“RULE-BREAKING” IS A PHRASE thrown around in fashion a lot. But who makes these rules? And aren’t rules what fashion is based on? After all, fashion isn’t just the clothes on your back. It’s the form of those clothes at a given moment, adhering to certain codes that define them as forward-thinking, as now, as à la mode. Which often, as on a menu, translates simplistically to a lump of something fancy plopped on top of an existing offering, as opposed to tinkering about with the guts or really changing anything. Rules in fashion are made by the industry: the editors, the designers, the corporations who fund the whole thing. And so, genuine rule-breakers don’t come along that often. Fashion enjoys the status quo. It sells clothes, it makes money.
But what if the rules are broken? People have stopped buying clothes with quite the alacrity they used to, and large conglomerates have begun to see their profits slip southward. Designers are fleeing houses after a few short seasons. Plenty of brands, rattled by the instability of luxury markets, are now trying to close the gap between runway and retail, offering goods ever faster to consumers, hoping to whip them into a frenzy of acquisition. There’s a general unease in fashion, to say the least.
Fashion’s New Radicals: Alessandro Michele and Demna Gvasalia
Jackie Nickerson
And the clothes themselves? They wind up bit players in the Sturm und Drang of it all, overshadowed by financial finagling and designer wrangling, when they should be the focus of the conversation. There is a glut of clothing at every price point, especially in high fashion, where labels proliferate and multiple seasons (spring, prefall, winter, resort, capsules galore) concurrently jostle to justify a seemingly endless influx of clothing. But how much of that actually connects with what people really want to wear today? How they want to look, maybe even feel? The soft sell, rather than the hard?
It matters, at least, to two. One is the designer Alessandro Michele, who after anonymously toiling away at Gucci for 12 years, was appointed creative director of the 95-year-old Florentine brand in January 2015. In three seasons, the 43-year-old Italian has managed to entirely remake the brand, pulling back from its sexy image to explore a more romantic side. The other is Demna Gvasalia, a 35-year-old Georgian from the former Soviet Union, who started his Paris fashion collective Vetements in 2014 after working at Maison Margiela and Louis Vuitton, where he became frustrated with the increasing demands of the fashion industry. Six months ago, based on the sheer strength of his fledgling streetwear-based label, he was named the artistic director of Balenciaga, the century-old French house, in a twist that shocked the industry given Gvasalia’s distinct lack of star power — similar to Michele’s out-of-the-backroom appointment. He debuted his first collection for Balenciaga last month to ecstatic reviews.
Relative anonymity is the immediate connection between Gvasalia and Michele, but there's something deeper at play than the fact that, until 15 months ago, you'd probably never heard of either. Gvasalia's frustration is quietly mirrored by Michele, who has said that he'd planned to leave Gucci before being surprised with the creative director offer. More than that, there’s a synergy between their approaches to gender lines — ignoring them — and to the runway, which they use to actually show clothes, not just to stage a spectacle. They both talk frequently, incessantly, about clothes, rather than fashion; about reality, about appealing to, and ultimately dressing, the girl (or guy) on the street.
But their streets are worlds apart. Gvasalia and Michele’s aesthetics are diametrically opposed. Gucci’s embroidered and preciously embellished clothes look like family heirlooms; Vetements’ seem fresh from the trash bag, jumbled and crumpled and intentionally misshapen. Gvasalia’s Balenciaga adds a third element to the mix, focusing on a “couture attitude,” on the way garments are worn and their relationship with the body. These included embroidered evening dresses and strict tweed suits with exaggerated basques, as well as curving parkas and Perfecto-style jackets based on grand opera coats. The architecture of the garments at Balenciaga and Vetements is exciting, innovative.
That even includes the standard T-shirt, cut long in the body at Vetements with stiffened sleeves or a high-rise neckline, as if being worn back to front. Other garments are cut too small or too large, and sit unusually on the body. They’re often made of synthetic fabrics like velour and nylon. By contrast, Gucci’s clothes are generally simplistic in shape (track tops, single-breasted blazers, bowed blouses, a predilection for a 1970s flare) with a focus on shimmering surfaces and overloaded detailing: sequins, custom-woven jacquards, buttons in the form of jeweled lion’s heads or gumdrop pearls, sleeves dipped in mink.
However different their collections, though, Gvasalia and Michele’s ideas about fashion are interwoven. The connection is the moment, the collective nerve they seem to have touched in the cultural consciousness. People identify with the aesthetics these designers are proposing, with the “universe” their clothing represents, as badges of belonging. At Vetements’ fall show, high-school-age fashion fans thronged a church in the Eighth Arrondissement, dressed in Vetements and vintage mashed together, emulating the appearance of the similarly teenage street-cast models. It was difficult to see where the runway ended and reality began. In Milan, Gucci’s models were outnumbered by audience members wearing Michele’s fur-lined house slippers, chinoiserie jackets and foliage-festooned accessories. The newly revamped Gucci store on Via Montenapoleone was mobbed all week long, and not just by fashion types. Michele is pulling in consumers who previously felt put off by Gucci’s hedonistic repute, but who now feel drawn to its beautifully made jackets, dresses heavy with embroidery, handbags patterned with flowers or embroidered with bees. “Take it,” Michele told me backstage before his last Gucci men’s wear show, gesturing at the heaving rail of soon-to-be-shown Gucci wares. “Make it yours.”
‘Fashion is, I don’t know where — in the front of the window in Rue Faubourg? I don’t know. Where is "fashion"?’
ALESSANDRO MICHELE
THAT’S THE APPEAL of many of these clothes: Rather than a tub-thumping, dictated silhouette, both Gvasalia and Michele propose individual, individualistic items, designed to stand by themselves. They’re clothing people, not “fashioning” them. The collections themselves include countless styles, worn every which way. There’s no trend, no given shape, no definitive singular statement. Their work turns on its head the previously predominant idea of the “total look,” of a designer proposing an outfit to be sold head-to-toe. (Incidentally, these “looks,” which have dominated the past decade or so of fashion, are also often strictly proscribed to be photographed for magazines as such, ensuring a singular retail and marketing vision.) Both Gvasalia and Michele conceive their garments as individual entities: a great jacket, a great skirt, a good dress, nice shoes. They mix it all together on the runway, but the notion is to pull it apart into individual pieces. Gvasalia even named his label Vetements because, “it’s really just about that ... just clothes,” he once told me.
Their clothes also don’t change much from season to season, which is breaking another rule: that of perpetual change, of fashion simulating newness purely by its contrast with that which came before. Gvasalia and Michele’s clothing may not be designed, specifically, for seasons to be jumbled together. But they can be. Their greatest provocation to the establishment has been to eschew the industry’s built-in obsolescence, to challenge the very fabric of time.
Together, what they are proposing ideologically is affecting the way other designers think, how they design and subsequently how we all dress. First and foremost, Gvasalia and Michele’s work feels exciting because it aims outside of fashion’s insular bubble. There’s a pragmatism behind the collections of both. They frequently talk about “wardrobes,” about “reality,” one that actually feels authentic rather than some fashion construct. At the fall shows, many designers seemed intent on reflecting the way real people dress, as opposed to cold and calculated “ensembles.” That’s the influence of Gvasalia and Michele.
It’s a magpie approach to dressing, trying to please all of the people all of the time. They’re about choice, about freedom — a word Michele uses often. In effect, they’ve surrendered the power designers previously held over customers, in which a designer’s specific eye and taste deemed what was an acceptable, even cool, way to dress. Gvasalia and Michele have collapsed the very perception of fashion as rule-maker.
We’ve reached the point in fashion where focusing on the garments, as opposed to the gumpf fluffed about them, constitutes rule-breaking. The individual — the individual customer, the individual garment, the individualist look rather than the one dictated by a fashion designer or a fashion magazine — is at the root of their success. It’s something that had been missing in fashion. Vetements is only in its fifth season, but Gvasalia has more than a hundred stockists worldwide, where his clothes consistently sell out. Gucci sales under Michele have exceeded analysts’ expectations, rising 13.4 percent in the final quarter of 2015, to $1.2 billion.
Back in 1989, the late John Fairchild, legendary publisher of Women’s Wear Daily, hypothesized that fashion hangs from six designers by a golden thread. That they were referenced and ripped off by a legion of others. “All eyes are on these six,” stated Fairchild, in his book “Chic Savages.” “They show the rest of the industry where to go.” Now there are even fewer. We brought Michele and Gvasalia together three hours after Gvasalia’s Balenciaga debut, and two hours before Michele returned to Rome to begin designing Gucci’s spring 2017 collection. The two had never met before.
Alexander Fury: It’s interesting getting you to talk together for the first time because what you do is, on the surface, so immediately, incredibly different. Your aesthetics are opposed, and yet there are so many underlying similarities. Alessandro, you’ve spoken to me about strange ideas of beauty; and Demna, you’ve said of Vetements: “It’s ugly, that's why we like it.”
[Gvasalia laughs]
Alessandro Michele: But ugly is beauty. No?
Demna Gvasalia: I think that beauty is in everything, if you look for it. I mean it’s too easy to say something is classically beautiful. It’s clear for everyone. You don’t need to think.
Michele: A hidden beauty. I was talking with Miuccia [Prada] in Milan, and she told me something really funny, but it was true. She told me: “When I started in fashion, everything was about super-beautiful, aggressive, polished beauty. And I arrived, with these kind of ugly girls. They really criticized me a lot, for years and years.”
Gvasalia: Until they understood.
Michele: Yes, until they understood. “It’s easier for you,” she told me. Because now it’s a bit different. But I think it’s always hard, because when you change the language, they need time ...
Gvasalia: To digest it.
Fury: Which I suppose is now the same with you coming to Balenciaga. The work of both of you, at Balenciaga and Gucci, is about unexpected sides of those labels. They’ve always been there, but they weren’t as publicized.
Gvasalia: Because it’s a new story, I think. That’s also what makes it exciting. You have a base, this amazing platform, but then you make something new, that works with what was there before.
Michele: I think also that every single designer sees something different in the same brand. I think that creative work is what you see through your eyes. It’s like ... when I think about Gucci, I was trying to find the most crazy piece of the company. Because after a lot of years, Gucci for me was, in a way, flat. Without soul. But in the archive you can find a lot of quirky soul. They created a lot of strange kinds of objects. I think that my job could be easy, because we don’t have a ready-to-wear story, so you can invent what you want. It’s just about travel, suitcases, leather goods. But I was obsessed with this idea of the jet set that, honestly, I don’t think exists anymore. I don’t want to talk with something that is completely dead. But now, the street — I’m obsessed, like you, with the street.
Gvasalia: Because it’s also something you see.
Michele: Yes.
Gvasalia: And you see it through your filter. I think the normality, in a way, has so many ways of being inspiring. And you can do so much with it actually. With what you see.
Fury: It’s challenging, too. How can you make normality interesting?
Gvasalia: And then also clothes that are wearable that people desire. That they say, “I need to have that thing.” I think that’s also something that, somehow ... you do a show and then in the store, half of those pieces wouldn’t be there. Which doesn’t make any sense. To really have this kind of honesty.
Fury: Traditionally, very little of what designers create for the shows actually winds up in stores for sale. It just exists to be photographed. Is it a vital part of your creative process that the pieces in the runway show will be the bulk of what’s produced to sell?
Michele: Yes. Reality is a huge piece of our work. I think that fashion, for a long time, has been in a prison. Without freedom. I think that without freedom, with rules, it’s impossible to create a new story. I mean, I’ve worked in fashion for a long time — but I understand that after years and years of product, product, product. It’s something that kills everything. Also the market. A product without an idea, a soul, an attitude. If you don’t give people the idea that they belong to a tribe ...
Gvasalia: They need that.
Michele: They need that.
Gvasalia: And that’s very much what’s happening now, I think. It’s very much what’s happening with what you do. And in such a short period of time, also. This is quite amazing — it’s actually a virtue of our time, on one hand, because everything is so fast. People need to belong. Identifying them, as, well, “We’re part of that.” For me I have this very much at Vetements right now, but at Balenciaga the challenge is to create that. It’s a following in a way.
Michele: You don’t just work with the length of the skirt. Who cares? Now, I think nobody cares. We’ve seen every length of skirt ... I think that you have to give something different. And the most important thing now is also to give a real attitude to fashion. Because people want you to suggest the idea that you can really put together and create a personal point of view. You have to belong to a brand that has a story, because obviously a brand needs an aesthetic. But you need also to suggest the idea of freedom. Because when you go in the street, people are free to do what they want. There are no rules.
Gvasalia: And they choose what they buy.
Fury: I think it’s interesting that you both talk about attitude.
Gvasalia: That is such a key element I think. You know, when you see someone wearing Gucci — you know that she’s a Gucci woman. It’s so visual.
Fury: There’s also that idea that sometimes someone wears it who maybe ... doesn’t have the right attitude.
Gvasalia: But it makes her have it. It makes her. And I think that’s why they want it also, because they want that attitude. That look. That maybe they don’t even have.
Fury: Demna, do you find it difficult to think in doublespeak, to have an attitude for Vetements and an attitude for Balenciaga?
Gvasalia: It helps me. At the beginning it was like, okay, it’s going to be like Jeykll and Hyde and I’ll go crazy. But I must tell you, having those in-between moments — it’s like cold and hot showers. I go back and I forget about that day I spent at Balenciaga. It freshens me. For me, it really helps, creatively.
Fury: It’s interesting that in your work you’ve both collapsed the idea of trends. That’s been dying for a long time, but fashion has been clinging onto it, as a way of categorizing all these different collections. Does that whole idea of seasonality matter?
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