Just as everyone is talking about the “broken” fashion system—the breakneck speed of it, the distress to designers, the proliferation of pre-collections, the impossibility of competing with fast fashion—
Vetements, the collective which is the other most-talked-about subject of the season, is taking unilateral action to put a brake on it. From next January, Vetements will be mixing its women’s and menswear collections together in one show in
Paris, two months ahead of the
women’s shows, which traditionally commence their rounds in New York, London, Milan, and Paris.
It’s a seismic shake-up that Guram Gvasalia, Vetements’s 30-year-old CEO, has strategized with his elder brother, creative director Demna. Their aim is a sweeping plan to cut out the necessity for pre-collections, beat the copyists, stop overproduction, and persuade others to come with them. “Designers are human beings who need to have some spare time to get rest and gather strength. Instead, designers are put under enormous pressure and insane schedules,” says Guram. “The industrial machine sucks out their creativity, chews them up, and spits them out. Once a genius, the designer is left behind incapable of being creative. Reducing to two main collections will give designers enough time to revitalize.”
But that is just the beginning of their cure for the predicament fashion finds itself in. In an exclusive conversation with Vogue.com, Guram lays out their thinking with an analytical thoroughness that will astonish anyone who has assumed that Vetements, with its nightclub shows and their edgy friends, is a disorganized gang of underground upstarts from Eastern Europe.
The style of their clothes, based, as the name denotes, on practical streetwear, has swept fashion as an influence, and earned Demna the creative directorship of
Balenciaga. So far, so “fashion,” but there’s much more substance behind it: logical business thinking, and a fearlessness that comes from the brothers’ background.
The Gvasalias were born in a small town in the former USSR state of Georgia, fled their hometown with their family during a civil war in the ’90s, and settled in Düsseldorf in Germany. Demna became a designer, studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, and then worked at Maison Martin Margiela and
Louis Vuitton. Guram, four years younger, had a math brain precociously driven by the need to understand business and question its behaviors. He gained degrees in international business and European management and law at German universities, and crucial experience in sales at
Burberry. By the time he joined Demna to take on Vetements’s back-of-house operations, they were fully prepared. In the first season they gained 27 stockists. “I want to stress,” says Guram, “that we’ve been profitable from day one.”
What they’re taking on—a plan to lead a change in the schedule for everyone—is a conscious parallel to
Helmut Lang’s fateful move when he announced he was showing in New York ahead of the entire season. Then, Lang’s action reconfigured the world order of shows as
Calvin Klein and
Donna Karan followed suit, and then all of the
New York designers fell in line.
Years later, the Gvasalias are taking on the same kind of gamble. They’re not afraid of the risk. “Everything has its time, and sometimes in life, someone needs to take the first step. We’re ready for the consequences coming at us,” says Guram. “Russian people say: ‘Who doesn’t risk, doesn’t drink champagne?’ ”
Why do you think it’s necessary to pull the Vetements show back to January, instead of showing in early March, with the rest of the women’s shows?
Today, retailers spend 70 to 80 percent of their budget on pre-collections, so the main collections become less relevant. Collections shown in March can only get delivered in July, or perhaps September or October. The U.S. retailers go on sale right after Thanksgiving. Therefore, main collections stay on the floor to sell at full price, for eight weeks on average. Bringing back the main collections from March to January will result in extending the shelf life of the clothes for an additional four months.
You’ve said Vetements will never do pre-collections, only two collections a year. Why?
Pre-collections were created to make sure stores get earlier deliveries and have enough merchandise all the time to support conspicuous consumption. The business heads thought that the more they produced, the more they would sell.
The main misunderstanding of that model is that when one cuts a pie in eight or 16 slices, the size of the pie remains the same. There’s only a certain number of people willing to acquire a certain number of goods.
Once demand is satisfied, I see additional supply as wasted. If goods are left on sale, it means they were overproduced. Luxury, which once meant scarcity, has become “a bargain.” Reducing the number of collections means reducing the supply curve, and in this way, increasing the demand.
Your plan is to show women’s and men’s collections at the same time, in the same show. Is that a philosophical point of view, or is it to save money, too?
Showing men’s and women’s at the same time connects us to real life. Today, men wear womenswear and women dress in men’s clothes. Gender is not a given fact anymore; a person has the right to choose one. Times change. Splitting genders in two is against the natural flow of today’s reality. Apart from the philosophical point of view, in fact, it saves money and time for everyone, starting with brands to buyers and press.
How do you, Demna, and your friends define Vetements? The name comes from very practical roots, but how democratic do you want it to be—and how do you square that with believing, as you have said, that luxury is scarcity?
We would like to make our pieces more democratic so more of the brand followers can afford things. It creates a dilemma, though, as we want to maintain a certain level of quality. Our entire production is based in Europe; we work with over 20 factories, each specializing in a certain product category to ensure the authenticity of each product. For example, each pair of our jeans is made out of two pairs of vintage Levi’s. It takes an atelier in Paris over six hours of handwork to make one pair. Therefore, it’s challenging to compete with the high street.
Luxury is something that is scarce. We don’t all need as much clothes as we buy. It’s so much better to go from the fast fashion to the slow fashion, and instead of buying 10 pieces, get one that will last for years.
Is the goal to outstrip fast fashion and copyists in the race to the stores?
Today, when you have a show, pictures are being directly transferred to factories that manage to copy your product and deliver it to their shelves in less than three weeks. This means the high street delivers the same item four or five months earlier than you do the original.
Our goal is to swap the traditional seasons in the future. Instead of showing Autumn/Winter in January, we will show Spring/Summer and deliver it in February—so stores can sell it in the actual spring weather, through to August. To reach this result, the whole production will have to be pre-produced. It means each piece in the collection will be part of a limited edition. No restock. One delivery. The true definition of luxury is something that is scarce. It would be nice to give luxury back its true meaning.
Do you think you are taking a risk with these decisions—or are you so small, young, and nimble a brand that you can do what you like?
Every decision has a certain risk level. Life is about making choices. And if you fall, you should get back up and continue going.
