Let’s get the name VTMNTS out of the way first, because I know I stumbled over it like crazy when speaking with Guram Gvasalia, the founder and creative director of VTMNTS, the first label to appear as part of the Vetements umbrella. You spell it out: V-T-M-N-T-S. That’s hardly surprising. Gvasalia has been spelling things out about the fashion system ever since he launched Vetements with his brother Demna in 2014, upending the industry and reminding us that real clothes are great clothes—and vice versa. To be clear, though: VTMNTS (practice it a few times and it starts to roll off the tongue) is a separate entity from Vetements, despite the wink-wink play on the name of the mothership, with the brands only linked by Gvaslia’s presence and their shared organizational resources. “How did Shakespeare put it?” mused Gvasalia on our call. “‘That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’. We chose VTMNTS to show the roots of the label,” he went on to say. “To be proud of who you are, and where you come from.”
Inevitably, it’s tempting to play the game of spotting the differences between the two labels, of which there are several. Firstly: Scrolling through VTMNTS’s 100 looks reveals that there are very few jeans, only one hoodie, and certainly no sneakers. With the latter there are instead sturdy, relatively classic shoes pithily emblazoned with the legends Hard Core, Let Go, and Fuck Off; not so much “wear your heart on your sleeve” as your toe caps. (Incidentally, further VTMNTS adornments come in the form of strands of pearls, hefty chain necklaces in precious gold, and yet more gold—and sometimes platinum—on sunglasses, which will retail at an even heftier $20,000 and upwards. Given that billionaires were breezily going into the stratosphere of space these past few weeks, those shades and their price tag somehow seem to meet the cultural moment we’re in; I mean like, sure, why not?)
Secondly: There’s a virtual absolute absence of logo-ing, despite the name VTMNTS looking like a prime contender for the big bold branding treatment. Instead, in that clever and shrewd counterintuitive way of Gvasalia’s, he has opted instead to play with the humdrum reality of the universally recognized barcode as a way to graphically represent the label, a nifty, witty joke on identity and consumerism. It could turn up on the chest of an impeccable camel or loden balmacaan—the tailoring is pretty impressive here, more of which later—or one of the many terrific jacquard knits, the barcode traced onto the necklines of the sweater. “Personally, I don’t wear logos,” said Gvasalia, “and those like me who don’t might say, ‘Well, maybe I could wear a little barcode.’”
Of course, that leads to the question: What do you want your clothes to say about you? And more pertinently: What does Gvasalia want to say about the clothes of his new VTMNTS label? One clue is that despite the collection primarily being menswear-focused, it's really envisaged as being for all genders, something alluded to by the tees stamped with pronoun choices—and intended to signal that the freedom to be who you are sadly isn’t freely enjoyed everywhere. Another clue lies in the tally of what’s being shown. “We are starting VTMNTS with 100 looks in our first season,” he said. “The number of looks is symbolically chosen to show our 100% commitment to the fashion industry.”
What we have here, for all the playful allusions to pop and political cultures (that hoodie emblazoned with the movie poster for Back to the Future; the brown pants which echo communist era Eastern European school uniforms) is a label which out of the gate takes a sincere and earnest appreciation for the art of making clothes; to evoke luxury without having to crassly spell it out. (Even if any of us were ever in the market to shell out that kind of money for those shades, who’d ever really know they were approximately the price of a modest car?)
So that tailoring, for instance: the jackets, which button high on the chest, and whose seams have piping built into them, done not only for how it looks, but because the skill involved in that seaming technique is all but impossible to imitate (Okay: knock off). Or the pants, whose cut was perfected after every single person on the team tried them on and weighed in on what worked and what didn’t. Ultimately, the measure of success of VTMNTS has to be judged not by what it isn’t but by what it is: A new label which conspires to offer clothes which possess both the shivery frisson of fashion and which transcend that immediate thrill to stick around and last. In the (still) difficult time we’re living in, there’s a real joy and optimism about that, not to mention just a bit of bravery, to be venturing into the territory of launching a new label when you still have the day job. Maybe that’s why Gvasalia chose a silver lining for some of those jackets.
Vogue
Image Vogue, vtmnts_project
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