Demna Gvasalia — His Own Rules

NTERNATIONAL marathon of fashion weeks, a good number of collections follow a familiar formula: Such-and-such an artist or musician or film or personality or geography or historical period inspires X designer. The show notes typically wax poetic about how these influences are expressed in X’s collection, and journalists and bloggers dutifully regurgitate this.

And then there’s Demna Gvasalia, the red-hot designer of Vetements, who starts out each collection by simply listing the garments it is to contain, like some banal shopping list: pants, cocktail dress, uniform top, sweatshirt, bomber jacket. Occasionally, an image sourced from Google represents the style. Sketching comes last, but not before each garment has been rethought, repurposed and injected with a nuclear-strength cool factor.

This story first appeared in the November 18, 2015 issue of WWD. Subscribe Today.

“The idea was really to work on a collection that is completely product-oriented, one by one. We select what we like, what kind of garment it is, and we see what creative concept to apply to it in order for it to become new or desirable — something that is kind of ‘actuel’ for today,” he says, employing the French word for “current.” “We’re not trying to push the boundaries of fashion, but just make clothes people want to have.”

In less than two years, the Georgian-born designer has catapulted his Paris-based brand and himself to the forefront of the international scene, electrifying fashion week with his brash, high-energy shows and pointing to a new path for fashion based on garments and wardrobe-building rather than seasonal themes or narratives.

He also became the talk of Paris Fashion Week when Balenciaga named him its new artistic director of collections, thrusting him from sudden alternative fashion hero to the creative head of a storied couture name.

He takes over from Alexander Wang, who logged a three-year tenure and was the original successor to Nicolas Ghesquière, who...