• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

These Two Guys Are Changing How We Think About Fashion Alessandro Michele and Demna Gvasalia with German Shepard, Gucci Alessandro Michele of Gucci and Demna Gvasalia of Balenciaga and Vetements are making clothes that capture the zeitgeist. By: Alexander Fury T brought them together for the April 11, 2016 first time to have a little chat. “RULE-BREAKING” IS A PHRASE thrown the whole thing. And so, genuine rule-breakers around in fashion a lot. But who makes these don’t come along that often. Fashion enjoys the rules? And aren’t rules what fashion is based on? status quo. It sells clothes, it makes money. After all, fashion isn’t just the clothes on your But what if the rules are broken? People have back. ¬It’s the form of those clothes at a given stopped buying clothes with quite the alacrity moment, adhering to certain codes that define they used to, and large conglomerates have be- them as forward-thinking, as now, as à la mode. gun to see their profits slip southward. Design- How they want to look, maybe even feel? The to Michele’s out-of-the-backroom appointment. Which often, as on a menu, translates simplistical- ers are fleeing houses after a few short seasons. soft sell, rather than the hard? He debuted his first collection for Balenciaga last ly to a lump of something fancy plopped on top Plenty of brands, rattled by the instability of It matters, at least, to two. One is the design- month to ecstatic reviews. of an existing offering, as opposed to tinkering luxury markets, are now trying to close the gap er Alessandro Michele, who after anonymously Relative anonymity is the immediate connec- about with the guts or really changing anything. between runway and retail, offering goods ever toiling away at Gucci for 12 years, was appoint- tion between Gvasalia and Michele, but there's Rules in fashion are made by the industry: the faster to consumers, hoping to whip them into a ed creative director of the 95-year-old Floren- something deeper at play than the fact that, until editors, the designers, the corporations who fund frenzy of acquisition. There’s a general unease in tine brand in January 2015. In three seasons, 15 months ago, you'd probably never heard of fashion, to say the least. the 43-year-old Italian has managed to entirely either. Gvasalia's frustration is quietly mirrored And the clothes themselves? They wind remake the brand, pulling back from its sexy im- by Michele, who has said that he'd planned to up bit players in the Sturm und Drang age to explore a more romantic side. The oth- leave Gucci before being surprised with the cre- of it all, overshadowed by financial fina- er is Demna Gvasalia, a 35-year-old Georgian ative director offer. More than that, there’s a syn- gling and designer wrangling, when they from the former Soviet Union, who started his ergy between their approaches to gender lines — should be the focus of the conversation. Paris fashion collective Vetements in 2014 after ignoring them — and to the runway, which they There is a glut of clothing at every price working at Maison Margiela and Louis Vuitton, use to actually show clothes, not just to stage a point, especially in high fashion, where where he became frustrated with the increasing spectacle. They both talk frequently, incessantly, labels proliferate and multiple seasons demands of the fashion industry. Six months about clothes, rather than fashion; about reality, (spring, prefall, winter, resort, capsules ago, based on the sheer strength of his fledgling about appealing to, and ultimately dressing, the galore) concurrently jostle to justify a streetwear-based label, he was named the artistic girl (or guy) on the street. seemingly endless influx of clothing. But director of Balenciaga, the century-old French But their streets are worlds apart. Gvasalia and how much of that actually connects with house, in a twist that shocked the industry given Michele’s aesthetics are diametrically opposed. what people really want to wear today? Gvasalia’s distinct lack of star power — similar Gucci’s embroidered and preciously embel- Page 8 of the similarly teenage street- cast models. It was difficult to see where the runway ended and reality began. In Milan, Gucci’s models were outnum- bered by audience members wearing Michele’s fur-lined house slippers, chinoiserie jackets and foliage-festooned accessories. The newly re- vamped Gucci store on Via Montenapoleone was mobbed all week long, and not just by fashion types. Michele is pull- ing in consumers who previ- ously felt put off by Gucci’s hedonistic repute, but who now feel drawn to its beauti- fully ¬made jackets, dresses heavy with embroidery, hand- bags patterned with flowers or embroidered with bees. “Take it,” Michele told me backstage lished clothes look like family heirlooms; Vete- nylon. By contrast, Gucci’s clothes are generally before his last Gucci men’s ments’ seem fresh from the trash bag, jumbled simplistic in shape (track tops, single-¬breasted wear show, gesturing at the and crumpled and intentionally misshapen. blazers, bowed blouses, a predilection for a 1970s heaving rail of soon-to-be- Gvasalia’s Balenciaga adds a third element to the flare) with a focus on shimmering surfaces and shown Gucci wares. “Make it mix, focusing on a “couture attitude,” on the way overloaded detailing: sequins, custom-¬woven yours.” garments are worn and their relationship with jacquards, buttons in the form of jeweled lion’s THAT’S THE APPEAL of the body. These included embroidered evening heads or gumdrop pearls, sleeves dipped in mink. many of these clothes: Rather dresses and strict tweed suits with exaggerated However different their collections, though, than a tub-thumping, dictated basques, as well as curving parkas and Perfec- Gvasalia and Michele’s ideas about fashion are silhouette, both Gvasalia and to-style jackets based on grand opera coats. The interwoven. The connection is the moment, the Michele propose individual, architecture of the garments at Balenciaga and collective nerve they seem to have touched in the individualistic items, designed “Vetements is only in its Vetements is exciting, innovative. cultural consciousness. People identify with the to stand by themselves. They’re clothing people, That even includes the standard T-shirt, cut long aesthetics these designers are proposing, with the not “fashioning” them. The collections them- fifth season, but Gvasalia has in the body at Vetements with stiffened sleeves “universe” their clothing represents, as badges of selves include countless styles, worn every which or a high-¬rise neckline, as if being worn back belonging. At Vetements’ fall show, high-school- way. There’s no trend, no given shape, no defin- more than a hundred stockists itive singular statement. Their work turns on its to front. Other garments are cut too small or age fashion fans thronged a church in the Eighth worldwide, where his clothes too large, and sit unusually on the body. They’re Arrondissement, dressed in Vetements and vin- head the previously predominant idea of the “to- often made of synthetic fabrics like velour and tage mashed together, emulating the appearance tal look,” of a designer proposing an outfit to be sold head-to-toe. (Incidentally, these “looks,” consistently sell out.” Page 10 which have dominated the past decade or so of fashion, are also often strictly proscribed to be photographed for magazines as such, ensur- ing a singular retail and marketing vision.) Both Gvasalia and Michele conceive their garments as individual entities: a great jacket, a great skirt, a good dress, nice shoes. They mix it all together on the runway, but the notion is to pull it apart into individual pieces. Gvasalia even named his label Vetements -because, “it’s really just about that ... just clothes,” he once told me. Their clothes also don’t change much from sea- son to season, which is breaking another rule: that of perpetual change, of fashion simulating newness purely by its contrast with that which came before. Gvasalia and Michele’s clothing may not be designed, specifically, for seasons to be jumbled together. But they can be. Their great- est provocation to the establishment has been to eschew the industry’s built¬-in obsolescence, to deemed what was an acceptable, even cool, way challenge the very fabric of time. to dress. Gvasalia and Michele have collapsed the Together, what they are proposing ideologically very perception of fashion as rule-maker. is affecting the way other designers think, how We’ve reached the point in fashion where focus- they design and subsequently how we all dress. ing on the garments, as opposed to the gumpf First and foremost, Gvasalia and Michele’s work fluffed about them, constitutes rule-breaking. feels exciting because it aims outside of fashion’s The individual — the individual customer, the insular bubble. There’s a pragmatism behind the ripped off by a legion of others. ibly different. Your aesthetics individual garment, the individualist look rath- collections of both. They frequently talk about “All eyes are on these six,” stat- “I think that are opposed, and yet there are er than the one dictated by a fashion designer “wardrobes,” about “reality,” one that actually ed Fairchild, in his book “Chic so many underlying similarities. or a fashion magazine — is at the root of their feels authentic rather than some fashion con- Savages.” “They show the rest of fashion, for a long Alessandro, you’ve spoken to me success. It’s something that had been missing struct. At the fall shows, many designers seemed the industry where to go.” Now about strange ideas of beauty; in fashion.

Load more

  8

Copy Link