Vetements. Spring 2027 - Paris Fashion Week
Could Guram Gvasalia be, albeit polished, the very last of the backlash fashion trend creators? Which he had his brother exacerbated in 2014, when the two Georgian brothers descended on Paris with their brand Vetements, and shook it all up with their antithesis styles akin to a back alley Eastern Europe rave, in all of its DIY drug induced euphoria.
And in true antithetical prowess, and dedicated continuity, Guram for the Vetements Spring 2027 showing, had the address for the guests at 22 Rue du Théâtre, which is the official address for the Novotel Paris Centre Tour Eiffel. But, rather than than the hotel's snazzy convention areas, and scenic meeting rooms, the guests were redirected to the underground basement, and then lead down into a brutalist, industrial concrete traffic tunnel which passes directly beneath the hotel structure. Cool huh?
Guram, once again, and it can be said, within the realm of feigned reflections of celebrity-dom, has offered to the masses, a degree of groundedness, or be it, sensibilities via Vetements. That beneath the digitized expectations of three generations, unfortunately that also means Gen Z, with Gen Y and X being the instigators, was the greatest conjob in living history. That everyone could be a star on a 7" screen, and the hyperreal, with its corporatism slanted wars, genocide/s and Trumpist fascism has all but been normalised. A long time fear of speculative science fiction writers of the 1960s and 1970s, if the counterculture proponents drop the ball, and the lurking, rebranded authoritarianism picks it up, we're in trouble. And this, as a sociological standard, 'ball drop' occurred in the 1990s, to which, ironically, it was the French writers and comic book artists that laid down those exact dystopian fears, two decades earlier.
So, Guram's raw, urbanized setting, which has been a fixture for his recent Vetement shows, noted the Spring 2026 show was held in a disused underground shopping mall, does indeed hold a resonance to that, as discussed, Parisian dystopic ala the prophetic French adult comic Métal Hurlant of 50 years ago, credited to have influenced Ridley Scott's 1983 "Blade Runner". And the question posed, and very much has to be asked; Can we find an counterculture ethos in all this repression, which also seems to be self imposed?
And I answer with also a question, "Destroy the digital world?". Guram antithetic doesn't ask that question, nor answers it, yet his reworking of popular culture, and defining the reality that time, and space hold paradoxes, time ends, space doesn't, and human beings, trapped in our own enclosed relay, are alive for mere seconds within the infinite universal construct. Fashion can sometimes offer that sobering, or liberating perspective.
For his latest aray, all the paradoxes, and antithesis aspects that makes Vetements such an interesting brand are intact, better still, was having Sharon Stone, one of my favorite actresses closed the show. Who, if you were not aware, played the Femme Fatale with gusto, from her brief, yet memorable role in "Total Recall" (1990), which lead to her playing psychopathic manipulator Catherine Tramell in "Basic Instinct" (1992).
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(A.Glass 2026)
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