Is Vetements the New Balenciaga?
Not so long ago, we were asking: will Balenciaga become the new Vetements? Amidst the recent realignment of fashion’s Overton window, we’re now asking: Will Vetements become the new Balenciaga?
In reaction to the shaky international economy, the fashion industry is currently craving safe bets as badly as it once craved cigarettes (y’know, in a pre-vape world). Companies are falling over each other to hire industry lifers and/or celebrities in desperate bids to either churn out bland collections of luxury normcore or drum up buzz for collections "curated" by Kim Kardashian.
As such, the tables have turned on Balenciaga and Vetements. With Balenciaga intentionally ceasing to push buttons, Vetements has become fashion’s provocateur du jour.
Vetements, with its newly extreme clothes and x-treme creative director, is the talk of the town for the first time in years, as creative director Guram Gvasalia steps into the shoes once worn snugly by his brother, mononymous Vetements co-founder and Balenciaga overseer Demna.
Vetements’ newfound rise recalls its own glory days.
The Vetements x DHL T-shirt that then-creative director Demna sent down the runway in 2015 was an Important Fashion Moment in the vein of Helmut Lang’s jeans, Raf Simons’ skinny suits, and Marc Jacobs’ Perry Ellis Birkenstocks. Vetements' signature pieces were so omnipresent that they birthed memetic imitators.
Vetements was so essential that haughty editors were forced to attend every single one of its DIY runway shows even when Demna, in a fit of anti-hoity-toitery, held them in cramped sex clubs and Parisian Chinese restaurants.
It all peaked with Demna’s final Vetements collection, an anti-capitalist dictum hosted within Paris' largest McDonald's, where models wore flip-flops and T-shirts that parodied the corporate logos of Heineken and PlayStation. It was a not-so-subtle rejection of the commercialism foisted upon Vetements and it was the last time that Vetements’ shtick still shocked.
With Demna gone, Vetements, once the world's hottest, edgiest fashion brand was no longer vital in the way that Demna’s Balenciaga had since become.
Here’s where, with the power of hindsight, we can return to our earlier query about whether Balenciaga would become the new Vetements under Demna’s purview. Could the Georgian ingenue infuse the same sense of youthful rebellion that fueled his upstart enterprise into a then-stagnating luxury label? Answer: a resounding yes, and then some.
In fact, Vetements' notoriety declined almost in tandem with Demna's Balenciaga ascending; once Demna left after that mid-2019 McDonald's collection, so too did Vetements' raison d'etre, though Guram Gvasalia remained as Vetements CEO.
In the wake of Demna's decampment, Vetements limped along as a pale shadow. Presented in plain lookbooks, Post-Demna Vetements collections had one gimmick: their scale. Lookbooks ballooned to over 120 images of forgettable, watered-down tropes, suggesting a lot but imparting very little.
The brand experimented with empty publicity stunts, like the NSFW-branded @Vetements_Uncensored Instagram account (little more than a Vetements promo page with puerile titillation) and much-hyped "new brand" VTMNTS.
VTMNTS was positioned as Hermès for Gen Z, as if kids could afford its $500 T-shirts and $2,700 jackets. In reality, VTMNTS seemingly existed to simply repackage and resell existing Vetements designs. Even Vetements’ most ardent followers rolled their eyes at VTMNTS’ claims of sustainability and anti-inflation pricing.
This was when Vetements completed its shift from a humble manifesto-driven clothing line to a braggadocious social media presence more in line with Philipp Plein than Maison Margiela, the house that informed the entire essence of Demna's Vetements.
By 2021, when Guram took over as its creative director, Vetements had devolved into the exact thing it once mocked.
“Despite our high price point, Vetements isn’t a luxury brand and will never be one,” Demna said in 2016, two years after the label was founded. He didn't say that with pretention but derision, aimed at fashion debauchery.
Meanwhile, when Vetements introduced VTMNTS in 2021, it was accompanied by a bloated, two-page press release typical of the post-Demna era, over-extolling the supposed quality of VTMNTS' clothing and promising to “start a little revolution” in fashion by... selling expensive suits.
In short, Vetements had become a luxury brand.
Ordinarily, this is where I’d write “and that was the end of Vetements.”
But, recently, something strange happened: nearly a decade after Vetements was founded, it has again become buzzy. And it's done so by actually leaning into the fact that, against all odds and its own founding ethos, Vetements is now a luxury brand.
In early 2023, the mostly-dormant Instagram page of Vetements creative director Guram Gvasalia crackled to life with staged street style pictures, private jet-flexing selfies, and photos of his many celebrity pals. There’s Guram sitting front row at Schiaparelli with Doja Cat, there’s Guram getting drinks with J Balvin, there’s Guram holding hands with Avril Lavigne.
This weird, cocksure revival all led up to the June reveal of Vetements’ Spring/Summer 2024 collection, the label’s first truly engaging offering since Demna’s departure.
Finally, rather than repeating Demna's greatest hits, Vetements was doing something different, exploding familiar clothes into enormous drapery. Recognizable Vetements staples were rendered 16 sizes too big, sending shirts drooping below the knee and stacking overlong trousers into interminable pant puddles.
The concept of big clothes isn’t itself terribly novel, even for Vetements — Demna frequently dabbled in enbiggened garments and has since created "XXXL"-branded hoodies at Balenciaga — but Guram’s execution was surprisingly fresh, perhaps because it so earnestly leaned into the exaggeration.
Like the Vetements collections of old, SS24 also included some telling collaborations.
Wheres Demna's Vetements elevated conventional clothing companies, like Alpha Industries and Hanes, into Duchampian runway readymades, Guram went in the exact opposite direction, tapping famed couturier Elie Saab to help create overblown eveningwear.
This collection is perfectly indicative of the #NewVetements era, wherein the brand that once begrudgingly hosted runway shows is now living large on its own excesses, literally.
Vetements SS24 was accompanied by two press releases: an effusively self-serving release created with ChatGPT and a surprisingly tame note from Guram himself, which explained, in part, that this collection intended to recreate the shock of seeing AI-generated clothing with real-world garments.
Guram instead saved his chest-thumping for a New York Times cover story that was published in early July to coincide with the big announcement that Vetements would be dressing Madonna on her forthcoming tour.
Certainly, with all the impressive buzz behind his brand — Vetements’ SS24 collection was reportedly one of Paris Fashion Week’s most-viewed shows, to boot — Guram had much to bask in but this, well, this was a little much.
“I think my brother is very talented, but I have a completely different approach to things,” mused Guram in the interview. “He had his good run of 10 years, and I think his era is slowly going to its finish line.”
When comparing Vetements’ bell-shaped gowns to the voluminous Balenciaga dresses that’ve been a Demna signature since the early days, Guram offered: “If you look at them next to each other, ours are much better.”
After the article was published, Guram uploaded an Instagram Story of a Balenciaga Couture gown with a sarcastic caption: “Congratulations Demna. Always so new and innovative!”
Tell us how you really feel!
But perhaps Guram’s bravado isn’t misplaced. Demna’s been on his back heels since the child ad scandal that rocketed Balenciaga back to earth in late 2022.
I’d argue that Balenciaga has since successfully navigated its way back into prominence in subsequent months — you can’t keep a good designer down forever, and Demna is indeed a very good designer — but Balenciaga, unsurprisingly, isn’t quite the same as it once was.
Nine months ago, Balenciaga was sending potato chip handbags and fake Supreme T-shirts down a sludgy runway. Would-be Balenciaga rivals were left hopelessly in the dust, or mud, as it were.
The most recent Balenciaga mainline collection, meanwhile, was an appreciable but safe selection of Demna staples, stuff we've all seen before, aside from some wrapped towel skirts.
In Q3 2022, Balenciaga ranked as one of the top five hottest luxury labels on the planet and Vetements was a mostly forgotten has-been. Now, it's barely placing in the top 20.
The problem isn't that Balenciaga's clothes are bad, not at all. The problem is that they're becoming de rigueur.
The days when Demna would gleefully troll the internet (and boost Balenciaga's influence) with shockingly destroyed sneakers and $2,000 trash bag clutches are over, at least for now. No longer the enfants terrible, Balenciaga is an establishment and it's keen to play nice.
It's not necessarily bad to be an establishment within fashion, it's just that Demna's Vetements and Balenciaga had an exciting edge. They were new, different, antagonist to established codes — there's that word again — and that's exactly why it's odd that Demna's Balenciaga is playing establishment while Guram's Vetements, hungry for attention and immune to self-awareness, is the hot newness.
Guram’s gleeful shamelessness is an interesting inversion of the Vetements formula. Under Demna, Vetements doggedly refuted fashion indulgences, loathe to even slightly capitulate to industry convention.
Guram’s Vetements, however, is all about indulgence, what with the gloating, splashy social media pages, and the torrent of celebrity co-signs. Sam Smith just wore Vetements SS24 to the Barbie premiere, for crying out loud.
Especially compared to social media-shy Demna, Guram is unapologetically brash, all diamond grillz and self-aggrandizement. Elon Musk in a $1,400 hoodie.
I can’t confidently say that Guram’s vision will have the same legs as Demna’s but, then again, that’s also what people were saying about Balenciaga even a couple years ago. And, as Mr. Vetements himself said in that July interview, gracious as ever, “Now it is my time.”
