Things Vetements Is Over: Fashion Shows, Oversized Sleeves, Paris, Eastern Europe, Subcultures

Demna Gvasalia’s Vetements label is still in its imperial phase, where every little thing it does reverbs throughout the fashion industry (and on down to street style stars’ and celebs’ Instagrams), but that doesn’t mean that Gvasalia is coasting off the status quo. Indeed, he and his CEO brother Guram Gvasalia are trying to build the brand up from buzzy indie label into a full-fledged lifestyle brand built for the long term, and that means a lot of changes are underway.

For one thing, as Demna told Vogue recently, Vetements is done with traditional fashion shows.

“We are not going to show in the classical system anymore,” Gvasalia said. “I got bored. I think it needs to enter a new chapter. Fashion shows are not the best tool. We did the show in the sex club, the restaurant, the church. We brought forward the season, we showed men’s and women’s together. It’s become repetitive and exhausting. We will do something when there’s the time and the need for it. It will be more like a surprise.”

He also noted that while other brands stage shows to project a fantasy, he doesn’t want Vetements to get into that business. While others show clothes that never even make it to a boutique rack and only serve as a glamorous front for their primary business of perfumes and purses, Gvasalia only designs clothes for the label that he intends for people to actually wear.

Though, the designs of those clothes are also starting to change. One of the brand’s sartorial trademarks has been oversized clothing. Gvaslia said the proportions were inspired by growing up in Georgia the former Soviet state where everyone bought used clothing for their children that was a few sizes too big, to allow room for growth. Now he’s done with that, and Eastern European influence all together.

“Eastern Europe is over for me,” he recently told WWD.

“I personally want to move on from there and to use other tools in my creative approach, which is more analytical, which is more based on really observing the way we dress, what we wear, why we wear it.”

He also noted that the brand is done with trolling subcultures for inspiration.

What might all this upheaval mean for the Vetements aesthetic in the future? We might have had hints of it in recent shows, but, then again, there’s no more traditional fashion shows to look forward to for more clues.

Of course, all these bigs shifts come after another big one: the brand recently announced that it was leaving its home base of Paris and setting up shop in the Swiss city of Zurich. Guram Gvasalia acknowledged the move was partly motivated by lower taxes, but also noted it was a way to distance Vetements from the traditional fashion sphere of influence, literally.

“Paris kills creativity. Its environment with the ‘bling bling’ is destructive. I’m done with the whole showing-off in fashion and the superficial glamour,” he told Business of Fashion.

No surprise that they left Paris with an insult. Let’s wait and see where the bridges Vetements burned will lead the label.

Related: 25 of the “Stereotypes” That Vetements Is Trying to Tackle For Fall 2017

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