Demna Gvasalia, who had recently returned to his childhood home that was bombed out during the Georgian Civil War, wanted to embark on some storytelling to face his fears ‘’and painful moments that I never processed postwar in the Nineties’’.
‘’I dedicated this collection to Georgia, the Georgia where my brother Guram and I grew up together in the ‘90s, and the war that happened where we lived. I tried to face this angst and fear and pain in this show. I didn’t want to remember before, I didn’t want to go that far’’, he said.
Staged on a runway set up under a bridge over the Périphérique in an area of Paris where migrants, displaced by so many conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, live in encampments along the road, the Vetements collection had been seeing like a therapist for the designer.
To model the looks, he brought more than almost 40 people from Georgia, each embodying ‘’a certain naïveté and the voice that they feel they don’t have in their own country’’. They wore anoraks made as flag jackets – Georgia, Ukraine, Turkey, the United States – and expressed the terrifying imagery of nationalism.
Demna Gvasalia used slogans as political messages, and printed in Georgian and Russian, including one that Gvasalia said was one of the most offensive expressions in the Russian language.
©Vetements
