Editor’s Note: In honor of Vogue Runway’s 10th anniversary, our writers are penning odes to the most memorable spring 2016 shows. New today: Vetements’s presentation in a Chinese restaurant.
It was the season Vetements exploded. Everyone felt it. Packed knee to knee as we were in a Chinese restaurant in Belleville, witnessing the show which eventually catapulted Demna into becoming the creative director at Balenciaga.
It’s not often that the visceral sense of a generational shift in fashion is felt through a crowd. The frenzy had a lot to do with the collective feeling of a subversive gang of outsiders invading the Paris establishment—two brothers from Georgia, abetted by their Russian-born friends Gosha Rubchinskiy (opening in that instantly notorious DHL T-shirt) and their stylist Lotta Volkova, powering around in her sawn-off jeans skirt and thigh-high boots at the close.
“The buzz and the energy in that cheap-and-cheerful establishment, the freakishly beautiful club of the young and the strong who modeled, and the wildly impressive clothes they were wearing had all the makings of an unforgettable fashion landmark.”
So I wrote, flat out on my hotel bed late that night. I hold to that still, though very possibly 10 years on, young eyes won’t see now what got us all going. That’d be because everything that hit us as so radical then—the street-style hoodies, the XXL tailoring, the appropriated logos, and the floral dresses—were so influential. One litmus test for what really matters in fashion is this: Did it become so normalized that everyone was soon dressing like that? It did.
Then, Demna transferred that language to Balenciaga. The super-exaggerated slouch and the attitude of it became one of the most globally widespread youth looks of the decade. It was copied and copied until it became so common it was all but invisible.
One element of my conviction that night that Vetements had that kind of oomph was that so many editors and assorted fans had turned up at that Chinese restaurant wearing their clothes. Demna and his CEO brother Guram Gvasalia had already ignited the Vetements fire with two underground shows and their original look book, made when Demna (and others) were moonlighting from their day-jobs in Paris fashion houses.