Art-à-porter: On anti-fashion as anti-art

When I first showed my aunt some of the garments in the Vetements Fall-Winter Collection of 2016, her initial reaction was that designer Demna Gvasalia is actually just pulling a gigantic prank on the fashion world. To be fair, the Georgian designer’s clothes have elicited similar reactions even from some fashion connoisseurs, who were astonished not only by the garments’ ungracious forms (sleeves going down to the knees are a Vetements staple) but also by Vetements' prices. One t-shirt, which was a quasi-exact replica of Snoop Dogg’s "Beware of Dogg" tour merchandise, sold for $924. The rapper even weighed in on the polemic, stating in an interview, “I wouldn’t even pay 900-something dollars for a Snoop Dogg shirt and I know the muthaf***a."

Gvasalia, who is not only the head designer at Vetements but also took over the position of creative director at Balenciaga in fall 2015, created new controversies when he sent his Fall-Winter 2017 designs down the runway of Paris Fashion Week. Some garments displayed Bernie Sanders’ campaign logo, with “Balenciaga” having replaced “Bernie.” CNN journalist Jake Tapper interviewed Sanders about his new role as Balenciaga’s fashion muse. Bernie as a fashion icon is quite the surprise, after the many critiques he received during the Democratic primaries for his bad fashion sense. The politician was under attack for wearing un-ironed button-downs and only owning one pair of underwear (claims he later refuted).

It is therefore particularly interesting to think of high fashion and couture as the unglamorous and the run-down. It almost seems as if, in recent seasons, the fashion world has moved toward more self-critique and self-awareness that is quite similar to the paradigm shift that occurred in the art world with the advent of conceptual art and anti-art. Artists like Piero Manzoni, with his "Artist’s Shit," attempted to expose the ridiculousness of the institutions of the art world, from critics to art galleries and museums. For this famous work, Manzoni claimed to have defecated in a can and then exposed it in an art gallery. This artistic sacrilege was meant to go against the art world and its contradictions, but it ended up becoming a part of the very system it was critiquing, since "Artist’s Shit" is nowadays on display in the Tate museum in London.

Fashion designers like Gvasalia and another rising star of the fashion world, Gosha Rubchinskiy, are acting in a way that is analogous to Manzoni. Their celebration of the unglamorous as a constitutive component of the fashion world echoes Manzoni’s repulsive display. Their way of criticizing the practices of their respective ambiences, however, ends up ironically being incorporated into the object of their critique: Gvasalia’s collections are held in high regard among fashion experts, as the Georgian designer shows his designs on the most famous runways around the world.