Demna Gvasalia
As a former resident of the Soviet Union, the fashion superstar spent his childhood in a society where the most luxurious of luxury goods were to be found at the local greengrocer
It was there that the choice of toothpastes was limited to just one variety, handily branded Toothpaste. No wonder he started a label called Vetements, simply the French word for clothes. Who needs more than that? This brilliant approach of making mundane clothes with radically updated shapes has made Demna, now a German citizen living and working in Paris, the most in-demand man in fashion. He is 35 years old and orchestrates both the twisted beauty of Balenciaga and the magnificent ordinariness of Vetements.
From Fantastic Man n° 24 – 2016
Text by ALEXANDER FURY
Photography by INEZ & VINOODH
Demna Gvasalia is from Georgia, the former Soviet country east of the Black Sea – as opposed to the deep-southern US state that counts Gucci Mane and Young Thug among its latest cultural exports. Demna is 35 years old, slightly grizzly, with a close-cropped beard and shaved head, and habitually clad in customised black jeans and a hooded sweatshirt in a washed-out black or an off-colour hue of murky olive drab perhaps bearing the slogan Polizei or something similar. There’s sometimes an oversized coat slung on top, drowning his physique, which is neither waif-like nor Falstaffian. It’s average. Demna, indeed, is generally quite an unassuming, normal guy.
He’s garrulous, though, in an appealing way that eludes many fashion designers, especially early in their careers. In between chain smoked cigarettes, he rapidly lays out his ideas about both the fashion industry and the clothes that he makes, which would be entirely separate entities if the latter wasn’t such an influence on the former. The fashion line he creates is labelled Vetements, which is bastardised French for clothing. The name is cleaved of its original circumflex accent for copyright purposes (it was too difficult to trademark intact), but the intent remains the same. “Just clothes,” is how Demna summarises his philosophy, meaning there’s no big concept and no overarching theme to what Vetements does. Philosophy is probably the wrong word even. There are no seasonally shifting themes, nor does he care about a “total look.”
The idea Demna most consistently speaks about is a wardrobe. “If you come to somebody’s place and you have a look at their wardrobe, there is no concept; there’s a flannel shirt, an evening dress, jeans, a pair of boots. That’s our approach. Every season we start designing a wardrobe.” I think Demna is referring first and foremost to Vetements’ womenswear collections, since that’s what the brand started with three years ago. It has only launched a menswear collection recently. However, the general approach seems rooted in a man’s wardrobe, where brand loyalty often trumps the transience of fashionable trends and where the focus is on the individual item. A garment as an island, the whole no greater than its parts.
When he talks about Vetements, Demna loves to use the word product. It’s a word that’s seen as dirty by many young designers, but for him it has an important resonance. “It’s very product oriented, you know. There’s no illusion about it, like, ‘Oh, we’re creating a fashion dream,’” he says. “We just want to make clothes that people want to have.” For many, that’s the most refreshing – and rebellious – aspect of Vetements’ proposal. “Fashion has been stuck in a cocktail party for the last ten years,” says Sarah Mower, chief critic of American ‘Vogue’ and a passionate and vocal advocate for Vetements. “The most important thing is that it’s clearly about clothes to wear.”
Demna and I meet twice, at pivotal points before the two Vetements shows staged in Paris in 2016; first in March, when the show during womenswear week includes menswear for the first time, although men have appeared on the Vetements runway before (but not strictly wearing menswear). Our second meeting is in June, not long before the Vetements show during the haute couture presentations, even though the brand doesn’t claim to make couture.
To complicate his schedule, during this time Demna also presents his crazily anticipated first womenswear collection for Balenciaga in March, and his first menswear collection for that venerable 97-year-old Paris-based fashion house in June.
At both of our meetings, the Vetements studio – a mysterious space in the 10th arrondissement that I’d love to see – turns out to be off-limits in order to safeguard the collections brewing inside from prying eyes. Demna and his team jealously guard their privacy. “All of us, we’re kind of camera shy and not really happy taking pictures of ourselves,” Demna tells me. “We don’t do selfies, all of this stuff; it’s just not part of our character.” Instead, we meet in a bar near the studio and in a hotel, respectively. The ritzy hotel, Les Bains, was formerly the nightclub Les Bains Douches, dubbed ‘the Studio 54 of Paris’ in the ’80s. It’s in the 3rd arrondissement, around the corner from Demna’s home in the Marais. It’s also around the corner from Le Dépôt, the infamous gay sex club on Rue aux Ours where the management habitually pour amyl nitrate into the air conditioning, to ensure a suitably hedonistic experience for all. Demna is not, to my knowledge, a Dépôt denizen. But the club has played a role in his story, which we’ll come to later.
We’re not sitting in Les Bains for its own seedy history, or its cuisine – we just drink water. Rather, we’re at Les Bains because the designer is living here right now. He’s moved in temporarily since there’s construction going on outside his flat. “At seven in the morning they can officially start, so they do,” Demna groans. “You get the feeling they’re drilling your head.” Hence, he isn’t sleeping much – the fittings for the Vetements show are keeping him awake until 3am, if not later. He smiles widely at the idea of Paris and fashion vehemently working against each other. “I literally just went home to get socks,” he says. He really does live around the corner.
“He’s quite hedonistic,” Mower tells me when I ask her about Demna, “but combining that with hard work. I wonder if he’s living his life backwards. I’d think that’s because of the trauma he went through when he was 13.”
Demna was born in 1981; his brother Guram, now CEO of Vetements, was born five years later. His mother was a housewife; his father ran a car repair business until the fall of the Iron Curtain. There was no family background in fashion, and despite what Demna terms the “crazy homophobia” of the Soviet Union and parental strictures, he was fascinated with clothing from an early age. “Everybody was wearing the same stuff,” he says of Georgia under the Soviet yoke. “My interest in clothes actually came from wanting to be different from that. I used to shorten my pants. I used to draw on my red pioneer scarf. I was almost kicked out of school for that.” He laughs. “I looked like a freak. People laughed at me.”
Demna grew up by the coast in provincial Georgia – far away from cities where ersatz or smuggled Western goods would have been more common. “Georgia was very, very behind. It was so isolated, like many other small countries of the Soviet Union,” he says. “Moscow had stores where you could buy Western products, but they were very elitist. You needed a special currency – you couldn’t buy there with roubles. I remember my parents bought me an Adidas tracksuit, and I actually didn’t wear it until it was too small, because it was so precious. It was Adidas! It was like having a Lamborghini!”
He laughs again, not bitterly though. “I remember when I got my first pair of real jeans – not Soviet jeans that weren’t even made of denim, but my first Western jeans. I wore them for a whole year. I think that’s where my fascination with things that are so normal in Western culture and society comes from. I mean, I’m talking about clothes all the time, but it was other things too. Food. People had never seen bananas. I remember the first time I saw a kiwi – it was like I was seeing an alien. That curiosity about things that are normal here – for us they didn’t exist. I think that also fed a certain…I don’t know, a certain hunger for discovery.”
It’s natural to wonder if Demna still has a certain Soviet fascination with the Western everyday, today. He smiles, ruefully. “No, I’ve seen bananas now. They’re boring,” he laughs again. “But I go back to Russia and I find all this old stuff, and that still fascinates me. We only had one type of toothpaste, and the whole country used that one fucking toothpaste called Toothpaste! There were no options.”
The Gvasalia family lived in what is now the partially recognised state of Abkhazia, on the eastern coast of the Black Sea. Then part of Georgia, in 1992–1993 a process of ethnic cleansing by Abkhaz separatists killed thousands, while huge numbers of Georgians were expelled from their homes, including the Gvasalias. Demna was 13 when they relocated, first to the Georgian capital Tbilisi, then to Ukraine, and then eventually to Russia. He went on to study economics back in Tbilisi and considered the few options he had for his future. The atmosphere in the former Eastern Bloc did little to encourage his nascent interest in fashion, and when the Gvasalias again relocated, this time to Düsseldorf, Germany, he was more or less resigned to following a conventional career path, even though his notebooks were filled with images of clothes. “Studying economics was really my family route,” he says. “My dreams about fashion were kind of shattered by then,” he states, pragmatically. “So obviously I went to apply for a job in a bank. I had an interview in Düsseldorf; they accepted me for an internship. I was supposed to start, but then I read this article in ‘Le Figaro’ – because I was learning French – about fashion schools in Europe. They listed tuition prices, and I saw that the Academy in Antwerp was, like, only €500 a year. And I thought, well, that’s kind of affordable for me.” Demna got in. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, the alma mater of the legendary Antwerp Six, graduating in 2006.
Demna soon made a name and place for himself in the strict hierarchy of the Paris fashion world. He headed the womenswear studio at Maison Martin Margiela for four years, then moved to Louis Vuitton in 2013, where he worked first under Marc Jacobs and then Nicolas Ghesquière. While at Vuitton, Demna says, he “started to realise that if I would go on like this, I would start to hate my job because there was no way of expressing myself.” And so, together with two colleagues, he started a side project intended to be a release from the commercial drudge of creating under another designer’s instruction. It began part-time, “on weekends, after work,” he says, as if talking about a book club or an aerobics class. “We worked like crazy in my bedroom, literally, the three of us making these pieces.” It was at the encouragement of his younger brother Guram – who had studied Strategic Fashion Management at the London College of Fashion and worked for luxury brands including Burberry – that the elder Gvasalia decided to spin his stress-relieving pastime into a fully-fledged business. Their parents thought it a terrible idea for Demna to leave secure employment. “Everything I earned from Vuitton went to Vetements,” Demna says, candidly. “That was my motivation.”
Demna speaks of Vetements in the plural because the label was conceived as this collective effort. All three had spent time working at Margiela, which explains both the group approach and a label ostensibly free of designer name or logo, not emulating but certainly allied with the famously blank tags stitched inside Margiela’s garments. But in actual fact, “Demna Gvasalia” is woven on the reverse of the looped Vetements label, which conventionally states “Pour Femme” or “Pour Homme” and the season they were produced – the name a tacit acknowledgement not only of Demna’s role as creative head, but also of the fact it was his money that originally bankrolled the business. The two friends were nameless and faceless, not because of more perceived Margiela style conceits, but because they were moonlighting. Demna is still somewhat cagey about their identities: perhaps through force of habit. “One of them works at Vetements,” he says, avoiding names. “The other one we’re actually trying to get back.”
Vetements’ connection with Margiela, arguably considered to be the biggest fashion genius of modern times, is interesting, although Demna wrinkles his nose at my suggestion of an interrelation. First of all, he joined the house after the legendary reclusive founder Martin Margiela (who is also an alumnus of Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts) had departed. Demna isn’t his prodigal son; indeed, the two have never even met. The brands are different in approach, Demna thinks. “At Margiela there were clear concepts per season, like, ‘This is the flat collection,’ and you’d have coats, trousers, T-shirts. But sometimes maybe a flat trouser doesn’t work, but you’d still have to make it because it’s the flat season.” Demna exhales smoke. “Sometimes you end up with garments that don’t make any sense. Conceptually, yes, but as a product, no. And so, not having that frame anymore is much more fun.”
The fun brings us back to Le Dépôt, the aforementioned Parisian gay sex dungeon (“le plus mythique des Cruising Gay de France!” its lurid, prolapse-crimson and BDSM-black website informs me). It was the venue for what would be Vetements’ breakthrough show in early 2015. The show was staged off the official Paris Fashion Week schedule, late at night, with few members of the press present. Actor Jared Leto and the omnipresent rapper Kanye West were there, though. Vetements was the first fashion label to stage a show at Le Dépôt; it also marked the first time the establishment had permitted women to enter. Demna declares the show, which was devised in the aftermath of the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ attacks, “dark”. Models wore sweatshirts derived from French fire-fighters’ uniforms, tourist-y T-shirts spelling “Antwerpen,” high-waisted jeans, and bomber and motor jackets with long sleeves.
The presentation was considered anti-fashion in many ways: the timeslot, the venue, the odd proportions of the garments shown. But Demna says it wasn’t meant to be anti-anything. “We showed off-schedule because we couldn’t get the time that we wanted. It’s complicated, you know, with the Paris mafia,” referring to the powers that be in Paris fashion. “We had no choice, or the choice would have been to show on Tuesday morning 9am, before any journalist or buyer would arrive in Paris. You don’t want to be anti, but you become it. It forces you.”
Demna’s “it” here is referring to the Paris establishment – one which has since clutched Vetements to its collective embonpoint – but it could just as easily be referencing the fashion system as a whole, or even the times in which we live. “This kind of thing happens in uncertain times,” says Adrian Joffe, president of Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market, the department store that sells Vetements so well. “Great things come out of struggle and uncertainty, that space between ‘this is the way things are’ and the opposing view. Good and bad, right or wrong, black and white. Something new can happen.”
I ask Demna what he makes of Vetements’ remarkable success – and his own stellar appointment at Balenciaga – and he seems unruffled. “I really think it’s the moment now, because these times can feel a bit stagnated. Everybody feels there is a need for something else.”
Rule breaking is an important part of what Demna has done, or at least what his work represents on a wider scale. The whole idea behind Vetements was to transgress generally accepted ideas. When the brand was invited by the Fédération Française de la Couture, the industry’s official governing body, to show during the exclusive haute couture week in July, it left many people confused: was Vetements showing couture? No. In fact, it showed an exhilarating hotchpotch of collaborations with brands from Levi’s and Hanes to Juicy Couture and Brioni. Similar confusion came from earlier collections, where women’s clothes were shown on male models. Many men purchased the garments as such, despite the fact the Vetements labels clearly stated “Pour Femme.” But then, the “Pour Femme” also appeared on the labels of a capsule menswear collection created for London’s Dover Street Market last March. The simple explanation: Vetements didn’t have the time to have new labels made. “Oh well, Pour Homme, Pour Femme,” Demna shrugs. “It’s an indication of what kind of body it was made on, whether it was a male or female body. But everyone buys what they want to buy anyway.”
Already at Vetements’ earlier shows, its women’s clothes had been shown on male models too – with friends of the brand such as colleague designer Gosha Rubchinskiy taking the runway. “The male models were there really because we didn’t have enough female models!” Demna laughs and smiles widely. “We just wanted to have those looks in! And the clothes kind of let you do it because they’re…” His voice tails off and he shrugs.
The clothes let you do it because of their odd proportions, oversized to the point of swamping the body. I’d say it’s not the look, but rather the feel of Vetements clothing that is all important. It’s telling that Demna never makes sketches but works in three dimensions. “Take a cheap jacket that we buy for €20, cut it up completely, destroy it, boil it, shrink it, manipulate it. It’s like a raw material,” he says. He and his 20-strong team try the clothes on, testing the fit, twisting the garments around their bodies. “With menswear,” Demna says, “it’s much more direct. It’s faster. It’s easier for me to know whether it works or not. Once I get pieces, I immediately try them on, to see if I fit into them. With womenswear it’s different. It’s more removed, which is also nice, I think. It makes it more objective, in a way, because it’s not for me, but I can imagine an array of different women, what would they feel like wearing that? Age, height, body shape, all of that.”
“The work is almost sculpture,” says Lotta Volkova, the stylist who works closely with Demna, both at Vetements and Balenciaga. He frequently refers to her as “the Vetements woman” and she wears the brand a lot, and well. Fittings always happen in her presence, frequently on her body, and she even models in the shows. They met at a party thrown by their mutual friend Peter Hornstein, the co-designer of the label Wanda Nylon. “Of course she was speaking Russian,” says Demna, “and Russian people have this ‘Oh, we should be friends because you speak Russian’ thing.”
Demna himself, incidentally, speaks six languages – Russian, Georgian, English, German, Dutch and French. Members of Vetements’ staff come from across the world: Romania, Italy, America, Great Britain. It’s far from the East Bloc outpost it’s often thought to be. “The way we work at Vetements is kind of a sign of our times,” says Lotta. “I think it represents a whole remix of cultures, a remix of references. You’re constantly bombarded by information, social media.” She pauses. “It’s why young people feel so related to it. Older generations don’t necessarily get it.”
“I’m the oldest – I’m 35,” says Demna, of the Vetements team. Lotta is 32; Guram is 30. “You feel the difference,” he continues. “My boyfriend is 24. I was showing him some stuff from Margiela and Helmut Lang from the mid ’90s, and he said ‘Oh, I was two years old then.’ He was born in 1992. By that time I already had sketchbooks full of ugly stuff!” Demna roars.
His appointment as artistic director at Balenciaga took place in October last year. In a press release for the shock announcement, his new boss, Kering’s CEO François-Henri Pinault, lauded Demna for his “unique approach to the profession, marked by a sociological observation of the wardrobe’s essentials and the way he remains humble and rigorous in his creative work.”
The new job has stabilised Demna, somewhat. It allows him the freedom to relocate to a fancy hotel for a while, and offers Vetements a touch more financial security by association. It has also perhaps legitimised Vetements in the eyes of the fashion establishment: no more off-schedule slots. For critics, it felt like another set of rule breaking – a refreshing triumph of creativity over commercialism, even for a conglomerate the size of Kering.
It does, however, warrant much more work for Demna. Both his women’s and men’s debut for Balenciaga have shown a startlingly different side to his aesthetic. This was especially true at the men’s show, which highlighted an affinity with tailoring, translating the formality evoked by traditional bespoke techniques into a wide array of garments. And on large shoulders – very, very large shoulders, pushed to Talking Heads-style proportions. “Expanded” was the official parlance for them, alongside a selection of “shrunken” pieces that gripped aggressively at the models’ slender adolescent bodies. The two extremes in one show resulted in hyperbolic reviews in the fashion press.
Hype is an interesting notion when discussing Demna, considering the critical plaudits, Vetements’ soaring sales, and his appointment to Balenciaga so early in his career. “Everything is hyped,” Adrian Joffe tells me. “But Demna’s work feels real, which is why I can live with it. It’s not empty hype. There’s a reason why people are connecting or identifying, which is nice.”
His work for Balenciaga does show another side of his sensibility: no sweatshirts, no slogans, not so much of the cultural remixing that Lotta Volkova mentioned. Instead, Balenciaga is about an “attitude” – about couture and tailoring and tradition – but trying to make that feel bold and new and exciting. And, indeed, relevant for a new generation. “I’m starting to find those instruments at Balenciaga,” says Demna. “It’s a beauty aspect. At Vetements it’s always very much, like, ‘It’s ugly; that’s why we like it.’” He deepens, then smiles widely. “At Balenciaga ugliness doesn’t exist at all. I like that a lot.”
Despite the allusions to the universal wardrobe, and the use of clothing tropes that are almost aggressively mundane (T-shirts, jeans, sweatshirts), Vetements’ clothes hang perfectly well in the world of luxury fashion. They’re expensive, for one: the label’s signature patched-together, secondhand jeans run at £868; an oversized bomber will exceed £1,000. They’re also not always easy to wear, especially for the less adventurous – which is interesting when applied to sweatshirts and T-shirts. Vetements’ sold-out yellow T-shirt printed with the logo of the courier company DHL was remarkable for two reasons. Firstly, the furore it caused, being pilloried and derided in international newspapers and on websites across the world as the ultimate example of the emperor’s new clothes. Secondly, because the fit of the T-shirt had been subtly manipulated: the sleeves enlarged and shoulders pulled forward, the torso elongated to ruck and distort on the body. The fit was in fact what made the T-shirt so special, but few noticed the design.
Maybe that’s the irony of the Vetements phenomenon: the clothes, les vêtements, wind up playing second fiddle to their popularity, ubiquity and that seemingly endless hype. Which is a shame, because Demna not only designs some of the most interesting clothes in the world but has also completely shaken up the way fashion is seen and perceived, even by some of its harshest critics. It’s not just a funny DHL T-shirt. Although, Demna admits that even he can’t see a DHL truck now without thinking only of Vetements.
Lighting direction by Jodokus Driessen. Digital operation by Brian Anderson. Grooming by Lisa Butler at Bryant Artists. Grooming assistance by Rachel Singer Clark. Production by VLM Productions.