Vetements Fall/Winter 2016

The way that the fashion world praises and fawns over Vetements, you would think Demna Gvasalia is some kind of god (although his deity status hasn’t yet rivaled Alessandro Michele’s, whose fashion edicts have spread like wildfire). So it’s appropriate that the show was held in the American Church in Paris. Since the anarchist clothes were thoroughly influenced by Americana, you might interpret that as a jab at the country’s current political climate. However, Gvasalia also happened to be designing this collection around the time of the Paris terrorist attacks, so it might also be a statement against religion in general. How ironic, then, that his own collection has become a sort of fashion cult?

The collection was off-beat, naturally: hunchback and football-inspired shoulders, overly oversized menswear attire that was purposefully styled sloppy, hoodies and all manner of sweatshirt material with expletive phrases, and metal influences. And for the record, we can really get behind those coat-holder key-rings. The hoodies were styled to make the models look like menacing new age religious figures (street monks?). The whole cooler and weirder than thou concept behind Vetements is only something the fashion and art worlds will initially embrace, but like any newfound religion, it raged against the current machine.