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Vetements and its designer Demna Gvasalia just let your local PTA board put on a fashion show and it was fucking awesome.
Just look at how great Brian J.’s dad looks ripping it down the runway.
The whole collection is a meditation on normal clothes, or as the New York Times’s Vanessa Friedman reported, “all about stereotypes.” If the guy above looks like Brian J.’s dad, it’s because he’s supposed to. An older woman wearing a fur coat, hair fresh out her rollers, is all about the bourgeois “lady who lunches.” There’s a coked-out Wall Street dude who would put young Jay McInerney to shame. There’s a soldier, a bride, an old man, and this amazing punk rocker who probably worships at the altar of Vivienne Westwood.
The cast was a glaring change from previous Vetements and Balenciaga runways (Demna Gvasalia runs both labels), which have been rightly called out for their lack of diversity. Here are models of all different colors, ages, and sizes. If they weren’t walking single-file down a runway in front of a crowd, they might look like photos taken on a sidewalk in any fairly diverse city.
This is also the closest Vetements has gotten to its mission of being about normal clothing — the name in French literally translates to just “clothes.” In past seasons, the brand has gotten too caught up in its own hype, iterating on hoodies with weirder slogans — “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” — and pushing puffer jackets to their puffiest. Gvasalia put this interesting thought out into the world — how do the most fashion-y of capital-F Fashion brands reflect the real world and make regular Seinfeld-grade clothing? — but he had yet to truly deliver on that thesis.
Here we see regular people wearing fairly regular clothes. While your dad, mom, or grandpa might not wear these exact pieces, the vision is crystal clear.
The fall menswear 2017 collection is undoubtedly the purest take on what Vetements set out to do, and as Racked EIC Britt Aboutaleb pointed out, “it really makes it clear how much everything else looks the same.” People have pointed out that this is a continuation of the normcore trend we’ve seen the past couple weeks, but that was a trend that was really kicked off at Balenciaga, another Demna collection.
Vetements has gone from darling up-and-comer to way-too-hyped to oversaturated to Good again.