Vetements stages fashion shows in sex clubs and believes in creating interesting wardrobe pieces that are based on the women they know. Who knew reality could be so radical?

Photography Alex Franco
Styling Tereza Ortiz

There’s a moment before Demna Gvasalia walks into Miss Kō, the restaurant in the 8th arrondissement of Paris where we’ve decided to meet, when I think I see the future. “The future” is a skinny boy, and he’s wearing a checked shirt with extra-long sleeves from the S/S 2015 womenswear collection by Vetements, the label for which Gvasalia is spokesperson (it must be someone from the team, since Demna walks in shortly thereafter). The look is so deceptively simple that you could say there’s nothing special about it – at least if it’s supposed to represent what lies ahead. But then I think, maybe the future is simple, because it looks better than anything I’ve seen in a long time.

The label Vetements (French for “clothes”) is young. It was only last year that the first items appeared, when Demna and the rest of the anonymous team made pieces for people they knew (“it was really to dress our friends”). Others swiftly took notice and, before long, Vetements had 37 retailers (today it has 84). The A/W 2015 collection, which was presented at Le Dépôt, a gay sex club in the centre of Paris, was named one of the top shows of the season by Style.com.

“There were so many things in the fashion industry I disagreed with,” says Demna of his reasons for starting the brand. “Where does the cool girl I know buy her pieces? She either reworks them herself, or she has some old archive pieces, something she found at a flea market, a special military garment. Everything we saw [in the industry] was based on publicity and, also, total look this brand, total look that brand. Our idea was to build a wardrobe for those women who have their own style, who basically are designers of their own. We supply them with wardrobe pieces.”

What this means for A/W 2015: bomber jackets with elongated sleeves, floor-length coat and aviator jacket hybrids, cut up and restitched French firemen’s jumpers, black leather shirts with fringed backs, deconstructed high-waisted jeans, “Antwerpen” t-shirts, asymmetric long dresses with chunky, sparkly bracelets worn over the sleeves, and yellow leather gloves made to look like rubber gloves.

When Vetements puts on a show, the underlying ideology – that women, even models, are individuals with their own taste, rather than targets or placeholders for branded clothes – shines through. “We do the look for every girl that we cast for the show,” Demna explains. “We try it on, and actually ask her, would you wear that? If she says no, we never put her in the look – it has to correspond to the person who wears the clothes. This means that what we basically push is product that complements the personality of the person.”

Demna describes Vetements as the complete opposite of what the global fashion industry offers at the moment, which is a world where the same model can represent several brands, and where the customer is told that they have to wear certain clothes in order to be that woman. Instead, it is the individual girl who is at the centre of what Vetements stands for. This is reflected in the design process, which is essentially a group session between the team and different girls they know. They all talk about what they are looking for, clothes-wise, and what they are wearing at the moment. The team start out with a regular version of, say, a bomber jacket – then try to make it into something you can’t find at the army surplus store. “Really, what we do with pieces is cutting, making them longer, bigger, upside-down. There’s a lot of craziness going on,” Demna explains.

In all of this, Vetements seems to be part of a certain zeitgeist: a move towards the personal, and an increased focus on the wardrobe. “It’s strange that it’s happening now,” Demna concurs. “But we always thought like this. And the reason for it happening now, I think, is that there is too much – too much information.”

He continues: “Everything is available. On Instagram, it’s there. They follow, they like, they don’t like. [Fashion] has became so globalised, you can have the same look in the LA store as you have in Shanghai. At some point, people feel they need to [do something] different, because otherwise they won’t be different any more.”

Demna, who got his fashion education at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, grew up in the Soviet Union, in present-day Georgia (the family left in 1991). He thinks what is taking place in fashion today is oddly similar to aspects of life under Soviet rule, when everyone had the same furniture and clothes, because those were the only things you could get hold of. Even though there is more product than ever in the world, he notes, people tend to dress more and more alike.

His childhood still influences him, especially when it comes to his focus on real women, rather than dream versions of them (“people were not allowed to dream there”), and certain types of clothes that he finds horrible but sometimes end up in the collection – like the flowery 1970s dresses that can be seen in both the S/S and A/W 2015 collections.

Many people see Vetements as a kind of heir to Martin Margiela, with Paris-based headhunter Agnès Barret calling Demna the “spiritual son” of Martin. He and others from the team worked at the house – although Demna most recently spent time at Louis Vuitton – while the deconstruction aspect, the use of non-traditional models and off-kilter styling seem to come from the same universe as old-school Margiela. Demna has a lot of respect for what Martin Margiela did with fashion, yet he interjects that he “wouldn’t idolise anyone in this field, because I don’t think it’s important enough – not as important as politics or social matters”.

In the eyes of the Vetements team, what they do is different, in any case. “What we are trying to do is to have more variety,” says Demna. “With Margiela, back then, it was [all about] the Margiela woman – of a certain age, a certain way of being. We have some girls who are skater girls and wear our clothes, and also women who are dressed in Céline, who are more sophisticated.”

But what makes Vetements distinct from, say, Saint Laurent? Aesthetically, it is something else, but the approach – the focus on product and basing the collections on what people are already wearing, then perfecting or changing it – is not. “I think in terms of approach, it’s very similar, which I didn’t understand in the beginning,” Demna says. “I needed some time to understand, but I respect [Saint Laurent] a lot now. The difference perhaps lies in our real need to strive for our own aesthetic frame, and not look too accessible to everyone. Also, the personality, the individuality is something we value a lot. There is more variety than just being the rock ’n’ roll type of girl.”

There is something liberating in this constant return to the real person, rather than dreaming up new shapes and new women. Demna also says he and his colleagues at Vetements are not interested in creating something new; their aim is not to be avant-garde, but to be worn on the street by “cool girls and women”. It is interesting that this break with the basic premise of fashion – to create something you haven’t seen before, or make people dream of a better life – is just what makes Vetements feel like a way forward right now.

“I love reality, the things that we know,” Demna says. “The time when fashion used to be a dream for people – ‘Oh, let’s make people dream!’ – that time happened, and it was a beautiful, amazing and impressive period. But it is dated today. We are going to dream about other things.”

Photography Alex Franco
Styling Tereza Ortiz (LundLund)
Model Heather Kemesky (The Hive)
Casting Jacob Mohr (Creartvt)
Hair Kota Suizu (Caren)
Make up Rebecca Wordingham (Saint Luke)
Photography assistant Davey Clarke

This interview is published in the A/W 2015 issue of Bon, available in select newsagents now.