Vetements. Spring/Summer 2026 - Paris Fashion Week.
Guram Gvasalia returns with his most politically themed show to date, rather than the ambiguousness of the Vetements backlash and antithesis styles of past showings, to which he and his brother Demna, now designing for Gucci, after a ten year tenure with Balenciaga, have mastered their latent representation of early 1990s Eastern European aesthetics. And for Guram's Spring 2026, held on the picturesque Champs-Elysées stretch in Paris, with its abundance of luxury consumerism, mixed with garish Western fast food chains, namely McDonald's, where their Spring Summer 2020 show was held inside a Champs-Elysées McDonald foyer, Guram has decided to showcase his latest collection in a disused industrial style basement, which used to be a former Adidas store.
If you are not aware, the world, politically, socially and environmentally is in turmoil, no thanks to the Far Right or a more adept term, Fascism, taking hold everywhere, and one cannot entirely blame Donald Trump for embedding it further, at least in America. It has been steadily heading that way for nearly a decade, now it's landed, and yes, with a shock. And if history is repeating itself, and a renewed counterculture could be upon us, the 1967 summer of love maybe delayed, when the Paris riots of 1968 set everything off, as we entered the 1970s, our summer of love, as mentioned hasn't arrived. So, it may indeed be just riots against global Fascism, with touches of 70s hedonism, offering a counterculture liberatitive scope, that being sexual.
And they say, history doesn't repeat, it rhymes, and our curret redux is certainly jumbled up and chaotic. With Guram's industrial, bunker like tomb the backdrop suggesting that the underground, metaphor or otherwise, could be the tactical retreat for the anti-fascists on the Left, as the Fascists are making gains not just in government but what could be the early formation of paramilitary mobs on the streets, and the internet, more social media, via a techno-fascist Elon Musk digital dominance, maybe the bunkers will have to be digital signal proof too! And our phones, which we have adored for many decades, could now become a hindrance, if we are easily tracked, being at a protest a week back. That's why we we wear a mask and dress all in black, the phone stays at home.
Vetements Spring/Summer 2026 affair, is certainly clad mostly in black, with full face and head masks, and enough protest to hedonic counterculture energy, to inspire even the meekest to stand up for your rights, reclaim your sexual choices, disavow the Far Right para-mob narrative that we are degentives, and other violent derogatory language used against us, and beat them into back into oblivion. And after the protest, removing the back clad clothing, padded vest, mask, goggles, helmet, we retreat back to our underground base, change, and the go to a 1980s synth disco party, dance, be free, and have glorious sex later on.
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(A.Glass 2025)
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