Vetements RTW Spring 2024
This past fashion month — with its smorgasbord of men’s, resort and see now, buy now collections — will be remembered for designers’ laser focus on creating memorable silhouettes, whether it be linebacker shoulders, high-waist pants or leg-of-mutton sleeves.
With its new “show collection” for spring 2024, Vetements went for gargantuan everything: supersized tailored jackets that graze the floor; mega jeans that puddle into elephant legs; bomber jackets that practically swallow the wearer; sweatshirts labeled size 16 XL, and even a tweed cardigan jacket as long and narrow as the Rue Cambon.
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Guram Gvasalia, creative director of Vetements, shares his brother Demna’s penchant for oversize clothing, and can be seen swanning around with J Balvin or Avril Lavigne during fashion weeks in his jumbo jeans and ginormous black T-shirts.
He opted to photograph the spring collection on models resembling dress-fitting mannequins, or Stockmans, because the clothes were simply too imposing to show in motion. Some wore monster platforms to bring their stature to 2 meters, heightening the visual impact of these extremely extreme silhouettes.
“I realized that there is a difference between where my creativity is and what the clients in the store want and can afford,” Gvasalia explained during a preview at Vetements’ Paris showroom directly in front of Printemps, which many passersby mistook for a boutique. “So I decided that there will be collections that are beautiful collections, full of cool pieces that at the end of the day are commercial. But show-wise, I need to do something much more complicated than that.”
Gvasalia said some of his regular manufacturers broke out into a sweat when asked to realize the mega prototypes. He enlisted Lebanese couturier Elie Saab to create T-shirt gowns with bulging skirts of six-meter circumference.
The dramatic eveningwear foreshadows a red-carpet push, with Gvasalia plotting a Vetements incursion of the Oscars, the Met Ball and the Cannes Film Festival next year.
The designer looked back at Martin Margiela’s famous oversize collections, only to discover they weren’t so radical by today’s visual standards. “It actually looks like a normal collection. So Margiela oversize is actually the same size as my commercial collection,” Gvasalia said.
The studio faithfully reproduced in wearable scale the quirkiest looks — puffers in leopard-print velvet, heart-shaped “Titanic” necklaces with pendants the size of dessert plates — along with lots of edgy black basics, knit with wry slogans, dress shirts defaced with blue Bic scribbles, and a new range of bikinis that scream Y2K.
Launch Gallery: Vetements RTW Spring 2024
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