Editor’s Note: In honor of Vogue Runway’s 10th anniversary, our writers are penning odes to the most memorable spring 2016 shows. New today: Vetements’s presentation in a Chinese restaurant.
It was the season Vetements exploded. Everyone felt it. Packed knee to knee as we were in a Chinese restaurant in Belleville, witnessing the show which eventually catapulted Demna into becoming the creative director at Balenciaga.
It’s not often that the visceral sense of a generational shift in fashion is felt through a crowd. The frenzy had a lot to do with the collective feeling of a subversive gang of outsiders invading the Paris establishment—two brothers from Georgia, abetted by their Russian-born friends Gosha Rubchinskiy (opening in that instantly notorious DHL T-shirt) and their stylist Lotta Volkova, powering around in her sawn-off jeans skirt and thigh-high boots at the close.
“The buzz and the 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.”
So I wrote, flat out on my hotel bed late that night. I hold to that still, though very possibly 10 years on, young eyes won’t see now what got us all going. That’d be because everything that hit us as so radical then—the street-style hoodies, the XXL tailoring, the appropriated logos, and the floral dresses—were so influential. One litmus test for what really matters in fashion is this: Did it become so normalized that everyone was soon dressing like that? It did.
Then, Demna transferred that language to Balenciaga. The super-exaggerated slouch and the attitude of it became one of the most globally widespread youth looks of the decade. It was copied and copied until it became so common it was all but invisible.
One element of my conviction that night that Vetements had that kind of oomph was that so many editors and assorted fans had turned up at that Chinese restaurant wearing their clothes. Demna and his CEO brother Guram Gvasalia had already ignited the Vetements fire with two underground shows and their original look book, made when Demna (and others) were moonlighting from their day-jobs in Paris fashion houses.
The collection was minimally distributed and hard to come to by, but I had run across a huge black tailored blazer in a New York boutique (Look 29 from the previous fall 2015 show in Le Depot night club). I thought it was way elegant—and fell for it, hang the expense. So I was wearing that—and then I remember seeing Sally Singer, then my editor at Vogue, showing up in one of the ankle-length draped floral dresses from the same collection, and then someone else in a different colorway, and over there, a guy in a humungous black leather biker, and then a kid in the slit-front ANTWERPEN souvenir T-shirt squeezed into a corner. (And this, long before the selfie was a thing!)
So the atmosphere that night had a bit of the thrill of a nascent cult convention, really. I wrote about that sensation too. That Vetements was self-described as a “collective” fueled the edgy mystique of it all—at a time when edginess had gone missing from fashion. God! We were so glad to welcome it back . And yet more grateful to discover that Demna, backstage in the kitchen—far from being a difficult underground 90s-type designer—was an affable story-teller, pointing out that the rose-printed aprons, dresses and boots in the show were an ode to his grandmother’s plastic tablecloths, back in Georgia.
You could call it a moment, I suppose, but it was a moment that lasted a decade, if you count in Demna’s tenure at Balenciaga (which I do), which started at full acceleration immediately afterward in fall 2016. Guram Gvasalia has been creative director of Vetements since 2020, when Demna left the brand.
He’s now left Balenciaga and is on his way to making his first presentation at Gucci. Will Demna cause as much of a seismic fashion revolution with his first outing in Milan? Let’s hope so. Fashion has gone into another of its dull cyclical troughs—just as I appear to have been complaining about in this 2015 review. We need someone to do pull off a show like that again.
Vetements, spring 2016 ready-to-wear
