattern modifications” that give straight-cut jackets a couture-ish hourglass shape. And they designed down jackets and jeans with built-in zippers so wearers can modify the silhouettes as they see fit. Other looks layer oversize tees on top of jackets and shirts, a counterintuitive idea that nonetheless looks distinctive. That brings it back around to the new gen, who have an uncanny way of making the counterintuitive suddenly look right.
25 November 2021
The checked backdrop of Vetements’s spring 2022 collection will be familiar to Photoshop users. It’s the background against which graphic designers do their work, and it offers a hint as to what’s on cofounder Guram Gvasalia’s mind. On a Zoom call from Zurich, he said he’s been thinking a lot about our digital existence: “I started to ask myself: What is reality today? We live in this 2D world; the question is, when you scroll through Instagram, is it photoshopped or is it real?” Here’s another one: “Do we consume the internet or does it consume us?”Public opinion may be souring on Silicon Valley, but its digital products have us more firmly in their grip than ever. The pandemic deepened our connections with our computers and smartphones, even as we longed to reacquaint ourselves with nature. That tug of war plays out in these 129 looks. The jumbled wires of server farms and a computer font straight out ofThe Matrix(a timely reference, withThe Matrix 4due out at Christmas) mix with pixelated salamanders and flower prints so bright they almost glow. For every shell suit there was a siren-y gown, and logo-stamped jeans were dressed up with a seriously sharp double trench.This collection didn’t deviate far from the Vetements source code. The butch tailoring with its strong shoulder lines, the floral dresses, the puffers and parkas—it’s all proven stuff. And the slogan tees and hoodies are cleverer than ever; “The Devil Doesn’t Wear Prada” example, Gvasalia said, is an idea he pinned to his mood board some time ago, for a would-be collaboration. A flame print that appeared on a wrap dress and matching boots, among other sportier pieces, was reprised from the brand’s last time on the runway, circa fall 2020. There are no glitches in this system, but the truth is one or two might not go amiss.The raw energy of a Vetements show has been integral to the brand’s success from its start. The problem with 2D? It’s not 3D. Gvasalia seemed enthused about the prospect of returning to the runway post-pandemic. “We are 100% going back the moment we can travel,” he promised. Apropos of that, a couple of sweaters bore the German wordfreilandhaltung.Gvasalia said it has a neat double meaning: “free range” and “free mind.”
27 May 2021
The checked backdrop of Vetements’s spring 2022 collection will be familiar to Photoshop users. It’s the background against which graphic designers do their work, and it offers a hint as to what’s on cofounder Guram Gvasalia’s mind. On a Zoom call from Zurich, he said he’s been thinking a lot about our digital existence: “I started to ask myself: What is reality today? We live in this 2D world; the question is, when you scroll through Instagram, is it photoshopped or is it real?” Here’s another one: “Do we consume the internet or does it consume us?”Public opinion may be souring on Silicon Valley, but its digital products have us more firmly in their grip than ever. The pandemic deepened our connections with our computers and smartphones, even as we longed to reacquaint ourselves with nature. That tug of war plays out in these 129 looks. The jumbled wires of server farms and a computer font straight out ofThe Matrix(a timely reference, withThe Matrix 4due out at Christmas) mix with pixelated salamanders and flower prints so bright they almost glow. For every shell suit there was a siren-y gown, and logo-stamped jeans were dressed up with a seriously sharp double trench.This collection didn’t deviate far from the Vetements source code. The butch tailoring with its strong shoulder lines, the floral dresses, the puffers and parkas—it’s all proven stuff. And the slogan tees and hoodies are cleverer than ever; “The Devil Doesn’t Wear Prada” example, Gvasalia said, is an idea he pinned to his mood board some time ago, for a would-be collaboration. A flame print that appeared on a wrap dress and matching boots, among other sportier pieces, was reprised from the brand’s last time on the runway, circa fall 2020. There are no glitches in this system, but the truth is one or two might not go amiss.The raw energy of a Vetements show has been integral to the brand’s success from its start. The problem with 2D? It’s not 3D. Gvasalia seemed enthused about the prospect of returning to the runway post-pandemic. “We are 100% going back the moment we can travel,” he promised. Apropos of that, a couple of sweaters bore the German wordfreilandhaltung.Gvasalia said it has a neat double meaning: “free range” and “free mind.”
27 May 2021
Vetements is back with a monster of a collection. Look one, the guy in a black balaclava with an upside-down anarchy symbol painted on his naked torso standing against a burning background might be triggering, given the events of January 6th. His female balaclava’d counterpart wears a T-shirt reading THINK WHILE IT’S STILL LEGAL. Welcome to hell, courtesy of Guram Gvasalia.Speaking on Zoom from Zurich, Gvasalia said, yes indeed: The background in the opening section of the 165-page lookbook for this Vetements collection is intended as a general reflection of “the hell we’re all living through.”Eight years in, Vetements as an established brand has a subversive reputation to keep alive for its 4 million Instagram followers. But how, in these strife-torn times when nightclubs are closed, youth can’t gather, and people are searching for some kind of hope? Gvasalia offered a conceptual answer, organized in the changing backgrounds: “First, there is hell. Then we go to earth, and rainbows. And then, there’s heaven.” The path to heaven is where the far-off promise of eveningwear eventually lies, in black lace dresses, long coats, and a cropped-jacket tuxedo. Otherwise, in angel-wing tattoo T-shirt prints.It’s a long, long scroll to get there, though—past crowds of Goth-y types; women in gigantic padded shoulders, mini skirts, and thigh boots; and roll-calls of sinister men in tailored coats and sleazy jeans. All this, of course, is familiar Vetements territory, spiked with the nihilistic-ironic T-shirt and hoodie slogans which are bread-and-butter to the brand. One text on a pink tee spelled out the reality of youth disillusionment in hard times: I LIKE FAIRY TALES AND FINANCIAL STABILITY. Gvasalia also drew attention to a skinny sweater dress and a man’s turtleneck which have blue streaks knitted into them: the color, he noted, of the paint that Hong Kong police sprayed on democracy protesters last summer.Courting controversy, that one. The distinctions between observing, commenting on, and merely mimicking real political events for profit all become dangerously blurred here. But Gvasalia is running that risk: Even counting out the moral provocation (what would it say to wear a fashion piece designed to look like someone else’s experience of physical struggle and violence?), it also begs a big question about how that imagery will be reacted to in the Chinese market.
When Vetements began, Demna Gvasalia definitely pointed at questions of state control and the fear of dark forces lurking in society. It was there in his appropriations of uniforms—police, security guards—and all the ways he twisted and made fun of corporate logos. Now that all those implied warnings have been realized in so many horrific ways across the world, the idea of detached, cynical political humor, in fashion at least, has come to feel pretty off. Surely better to hold out solutions and healing for the youngest audience—and the twists on tailoring and vintage-referenced fashion which made fans of the old Vetements customers?To be fair, in this humungous collection, Gvasalia also demonstrated flashes of idealism in passing—the United Nations flag prints, the Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité T-shirts. And indeed, there’s a vast offering of the classic suits, the trench coats and dresses, which are faithful to the original Vetements principle of constructing a new wardrobe out of existing archetypical garments.It’s true that they’re probably better made, and from better fabrics than they ever were when Vetements was really an underground startup. It’s just that all the pseudo-rebellious sloganeering has come to take your eye off it.
23 January 2021
Vetements is back with a monster of a collection. Look one, the guy in a black balaclava with an upside-down anarchy symbol painted on his naked torso standing against a burning background might be triggering, given the events of January 6th. His female balaclava’d counterpart wears a T-shirt reading THINK WHILE IT’S STILL LEGAL. Welcome to hell, courtesy of Guram Gvasalia.Speaking on Zoom from Zurich, Gvasalia said, yes indeed: The background in the opening section of the 165-page lookbook for this Vetements collection is intended as a general reflection of “the hell we’re all living through.”Eight years in, Vetements as an established brand has a subversive reputation to keep alive for its 4 million Instagram followers. But how, in these strife-torn times when nightclubs are closed, youth can’t gather, and people are searching for some kind of hope? Gvasalia offered a conceptual answer, organized in the changing backgrounds: “First, there is hell. Then we go to earth, and rainbows. And then, there’s heaven.” The path to heaven is where the far-off promise of eveningwear eventually lies, in black lace dresses, long coats, and a cropped-jacket tuxedo. Otherwise, in angel-wing tattoo T-shirt prints.It’s a long, long scroll to get there, though—past crowds of Goth-y types; women in gigantic padded shoulders, mini skirts, and thigh boots; and roll-calls of sinister men in tailored coats and sleazy jeans. All this, of course, is familiar Vetements territory, spiked with the nihilistic-ironic T-shirt and hoodie slogans which are bread-and-butter to the brand. One text on a pink tee spelled out the reality of youth disillusionment in hard times: I LIKE FAIRY TALES AND FINANCIAL STABILITY. Gvasalia also drew attention to a skinny sweater dress and a man’s turtleneck which have blue streaks knitted into them: the color, he noted, of the paint that Hong Kong police sprayed on democracy protesters last summer.Courting controversy, that one. The distinctions between observing, commenting on, and merely mimicking real political events for profit all become dangerously blurred here. But Gvasalia is running that risk: Even counting out the moral provocation (what would it say to wear a fashion piece designed to look like someone else’s experience of physical struggle and violence?), it also begs a big question about how that imagery will be reacted to in the Chinese market.
When Vetements began, Demna Gvasalia definitely pointed at questions of state control and the fear of dark forces lurking in society. It was there in his appropriations of uniforms—police, security guards—and all the ways he twisted and made fun of corporate logos. Now that all those implied warnings have been realized in so many horrific ways across the world, the idea of detached, cynical political humor, in fashion at least, has come to feel pretty off. Surely better to hold out solutions and healing for the youngest audience—and the twists on tailoring and vintage-referenced fashion which made fans of the old Vetements customers?To be fair, in this humungous collection, Gvasalia also demonstrated flashes of idealism in passing—the United Nations flag prints, the Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité T-shirts. And indeed, there’s a vast offering of the classic suits, the trench coats and dresses, which are faithful to the original Vetements principle of constructing a new wardrobe out of existing archetypical garments.It’s true that they’re probably better made, and from better fabrics than they ever were when Vetements was really an underground startup. It’s just that all the pseudo-rebellious sloganeering has come to take your eye off it.
9 February 2021
“We want to strip down the bullshit of the industry,” said Guram Gvasalia, about the first Vetements show without his brother Demna. We were in a disused parking lot, the Garage Amelot, hours before he was to send out a show in the dark. It wasn’t a sign of mourning that Demna has opted to spend less time with his family to concentrate on Balenciaga; it was a carbon-emissions saving move. “Shows have become extremely environmentally unfriendly. So I strip down the bullshit, and I have the most environmentally friendly show in the world, just sitting on beer benches, with very little lighting, and very little makeup.”In some senses, the younger Gvasalia brother, who studied law and business, is intent on steering the brand they created in 2014 back to its basics. Vetements—which was then described as a collective—was formed on a shoestring and on the quiet, with a few moonlighting friends, their original aim being to reproduce and perfect the generic clothes of everyday life.“Somehow in fashion the spotlight went away from the clothes,” he remarked, “and for me this is why people like Margiela are so iconic because he never appeared and it was always about the clothes.” So, flashlights were sent as invites, and an announcement was made at the beginning of the show that the audience should turn on their phone torches to be able to see it. Actually, visibility was not a problem—there were so many screens in the place.Sharp marketing is Guram’s forte—the reason that Vetements went into vertical takeoff in the age of social media, when all those hoodies and fake logos caused a million memes. A black hoodie worn with flame-print thigh boots indeed opened the show. “But it has no logo,” Gvasalia pointed out. In this period of transition for Vetements and amid the climate emergency, the appeal of ironic slogans is wearing thin. This time, that output was cut down to two. One bore an icon of a crossed-out phone, and the words “NO SOCIAL MEDIA THANK YOU,” and the other the words, “It costs $0.00 to be a nice person.”So, now that there is no creative director, Guram, who today identifies as “cofounder,” rather than as CEO, and the Vetements team (they are based in Zurich) are in the strange position of wanting to de-escalate the hype, while also keeping it going.
The Vetements archetypes—the belted coats, extreme padded jackets, uniforms lifted from firefighters and security people, the leathers, the flower-print dresses—were all there; testament, in their numbers, to how quickly the Gvasalias cemented those looks over five short years.
27 February 2020
“We want to strip down the bullshit of the industry,” said Guram Gvasalia, about the first Vetements show without his brother Demna. We were in a disused parking lot, the Garage Amelot, hours before he was to send out a show in the dark. It wasn’t a sign of mourning that Demna has opted to spend less time with his family to concentrate on Balenciaga; it was a carbon-emissions saving move. “Shows have become extremely environmentally unfriendly. So I strip down the bullshit, and I have the most environmentally friendly show in the world, just sitting on beer benches, with very little lighting, and very little makeup.”In some senses, the younger Gvasalia brother, who studied law and business, is intent on steering the brand they created in 2014 back to its basics. Vetements—which was then described as a collective—was formed on a shoestring and on the quiet, with a few moonlighting friends, their original aim being to reproduce and perfect the generic clothes of everyday life.“Somehow in fashion the spotlight went away from the clothes,” he remarked, “and for me this is why people like Margiela are so iconic because he never appeared and it was always about the clothes.” So, flashlights were sent as invites, and an announcement was made at the beginning of the show that the audience should turn on their phone torches to be able to see it. Actually, visibility was not a problem—there were so many screens in the place.Sharp marketing is Guram’s forte—the reason that Vetements went into vertical takeoff in the age of social media, when all those hoodies and fake logos caused a million memes. A black hoodie worn with flame-print thigh boots indeed opened the show. “But it has no logo,” Gvasalia pointed out. In this period of transition for Vetements and amid the climate emergency, the appeal of ironic slogans is wearing thin. This time, that output was cut down to two. One bore an icon of a crossed-out phone, and the words “NO SOCIAL MEDIA THANK YOU,” and the other the words, “It costs $0.00 to be a nice person.”So, now that there is no creative director, Guram, who today identifies as “cofounder,” rather than as CEO, and the Vetements team (they are based in Zurich) are in the strange position of wanting to de-escalate the hype, while also keeping it going.
The Vetements archetypes—the belted coats, extreme padded jackets, uniforms lifted from firefighters and security people, the leathers, the flower-print dresses—were all there; testament, in their numbers, to how quickly the Gvasalias cemented those looks over five short years.
18 January 2020
Say you’re a tourist in Paris, sitting in the McDonald’s in the Champs Élysées—and a policeman suddenly storms in. You’d be frightened, right? Police in action are a common enough sight on the Champs Élysées, what with it being one of the regularly chosen sites for the Gilets Jaunes weekend anti-government rioting. But no. This wasn’t the weekend; it was the opening of the Vetements takeover of the capital’s biggest McDonald’s branch. But a shock, nevertheless—especially because the models appeared through the front door, from a truck parked on the street.Demna Gvasalia is playing dangerously close to the narrow distinction between dystopian satire and reality this season. The “menu” for the fashion sitting was stamped in black on McDonald’s napkins. Kapitalism and Global Mind Fuck were two of the “courses.” Later on the wordBose, with (Angry in German) as a translation.Messing with corporate logos and the signifiers of generic clothing have always been central to Vetements’s methods. It plays ever more directly now into the agenda of critiquing the crumbling social decay of late-stage capitalism—a direction Raf Simons seemed to be pointing toward in his menswear show, as well. With Vetements, fingers of sarcastic blame are liberally jabbed at corporate managers and bankers, at populism, the internet, at the tide of waste caused by the fashion industry’s relentlessly profit-driven overproduction.A scary character walking in with the “police” was wearing a shirt, a tie stamped with a Global Mind Fuck logo, a conference sticker reading “Hello I am Capitalism,” and a MAGA cap. Wait, no, a red baseball cap with For Rent embroidered on it. Rent? Large For Rent signs appeared on the backs of jackets, too. What did that signify? All the things you can imagine when you see it, about the desperation of a generation willing to do anything to get paid or the hollowed-out husks of men with no moral scruples about moving capital around. Along the way, the root of all evil itself popped up, too, stamped on T-shirts in the form of dollar bills with redesigned text that read: “I Am the Piece of Paper That Controls Your Entire Life.”Gvasalia had explained earlier that the uniforms were based on Russian policewear. “I love uniforms. We wanted to design a Vetements uniform and kind of try to meme it into fashion.
” Well, is mimicking the guises of a system—with a few savage twists and puns—a way of getting under its skin? Gvasalia remembers turning up at an event as a student, “something I knew [I] had no real hope of getting into,” but he was wearing a piece of a secondhand uniform, and found people stepping aside to wave him in. “Because they assumed I was a security guard.”
21 June 2019
Say you’re a tourist in Paris, sitting in the McDonald’s in the Champs Élysées—and a policeman suddenly storms in. You’d be frightened, right? Police in action are a common enough sight on the Champs Élysées, what with it being one of the regularly chosen sites for the Gilets Jaunes weekend anti-government rioting. But no. This wasn’t the weekend; it was the opening of the Vetements takeover of the capital’s biggest McDonald’s branch. But a shock, nevertheless—especially because the models appeared through the front door, from a truck parked on the street.Demna Gvasalia is playing dangerously close to the narrow distinction between dystopian satire and reality this season. The “menu” for the fashion sitting was stamped in black on McDonald’s napkins. Kapitalism and Global Mind Fuck were two of the “courses.” Later on the wordBose, with (Angry in German) as a translation.Messing with corporate logos and the signifiers of generic clothing have always been central to Vetements’s methods. It plays ever more directly now into the agenda of critiquing the crumbling social decay of late-stage capitalism—a direction Raf Simons seemed to be pointing toward in his menswear show, as well. With Vetements, fingers of sarcastic blame are liberally jabbed at corporate managers and bankers, at populism, the internet, at the tide of waste caused by the fashion industry’s relentlessly profit-driven overproduction.A scary character walking in with the “police” was wearing a shirt, a tie stamped with a Global Mind Fuck logo, a conference sticker reading “Hello I am Capitalism,” and a MAGA cap. Wait, no, a red baseball cap with For Rent embroidered on it. Rent? Large For Rent signs appeared on the backs of jackets, too. What did that signify? All the things you can imagine when you see it, about the desperation of a generation willing to do anything to get paid or the hollowed-out husks of men with no moral scruples about moving capital around. Along the way, the root of all evil itself popped up, too, stamped on T-shirts in the form of dollar bills with redesigned text that read: “I Am the Piece of Paper That Controls Your Entire Life.”Gvasalia had explained earlier that the uniforms were based on Russian policewear. “I love uniforms. We wanted to design a Vetements uniform and kind of try to meme it into fashion.
” Well, is mimicking the guises of a system—with a few savage twists and puns—a way of getting under its skin? Gvasalia remembers turning up at an event as a student, “something I knew [I] had no real hope of getting into,” but he was wearing a piece of a secondhand uniform, and found people stepping aside to wave him in. “Because they assumed I was a security guard.”
21 June 2019
Fashion reflects society and politics—whether it thinks it does or not. In Demna Gvasalia’s case, at Vetements, he confronts it so head on, it’s almost not fashion anymore, but a hard-core warning. “Our inspiration starts on the Internet, that’s how we work. But we only see 20 percent of it—behind that is the part you don’t know about. I didn’t. So we found some people who know how to access the dark net, behind the wall you can’t see. I didn’t know about it, but you can buy guns, drugs, people, order things with kids—anything you want, with Bitcoin. It’s crazy, scary stuff. And you have perfect freedom to do it, because no one can see you, you have no identity.”Identity politics with a whole new savage twist, then. The show was held in the French National Museum of Natural History, around an uncomfortably close display of exotic stuffed animals. The invitation arrived in what had seemed like a jolly, hand-drawn illustration of cute animals on a jiffy bag. Not so cute: “These are the kind of things they draw on your delivery envelope to show what’s inside, symbols for drug types, whatever else.”“Anti-social” he called this collection, with perfect irony in the social media age. It opened with another ironic sight: a guy in blue jeans and a black turtleneck—“our tribute to Steve Jobs.” The shirt was printed with the words:Warning: What you are about to see will disturb you. There is a dark side to humanity the censors won’t let you see, but we will. View it at your own risk.What came next looked, for the most part, like a bunch of kids dressed to riot. At a time when there are indeed riots in Paris every Saturday—targeting landmarks and stores—we had truly entered the upside-down of fashion, and Gvasalia seemed to mean that almost literally. There were upside-down anarchy symbols; upended puffer jackets and T-shirts; misspelled but recognizable corporate logos; a faked Interpol sign (“looks like Russian, but isn’t”). “Made in Europe” was printed on a track pant leg in the same fashion as U.S. prisonwear. “What is Europe now? It’s basically collapsing all around us.”No: Vetements is one brand that has not rescinded its alliance with streetwear. “I feel this is Vetements territory, and I feel I want to own it,” Gvasalia said.
There were references to many things that have become Vetements-isms: printed dresses, some chunky-jacketed pantsuits, and socks that are now sock-shoes, the antidote to the chunky dad trainer that Gvasalia invented, but has now been the first to swear off. Then came the really uncomfortable bit: the black fleece masks inside hoodies, the parkas with flaps extending right over the face, with a peep-hole for looking out, or for taking photos through.Gvasalia laughed at the idea that he’s designed the latter for himself. “I realize there is no privacy. When I’m on public transport, doing work on my phone, I often see people overlooking it, or taking photographs of me.” It struck all sorts of sinister chords about surveillance society, facial recognition technology. In a nutshell: fear.Gvasalia took a big risk with this show. It will undoubtedly be condemned as politically insensitive for a fashion label to have made a show with what looked like a gilets jaunes jacket bottom half. He is not mealy-mouthed about that though. “I know why they are not happy. I understand the revolt of the people. It’s a general problem of the world, the gap between rich and poor. And this is a third world war—whatever you want to call it.”The thing about Gvasalia and his brother Guram is that they know what trouble looks like, because they’ve lived through a civil war themselves. They see what’s happening—the in-the-streets stuff and the stuff that lurks in the dark places. “You know,” he said. “We cannot run off from it. We need to inform ourselves.”
17 January 2019
Fashion reflects society and politics—whether it thinks it does or not. In Demna Gvasalia’s case, at Vetements, he confronts it so head on, it’s almost not fashion anymore, but a hard-core warning. “Our inspiration starts on the Internet, that’s how we work. But we only see 20 percent of it—behind that is the part you don’t know about. I didn’t. So we found some people who know how to access the dark net, behind the wall you can’t see. I didn’t know about it, but you can buy guns, drugs, people, order things with kids—anything you want, with Bitcoin. It’s crazy, scary stuff. And you have perfect freedom to do it, because no one can see you, you have no identity.”Identity politics with a whole new savage twist, then. The show was held in the French National Museum of Natural History, around an uncomfortably close display of exotic stuffed animals. The invitation arrived in what had seemed like a jolly, hand-drawn illustration of cute animals on a jiffy bag. Not so cute: “These are the kind of things they draw on your delivery envelope to show what’s inside, symbols for drug types, whatever else.”“Anti-social” he called this collection, with perfect irony in the social media age. It opened with another ironic sight: a guy in blue jeans and a black turtleneck—“our tribute to Steve Jobs.” The shirt was printed with the words:Warning: What you are about to see will disturb you. There is a dark side to humanity the censors won’t let you see, but we will. View it at your own risk.What came next looked, for the most part, like a bunch of kids dressed to riot. At a time when there are indeed riots in Paris every Saturday—targeting landmarks and stores—we had truly entered the upside-down of fashion, and Gvasalia seemed to mean that almost literally. There were upside-down anarchy symbols; upended puffer jackets and T-shirts; misspelled but recognizable corporate logos; a faked Interpol sign (“looks like Russian, but isn’t”). “Made in Europe” was printed on a track pant leg in the same fashion as U.S. prisonwear. “What is Europe now? It’s basically collapsing all around us.”No: Vetements is one brand that has not rescinded its alliance with streetwear. “I feel this is Vetements territory, and I feel I want to own it,” Gvasalia said.
There were references to many things that have become Vetements-isms: printed dresses, some chunky-jacketed pantsuits, and socks that are now sock-shoes, the antidote to the chunky dad trainer that Gvasalia invented, but has now been the first to swear off. Then came the really uncomfortable bit: the black fleece masks inside hoodies, the parkas with flaps extending right over the face, with a peep-hole for looking out, or for taking photos through.Gvasalia laughed at the idea that he’s designed the latter for himself. “I realize there is no privacy. When I’m on public transport, doing work on my phone, I often see people overlooking it, or taking photographs of me.” It struck all sorts of sinister chords about surveillance society, facial recognition technology. In a nutshell: fear.Gvasalia took a big risk with this show. It will undoubtedly be condemned as politically insensitive for a fashion label to have made a show with what looked like a gilets jaunes jacket bottom half. He is not mealy-mouthed about that though. “I know why they are not happy. I understand the revolt of the people. It’s a general problem of the world, the gap between rich and poor. And this is a third world war—whatever you want to call it.”The thing about Gvasalia and his brother Guram is that they know what trouble looks like, because they’ve lived through a civil war themselves. They see what’s happening—the in-the-streets stuff and the stuff that lurks in the dark places. “You know,” he said. “We cannot run off from it. We need to inform ourselves.”
17 January 2019
So many designers have been referencing army uniforms and camouflage in menswear this season, it’s been easy to lose count. The disturbing Vetements show by Demna Gvasalia today took it to a place far and away beyond any superficial referencing—it was cathartic self-disclosure from someone whose childhood was torn apart by civil war. “It was like dressing a documentary of my life,” he said. “I dedicated this collection to Georgia, the Georgia where my brother Guram and I grew up together in the ’90s, and the war that happened where we lived. I tried to face this angst and fear and pain in this show. I didn’t want to remember before, I didn’t want to go that far.”Gvasalia had been seeing a therapist for two years, and felt ready. “I thought,Let’s just go for it.I’ve never felt so creatively happy, so I think I felt safe enough to put it out there, to get it out on the table.”So it was, literally: staged on a runway which was a white table, set up like a wedding reception under a bridge over the Périphérique in an area of Paris where migrants, displaced by so many conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, live in encampments along the road. Insensitive irony, or pointing in a direction everyone should be made to look? His answer: “I feel everybody today talks about war, refugees. And I am like, yes, I know exactly what that means. It’s weird. This is about my life, but also it’s about everything you see on CNN, as well.”Bring on the fashion, then: The first look out was a guy in a tattoo-printed flesh-color body T-shirt, black skinny jeans, and shiny, pointy shoes. Social media kvetching instantly attacked the fact that both Martin Margiela and Jean Paul Gaultier designed tattoo T-shirts in the early ’90s (as if Gvasalia didn’t know everyone knows that). What was significant about it went way beyond first appearances: In the configuration of the tattoos, Gvasalia mimicked the patterns criminals in Georgian prisons have inked to display their mafia authority. More than that: When a phone is waved over it with a Vetements app, he has arranged that the viewer is directed to a Wikipedia page dedicated to “Ethnic Cleansing of Georgians in Abkhazia.”
1 July 2018
So many designers have been referencing army uniforms and camouflage in menswear this season, it’s been easy to lose count. The disturbing Vetements show by Demna Gvasalia today took it to a place far and away beyond any superficial referencing—it was cathartic self-disclosure from someone whose childhood was torn apart by civil war. “It was like dressing a documentary of my life,” he said. “I dedicated this collection to Georgia, the Georgia where my brother Guram and I grew up together in the ’90s, and the war that happened where we lived. I tried to face this angst and fear and pain in this show. I didn’t want to remember before, I didn’t want to go that far.”Gvasalia had been seeing a therapist for two years, and felt ready. “I thought,Let’s just go for it.I’ve never felt so creatively happy, so I think I felt safe enough to put it out there, to get it out on the table.”So it was, literally: staged on a runway which was a white table, set up like a wedding reception under a bridge over the Périphérique in an area of Paris where migrants, displaced by so many conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, live in encampments along the road. Insensitive irony, or pointing in a direction everyone should be made to look? His answer: “I feel everybody today talks about war, refugees. And I am like, yes, I know exactly what that means. It’s weird. This is about my life, but also it’s about everything you see on CNN, as well.”Bring on the fashion, then: The first look out was a guy in a tattoo-printed flesh-color body T-shirt, black skinny jeans, and shiny, pointy shoes. Social media kvetching instantly attacked the fact that both Martin Margiela and Jean Paul Gaultier designed tattoo T-shirts in the early ’90s (as if Gvasalia didn’t know everyone knows that). What was significant about it went way beyond first appearances: In the configuration of the tattoos, Gvasalia mimicked the patterns criminals in Georgian prisons have inked to display their mafia authority. More than that: When a phone is waved over it with a Vetements app, he has arranged that the viewer is directed to a Wikipedia page dedicated to “Ethnic Cleansing of Georgians in Abkhazia.”
1 July 2018
“We took it to the flea market because that’s where it always begins.” Hard to know where to start with the Vetements collection, which was shown in the corridors of the Paul Bert Serpette market, north of Paris. Let’s begin with truth telling. Demna Gvasalia called his collection “The Elephant in the Room”—the elephant in question being the subject of Martin Margiela, and how much Gvasalia has been influenced by the reappropriation methods of the man whose house he worked for, albeit after MM himself had left the company he founded.We live in a fevered moment when the copying of designs is being instantly called out all over social media. Fact is, though—you can take this from an eyewitness—Martin Margiela also began by deconstructing and repurposing skanky old flea market clothes. This is a time when accusation throwing about what’s real and what’s fake is indulged in by as big a genius as the president of the United States. It’s the mucky soup this culture’s swimming in, the subject du jour, extending way beyond the bubble of fashion. So Gvasalia thought the time was right to come clean about his Margiela fanboy status, and try to make something purely spontaneous of it.He went to the kindergarten next door to the Vetements studio in Zurich and set the children the project of making T-shirts illustrating their idea of “the elephant in the room.” “Martin once asked children to make drawings for an invitation,” he explained. “It was a note of homage, but also a mission statement for a way of switching off debilitating creative interference.” Detaching himself and the Vetements team by working in Switzerland has worked liberating wonders. “It’s taught me to stop thinking and start feeling,” he said. “We live in a world full of references. They are there to feed us—not to copy, but to create something new from them,” he said. “That’s the challenge.”The show was cast on his own tribe of people, who he says, “really do dress like this.” They stormed around the red carpet of the covered market, with stall holders watching, wearing hugely complex, piled-up layers of vintage-looking garments. Their heads were swathed in printed silk bourgeois lady scarves tied tightly over baseball caps. Some of them sported cobbled-together bits of old sunglasses. Swishing by, they radiated a hard, self-possessed, intimidating glamour.
19 January 2018
“We took it to the flea market because that’s where it always begins.” Hard to know where to start with the Vetements collection, which was shown in the corridors of the Paul Bert Serpette market, north of Paris. Let’s begin with truth telling. Demna Gvasalia called his collection “The Elephant in the Room”—the elephant in question being the subject of Martin Margiela, and how much Gvasalia has been influenced by the reappropriation methods of the man whose house he worked for, albeit after MM himself had left the company he founded.We live in a fevered moment when the copying of designs is being instantly called out all over social media. Fact is, though—you can take this from an eyewitness—Martin Margiela also began by deconstructing and repurposing skanky old flea market clothes. This is a time when accusation throwing about what’s real and what’s fake is indulged in by as big a genius as the president of the United States. It’s the mucky soup this culture’s swimming in, the subject du jour, extending way beyond the bubble of fashion. So Gvasalia thought the time was right to come clean about his Margiela fanboy status, and try to make something purely spontaneous of it.He went to the kindergarten next door to the Vetements studio in Zurich and set the children the project of making T-shirts illustrating their idea of “the elephant in the room.” “Martin once asked children to make drawings for an invitation,” he explained. “It was a note of homage, but also a mission statement for a way of switching off debilitating creative interference.” Detaching himself and the Vetements team by working in Switzerland has worked liberating wonders. “It’s taught me to stop thinking and start feeling,” he said. “We live in a world full of references. They are there to feed us—not to copy, but to create something new from them,” he said. “That’s the challenge.”The show was cast on his own tribe of people, who he says, “really do dress like this.” They stormed around the red carpet of the covered market, with stall holders watching, wearing hugely complex, piled-up layers of vintage-looking garments. Their heads were swathed in printed silk bourgeois lady scarves tied tightly over baseball caps. Some of them sported cobbled-together bits of old sunglasses. Swishing by, they radiated a hard, self-possessed, intimidating glamour.
19 January 2018
Is Demna Gvasalia having more fun in Zurich than he had living the high life in the nightclubs of Paris and Berlin? It certainly looks like it. Instead of having a runway show for Vetements’s Spring collection, he and his design team went out and about in his newly adopted hometown, and stopped and asked people if they’d like to be photographed in their new collection. They recruited everyone from sulky teenagers to whole families, a movie producer, an insurance executive, an heiress, an accountant, a motorbike enthusiast, and some pensioners. All seemed happy to do it—the word of mouth about the Vetements neighbors has been spreading, apparently—and, as Gvasalia says, there’s not so much entertainment in this extremely comfortable Swiss tax haven of a city.The photographs were taken by Gvasalia himself. “It’s not that I have any ambition to be a photographer, but I often find when I give direction to someone, they don’t catch the moment my eye sees,” he said. Also, Gvasalia is warm, personable, and down-to-earth, and obviously capable of patiently persuading and encouraging what the fashion industry is pleased to call “real” people. He’s keen to point out that he was scrupulously respectful of his subjects. “What you see is what each person chose to wear themselves. Everyone is choosy about what they want to wear; it was quite a big project with a huge range of clothes. And I showed everyone their photographs to be sure they liked them.”Still, the project is clearly aimed at poking fun at the conventions and pretensions of fashion. Gvasalia showed people a book of images of fashion poses “and then we asked them to do their version of them.” People were captured in 57 locations about town—outside a grocery store, abierkeller, a bank, on a bridge, in a park, in front of shops. Some chose to do the full ’50s Irving Penn curved-back pose, elbows out, hands into waist. A retired gent Gvasalia met at a café wanted, he said, “to do the grunge pose, the one with hands in front and a blank face. It’s funny how many older people related more to the grunge!” One or two of the characters agreed to have their photos taken with bars and a strip joint in the background. “There’s only one apocalyptic street in Zurich,” Gvasalia laughed.
24 June 2017
Is Demna Gvasalia having more fun in Zurich than he had living the high life in the nightclubs of Paris and Berlin? It certainly looks like it. Instead of having a runway show for Vetements’s Spring collection, he and his design team went out and about in his newly adopted hometown, and stopped and asked people if they’d like to be photographed in their new collection. They recruited everyone from sulky teenagers to whole families, a movie producer, an insurance executive, an heiress, an accountant, a motorbike enthusiast, and some pensioners. All seemed happy to do it—the word of mouth about the Vetements neighbors has been spreading, apparently—and, as Gvasalia says, there’s not so much entertainment in this extremely comfortable Swiss tax haven of a city.The photographs were taken by Gvasalia himself. “It’s not that I have any ambition to be a photographer, but I often find when I give direction to someone, they don’t catch the moment my eye sees,” he said. Also, Gvasalia is warm, personable, and down-to-earth, and obviously capable of patiently persuading and encouraging what the fashion industry is pleased to call “real” people. He’s keen to point out that he was scrupulously respectful of his subjects. “What you see is what each person chose to wear themselves. Everyone is choosy about what they want to wear; it was quite a big project with a huge range of clothes. And I showed everyone their photographs to be sure they liked them.”Still, the project is clearly aimed at poking fun at the conventions and pretensions of fashion. Gvasalia showed people a book of images of fashion poses “and then we asked them to do their version of them.” People were captured in 57 locations about town—outside a grocery store, abierkeller, a bank, on a bridge, in a park, in front of shops. Some chose to do the full ’50s Irving Penn curved-back pose, elbows out, hands into waist. A retired gent Gvasalia met at a café wanted, he said, “to do the grunge pose, the one with hands in front and a blank face. It’s funny how many older people related more to the grunge!” One or two of the characters agreed to have their photos taken with bars and a strip joint in the background. “There’s only one apocalyptic street in Zurich,” Gvasalia laughed.
24 June 2017
If anyone had Demna Gvasalia down as purely a streetwear revolutionary who shot from nowhere to lead a youth cult, then they'd have been taken aback by the sight of the silver-haired madame in dark glasses, fur coat, and a pencil skirt who stepped off the escalator at the Centre Pompidou to open the Fall 2017 Vetements show. “She’s the Milanesa!” Gvasalia chuckled, while he was marshaling his set of characters—a broad-ranging and subversively selected cross section of people-types—upstairs at the museum. “I got tired of just doing hoodies and underground clubs; we’ve done that at Vetements,” he said. “A new stage has to come. What we do here is always a reappropriation of something which already exists. So we took a survey of social uniforms, researched the dress codes of people we see around us, or on the Internet."Surprise is crucial in fashion, especially when there is so much pressure on a new designer in an era when constant praise, social media visibility, and global sales have accelerated him from zero to warp speed—fame! followers! hiring at Balenciaga!—in the space of little more than three years. The trouble, in these compacted, constantly connected times, is that backlash, the critics, and the trolls can set in really quickly with who knows what damage to reputation and sales. So, surprise, change Gvasalia did. Fall 2017 was a different kind of reality show, embracing all types of people, from that Milanese lady to a German tourist with a plastic anorak to a European policewoman, the stereotypical bouncer, a United Nations soldier, and a couple of shaven-headed skinheads who may belong to the Gabber club.Is this creativity as we know it? Yes, on a technical level. The generous, oversize outerwear has been constructed from two garments joined together at the hems and looped up over one another. Hence, the glam Milanesa was actually sporting two fur coats, which, Gvasalia hastened to note, were vintage and upcycled pieces. That’s a one-off, limited-edition item by nature, but the double-layering of more generic garments, like nylon blousons, has genuine cold-weather usefulness about it.What will keep people talking longer is the satirical symbolism—bleakly realistic, angry, and hilarious by turns—which came embedded within Vetements’s collection.
When the Commando in his camouflage turned his back, he had a United Nations peacekeeping symbol printed on his back: “He’s a soldier, but he’s a good boy! It’s not his fault!” The Nerd, wearing a double-layered flannel shirt and Barbour jacket, had a T-shirt printed with a takeaway pizza menu. The down-and-out Vagabond, meanwhile, was sporting possibly the most topical garment of all: a falling-apart sweater printed with the flag of the European Union.Does this collection, with its upgraded level of innovation, signal Vetements’s distancing itself from its roots? Not at all. The cult hoodies and T-shirts are being kept in a continuing, more secret category of their own—adding a value-protecting aura to them, and the possibility of distributing them in ways that defy the fashion system’s rules. Meanwhile, Gvasalia notes, pieces in this runway collection which prove commerically popular will be added to the permanently available range.Moreover, there are bigger plans afoot for the company being laid out for the long term by Demna’s younger brother and CEO Guram Gvasalia. Vetements is reportedly about to move its headquarters and design offices to Zurich in Switzerland. Whatever surprises and sociological quips come from this direction next, these brothers mean to harness the growth their disruptive strategies have generated, and create something the industry is likely to take very seriously indeed.
24 January 2017
If anyone had Demna Gvasalia down as purely a streetwear revolutionary who shot from nowhere to lead a youth cult, then they'd have been taken aback by the sight of the silver-haired madame in dark glasses, fur coat, and a pencil skirt who stepped off the escalator at the Centre Pompidou to open the Fall 2017 Vetements show. “She’s the Milanesa!” Gvasalia chuckled, while he was marshaling his set of characters—a broad-ranging and subversively selected cross section of people-types—upstairs at the museum. “I got tired of just doing hoodies and underground clubs; we’ve done that at Vetements,” he said. “A new stage has to come. What we do here is always a reappropriation of something which already exists. So we took a survey of social uniforms, researched the dress codes of people we see around us, or on the Internet."Surprise is crucial in fashion, especially when there is so much pressure on a new designer in an era when constant praise, social media visibility, and global sales have accelerated him from zero to warp speed—fame! followers! hiring at Balenciaga!—in the space of little more than three years. The trouble, in these compacted, constantly connected times, is that backlash, the critics, and the trolls can set in really quickly with who knows what damage to reputation and sales. So, surprise, change Gvasalia did. Fall 2017 was a different kind of reality show, embracing all types of people, from that Milanese lady to a German tourist with a plastic anorak to a European policewoman, the stereotypical bouncer, a United Nations soldier, and a couple of shaven-headed skinheads who may belong to the Gabber club.Is this creativity as we know it? Yes, on a technical level. The generous, oversize outerwear has been constructed from two garments joined together at the hems and looped up over one another. Hence, the glam Milanesa was actually sporting two fur coats, which, Gvasalia hastened to note, were vintage and upcycled pieces. That’s a one-off, limited-edition item by nature, but the double-layering of more generic garments, like nylon blousons, has genuine cold-weather usefulness about it.What will keep people talking longer is the satirical symbolism—bleakly realistic, angry, and hilarious by turns—which came embedded within Vetements’s collection.
When the Commando in his camouflage turned his back, he had a United Nations peacekeeping symbol printed on his back: “He’s a soldier, but he’s a good boy! It’s not his fault!” The Nerd, wearing a double-layered flannel shirt and Barbour jacket, had a T-shirt printed with a takeaway pizza menu. The down-and-out Vagabond, meanwhile, was sporting possibly the most topical garment of all: a falling-apart sweater printed with the flag of the European Union.Does this collection, with its upgraded level of innovation, signal Vetements’s distancing itself from its roots? Not at all. The cult hoodies and T-shirts are being kept in a continuing, more secret category of their own—adding a value-protecting aura to them, and the possibility of distributing them in ways that defy the fashion system’s rules. Meanwhile, Gvasalia notes, pieces in this runway collection which prove commerically popular will be added to the permanently available range.Moreover, there are bigger plans afoot for the company being laid out for the long term by Demna’s younger brother and CEO Guram Gvasalia. Vetements is reportedly about to move its headquarters and design offices to Zurich in Switzerland. Whatever surprises and sociological quips come from this direction next, these brothers mean to harness the growth their disruptive strategies have generated, and create something the industry is likely to take very seriously indeed.
24 January 2017
The Gvasalia brothers, Demna, the designer, and Guram, the business brains behind theVetementsphenomenon, pulled off a coup for the fashion credibility of Paris with a show in the Galeries Lafayette tonight. On many levels, it was an event which satirically contravened half a dozen arcane regulations of what is supposed to be the correct way for a label to operate. It was a collection made entirely with other brands, including Brioni, Schott, Levi’s, Comme des Garçons Shirt, Reebok, Canada Goose, Dr. Martens, Alpha Industries, Eastpak, Lucchesse, and Manolo Blahnik. It was both women’s and menswear, and it was magnanimously welcomed by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture as the big ta-da opener of couture week. Yet it was so far from being traditional haute couture that it was shown, cheekily, in a department store—during regular hours, at that.Twisting the conventions in terms of pre-existing generic garments—hoodies, trench coats, bomber jackets, jeans—is always Demna Gvasalia’s thing, and this was just one giant logical step further along that path. “We thought we’d go straight to the brands who make all these things best, and ask to do something in our way with each one,” he said. “The people who work at Vetements don’t really wear designer fashion—a lot of these are the labels they wear all the time.” The brands, from Mackintosh in Scotland to Lucchesse cowboy boot manufacturers in Texas, were approached by his CEO brother who set the legal and logistical negotiations to do with manufacturing, joint labelling, and selling. The clothes will mostly be made by the individual brands’ own specialist factories. “I’m explaining it to retailers that this is not one collection, but 18, which they will receive in different drops throughout the season.”The “best in category” collaborations went to a couple of high-level places as well. One was the classic Italian tailoring company Brioni, who agreed to Vetements’s sacrilegious processes of gigantic oversizing, unpressed seams, and fusing linings to cloth with glue. Another was Manolo Blahnik, who was game for going all the way with exaggerating his duchess satin stiletto boots for them. “We’ve done thigh-high, so we asked, could you go waist-high this time for us?” Demna noted. He was also happy to add a personal touch to the Vetements collab by autographing his classic satin pumps in bleach.
More difficult, said Guram, was winning permission from Levi’s to have an embossed Vetements stamp on its label: “This has never been allowed before in its history!”Still: It was drive and the energy with which this collection of collections came together that actually mattered, and especially at the end, when it moved into innovative high fashion gear with Vetements first real dealings with eveningwear. There was a brilliantly subversive “couture” collab with Juicy Couture, using its signature stretch velvet in skin-tight catsuits and incendiarily sexy long skirts, which are slit all the way up to the bottom and are kept on with an internal thong. Finally, there was a series of chic asymmetric dresses in slinky ’70s jersey or chiffon, and then Lotta Volkova Adam, ending the show in this Winter’s new Vetements floral dress, this time with blue flowers on a white background. That, laughed Demna Gvasalia, was “a collaboration with ourselves!”
3 July 2016
The Gvasalia brothers, Demna, the designer, and Guram, the business brains behind theVetementsphenomenon, pulled off a coup for the fashion credibility of Paris with a show in the Galeries Lafayette tonight. On many levels, it was an event which satirically contravened half a dozen arcane regulations of what is supposed to be the correct way for a label to operate. It was a collection made entirely with other brands, including Brioni, Schott, Levi’s, Comme des Garçons Shirt, Reebok, Canada Goose, Dr. Martens, Alpha Industries, Eastpak, Lucchesse, and Manolo Blahnik. It was both women’s and menswear, and it was magnanimously welcomed by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture as the big ta-da opener of couture week. Yet it was so far from being traditional haute couture that it was shown, cheekily, in a department store—during regular hours, at that.Twisting the conventions in terms of pre-existing generic garments—hoodies, trench coats, bomber jackets, jeans—is always Demna Gvasalia’s thing, and this was just one giant logical step further along that path. “We thought we’d go straight to the brands who make all these things best, and ask to do something in our way with each one,” he said. “The people who work at Vetements don’t really wear designer fashion—a lot of these are the labels they wear all the time.” The brands, from Mackintosh in Scotland to Lucchesse cowboy boot manufacturers in Texas, were approached by his CEO brother who set the legal and logistical negotiations to do with manufacturing, joint labelling, and selling. The clothes will mostly be made by the individual brands’ own specialist factories. “I’m explaining it to retailers that this is not one collection, but 18, which they will receive in different drops throughout the season.”The “best in category” collaborations went to a couple of high-level places as well. One was the classic Italian tailoring company Brioni, who agreed to Vetements’s sacrilegious processes of gigantic oversizing, unpressed seams, and fusing linings to cloth with glue. Another was Manolo Blahnik, who was game for going all the way with exaggerating his duchess satin stiletto boots for them. “We’ve done thigh-high, so we asked, could you go waist-high this time for us?” Demna noted. He was also happy to add a personal touch to the Vetements collab by autographing his classic satin pumps in bleach.
More difficult, said Guram, was winning permission from Levi’s to have an embossed Vetements stamp on its label: “This has never been allowed before in its history!”Still: It was drive and the energy with which this collection of collections came together that actually mattered, and especially at the end, when it moved into innovative high fashion gear with Vetements first real dealings with eveningwear. There was a brilliantly subversive “couture” collab with Juicy Couture, using its signature stretch velvet in skin-tight catsuits and incendiarily sexy long skirts, which are slit all the way up to the bottom and are kept on with an internal thong. Finally, there was a series of chic asymmetric dresses in slinky ’70s jersey or chiffon, and then Lotta Volkova Adam, ending the show in this Winter’s new Vetements floral dress, this time with blue flowers on a white background. That, laughed Demna Gvasalia, was “a collaboration with ourselves!”
3 July 2016
No doubt about it: The flagging spirits of Paris fashion have had a shot in the arm since theVetementscollective, led by Demna Gvasalia, came on the scene. Their channeling and upgrading of everyday street style into high style has exerted a massive influence as designers and brands both established and even younger have found it impossible to resist the gravitational pull of Vetements’s outsize tailoring, printed dresses, and thigh-high boots. The feeling that a young, outsider energy is rushing into the spiritual vacuum which currently exists at the center of the establishment is healthy, exciting, and perfectly timed.And here they all were, the band of friends and girls and boys cast from Instagram, led out byLotta Volkova, the Russian stylist, den mother, and agitator of the crew, who was wearing an almost obscenely short brown childlike dress with pinched-in shoulders and a lace collar, and holding a bunch of yellow flowers. They were storming along the aisles of a church, the gothic American Cathedral right in the heart of the establishment Avenue Georges V.Why a church? “I was in such a dark place while we were doing this,” said Gvasalia. “First we showed in a nightclub, then a restaurant—so I thought, ‘Let’s do it in a church this time.’ ” What Gvasalia omitted to spell out was that the terrorist attacks, whose victims were mostly young people, took place in Paris last November, when he was designing both this collection and the first he will show for Balenciaga this week. So the symbolism of the venue felt at least double-edged—charged with a contradictorily joyful kind of nihilism, a sense of a youthful life force on the move, which, for all its obscene T-shirt slogans, didn’t feel entirely sacriligious. There but for the grace of God?This group, at least, are running with every opportunity they have created to shake up the center of fashion and insist on placing their inclusive values within it. They also smartly dealt out new silhouettes—abbreviated school uniforms with school-tie chokers, shrunken shoulder lines as well as even more gigantic, boxier ones than before. Fast and furious came the ideas: hoodies and sweatshirt-maxis printed with the wordsSexual Fantasies; oversize men’s pin-striped shirts, velvet pant suits, legs in a dozen variations on thigh boots—one of them painted like tattoos—or clad in long, sexy white socks beneath miniscule skirts.
Still, what was noticeable in this mix was that, rather than just being subversive for the sake of the gestural politics, Vetements means business. Its hoodies have a cult appeal in one direction, but for the fashion congregation there is also so much to believe in here: not just the wearable, desirable printed blouses and dresses, but also the hope that this is the beginning of a new chapter in the life of Paris fashion.
3 March 2016
The entity that goes under the name Vetements has caused quite a quake through fashion—bottom-up, from nowhere. Just when—by looking at mainstream corporate luxury-goods norms—it seemed that cool was dead and buried and nothing “alternative” could ever again survive, along came a couple of brothers,DemnaandGuram Gvasalia, and their collective of friends, to prove skeptics wrong. There’s no faking the concrete truth of that. The visible evidence of their breakout is in the number of Vetements’ oversized blazers and giant MA-1 jackets, recycled firefighter sweaters, “Antwerpen” slogan shirts, and, especially, the flower-printed tea dresses with sweatshirting inserts that are being worn around the shows. Nobody seems to have consulted each other on this: They just went to shops, women and men alike; tried on the Vetements stuff; loved the way it made them look and feel; and impulsively paid up. That’s why those impulsive ones, plus a large contingent of the professionally curious, enthusiastically headed to Belleville today, to what turned out to be a large Chinese restaurant, to see theVetementsfollow-up for Spring. The audience was not to be disappointed. The buzz and energy in that cheap and cheerful establishment, the freakishly beautiful club of the young and the strong who modeled, and the wildly impressive clothes they were wearing had all the makings of an unforgettable fashion landmark. At top speed, Demna Gvasalia and his co-conspirators confirmed everything their following likes about their off-kilter, elegant, giant-jacketed tailoring and clunky romantic dresses, and then bettered it all. There were argyle knits under sober menswear suits, sexy sawn-off skirts with Vetements-labeled thigh boots under coats, brilliant flashes of neon yellow and toxic green, striped men’s shirts with superlong trailing cuffs, and corset T-shirts. Then came the dresses, in a stunning number of new, colorful, and punchy-sophisticated ideas. There were loose versions of prairie-flower prints with matching trailing coats, a green Lurex yoked smock, a navy polka-dot dress anchored on a black satin slip, and one outstanding mauve velvet dress cut to cling and slither across the body. And that was far from all.
After most of the crowd had filtered out into the streets, Demna Gvasalia explained, “There’s something in the collection which means a lot to everyone who’s worked on it—like those rose-printed plastic tablecloths we made into aprons and dresses were an ode to my grandmother. We’ve worked really hard on developing more jeans, too, and leather.” The point is that the Vetements collective has a lot of pooled talent and experience to call upon. Idealistic as they are, they haven’t started as naive lambs to the slaughter of the industry. One core ally is the Russian stylist Lotta Volkova Adam, who walked last in the show. Other people have worked silently with them, moonlighting from jobs elsewhere. Demna Gvasalia himself learned the ropes atMaison Martin Margiela, before setting up Vetements and getting on with proving that there can be a different way of doing things. Apart from their stylistic insights into what people really want to wear, it feels like the beginning of something else, too—perhaps something like the power of niceness and friendship in an industry that could do with a lot more of that.
1 October 2015
In the months between Vetements' second collection last September and its third tonight, the design collective headed up by Demna Gvasalia became a semifinalist in the second annual LVMH Prize contest. But if you thought the recognition would get Gvasalia and his gang to go mainstream, think again. Instead, Jared Leto, Kanye West, and the rest of us were in the basement of Paris' famous gay club Le Depot, the hour edging toward 10 p.m., a distinct scent of bathroom all around us, and not 2 feet between the knees on opposite sides of the runway. Nobody was unhappy to be there. On the contrary, it felt fairly electric in the dank surroundings, a seedy reprieve from the hauteur and polish of much of Paris fashion week.As for the clothes? An editor who would know declared afterward that this, not Alessandro Michele's Gucci as the headlines went last week, is what fashion looks like when you take the L train to Bushwick. Brooklyn or Paris, the kids are wearing vintage Levi's nipped and cropped for a sexy fit, spliced and diced sweats, seriously oversize outerwear, and the occasional welcome-mat skirt. It wasn't necessarily groundbreaking—Margiela, where Gvasalia once worked, traversed this territory in his day—but it was definitely energizing. The best pieces, deconstructed and reconstructed "Sapeurs-Pompiers" and "Sécurité" T-shirts, looked like they might've been sprung in response to theCharlie Hebdoattacks that terrified then unified Paris earlier this year. If we had to call it, we'd say Vetements is a long-shot favorite for the LVMH Prize. But then we wouldn't be able to come back to Le Depot next season.It's rare these days in Paris—or any other fashion capital, for that matter—to see this much edge at a show, and rarer to see it delivered with this much skill. With or without the imprimatur of an awards jury, Vetements is a label to watch.
5 March 2015
Now in its second season, Vetements is a collective of designers with (heretofore unidentified) Demna Gvasalia at its nominal helm. He's an alum of Margiela and, more recently, Vuitton, and his compatriots are former colleagues or people he studied with at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. This is a pedigreed lot. And the collection they produced for their first-ever show made a solid case for spontaneous style. The key look here was probably the wide-leg gray sweats worn with a matching one-shoulder top, which was imposingly cool and also just the kind of thing a woman could grab rumpled off the floor and put on in the dark. Hurrah! The sweats had strong competition for show standout from the side-tied trenches and paper-bag-waist skirts, as well as the two-faced dresses in different floral prints front and back.What all the clothes had in common—aside from the general deconstructive sensibility integral to Vetements—was that they celebrated the awry and offhand. Designers frequently give that idea a whirl, but rarely is the message so crisp, the pieces so relatable, and the execution so unmannered as here. Even the surreal suits, shirts, and coats, with their laughably huge proportions, didn't seem to be trying too hard so much as spinning the theme in a more editorial direction. This early on, it remains to be seen what Vetements will do—and according to Gvasalia, members of the collective may rotate in and out, so results may vary widely from season to season. But this collection, at least, staked a claim for the brand as one that respects the real life of clothes—the way they're tossed on, DIYed, worn out, resurrected. The look isn't polished. But it is, in its own way, refined.
24 September 2014