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Vetements Shakes Up Paris Fashion Week with Urban Realism

Vêtements means clothes in French. It’s a straightforward name for a label with straightforward goals: to turn our thinking away from the fashion world’s slick cookie-cutter perfectionism, and to revisit clothing’s cultural significance and make it new. Head designer Demna Gvasalia has been working on that premise for three seasons now, surrounded as he is with a new generation of talents whose collective experience traces back to his own school days at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, as well as his past at Louis Vuitton and the Maison Margiela (when Martin was around).

While that all points to a new wave of Belgian fashion, Gvasalia hails from ex-Soviet Georgia and his stylist Lotta Volkova Adam from Vladivostok, Russia. She’s made a habit of opening his shows herself, setting the decidedly Eastern Bloc tone to their high-voltage, street-cast affairs, pulsing to nineties gabber music. For fall, this took place in a Parisian sex club, with editors perched on barstools in its dingy basement, scrubbed spick-and-span for the occasion. As cult French DJClara 3000 hit play on the thumping techno soundtrack, Volkova Adam sped down the winding runway in a sliced-up French fireman’s sweater and Cuban heel cuissards, an unassuming, blacked out mix instilled with an abstract sense of the ordinary.

That strangeness continued all through the mashed-up archetypes that Gvasalia tackled with giant or tiny proportions. He moved the shoulders forward and sideways on overcoats and motocross jackets that made “oversize” an understatement, and misplaced the neck holes on hoodies, striped cotton shirts, and velvet tees to create awkward pulls in all the right places. Starry platform boots were an added Americana touch, one he inflected elsewhere with football scarves and a pink angora sweater dress straight out of Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas. The global effect of these idiosyncratic pop references was of an honest, youth-driven uniform, one that many designers try to riff on through their collections yet rarely succeed. Vetements did, because the extrapolation was minimal. These are young people driving one another’s curiosities, admitting their references, and running with them. They are the new voice of Parisian youth.