Georgian Designer Demna Gvasalia Featured in the Guardian

“In fashion now, you need to take risks to survive”

Creative Director of Balenciaga, and founder of his own brand 'Vetements', 36 year old Georgian designer Demna Gvasalia is featured in the Guardian, following Gvasalia’s recent new Vetements collection show in Paris. 

“To understand what makes Demna Gvasalia the hottest designer in Paris right now, you first need to forget everything you think you know about Paris. Forget Catherine Deneuve, forget Jane Birkin, forget Françoise Hardy. Forget trenchcoats, silk blouses, ballet pumps and straw baskets. Forget Amélie in Montmartre and Carrie Bradshaw in Ladurée,” Jess Cartner- Morley, the author of the article writes. 

“The Paris of Gvasalia, designer of Vetements and Balenciaga is not that Paris,” she continues. “Instead, it is the Paris you might recognise if you were gripped by the latest series of gritty French police drama Spiral. It is the city we glimpse through the eyes of Louise, the nanny in Leila Slimani’s novel Lullaby, when she makes the after-work journey from her employers’ chic 10th arrondissement home to her down-at-heel neighbourhood. It is a city of phone shops and fast food, a city where glamour means tight jeans and fake handbags, a city where background noise is a different language on every street corner, not a harmonious Édith Piaf soundtrack”. 

“I don’t think elegance is relevant”, Demna Gvasalia is quoted as saying, “Vetements is about the street, and on the street I don’t think elegance is what people are aiming for,” he says. “We do things differently here, I suppose. But, at the same time, it’s the same. Because whether it’s a Vetements hoodie or a couture dress, it’s still about the person putting it on and thinking: ‘I am happy with this, I am happy with how I look,” Gvasalia notes. 

Describing Demna Gvasalia’s rise to fame, with his own brand Vetements becoming “the most influential label in modern fashion” from 2014, and Gvasalia becoming Balenciaga’s Creative Director later on, the article quotes him again “What is different about my point of view is pragmatism…. The fashion world isn’t the real world and my aesthetic is a kind of hyperrealism. I am not interested in trying to live in some kind of dream. I’d be bored to death,” he says. “Taking risks is something I got used to as a kid, and that is in the DNA of Vetements,” he points out. “In fashion now, you need to take risks to survive,”

Read the full article here 

By Nino Gugunishvili