“”VTMNTS is Guram Gvasalia’s new project, an offshoot of the Vetements brand, with strong sartorial codes that were very much in evidence at tonight’s arresting show. The location was an empty former Monoprix on the Boulevard Raspail. Team VTMNTS lined it with wooden benches and invited guests to sit where they pleased. The energy in the room was not unlike that of the Vetements of old, back when Guram Gvasalia and his brother Demna were messing with the conventions of the fashion system.

As birdsong piping through the loudspeakers gave way to a sub-bass laden soundtrack that Shazam couldn’t identify, the first model charged through the automatic doors at the back of the store. They wore a dark red double-breasted suit jacket in bi-stretch with piping up the sleeves and shoulder seams that Gvasalia said he’s implemented to prevent copy-cats. Their black trousers were unzipped at the hems, the better to accommodate their substantial footwear: cowboy boots whose top stitching bore the VTMNTS barcode logo with combat boot soles. It was a boss silhouette—strong but not strange.

The 59 outfits that followed were variations on that theme. On some looks, Gvasalia doubled up the jackets or added a matching tailored coat. On others the trousers were replaced by colorful track pants with stripes down the side. Here and there a flash of underwear was exposed by a low-slung waistband; Gvasalia hinted that VTMNTS will unveil a full range soon. Outerwear included puffers cropped high below the armpits and letterman jackets. A cloud print on a zip-front coat brought to mind an early Louis Vuitton collection from the late Virgil Abloh or The Simpsons, which would be a nod in his brother’s direction. Gvasalia said he lifted it from a childhood puzzle of Germany’s fairytale Neuschwanstein Castle, and he retained the puzzle piece motif as a surface treatment.

All of these looks were served up with attitude by an all-gender cast of mostly runway first-timers, many with buzzcuts. What Gvasalia seemed to be up to here was establishing a VTMNTS uniform, and non-binariness is as much a mark of the label as impactful tailoring or its barcode logo. But why the Eminem hoodie close to the end? The “Remember Me!” messaging down both sleeves seemed to hint there’s more to come on that subject. Gvasalia has our attention.””

• Nicole Phelps

Vogue Magazine

“Fans of Balenciaga, Barthes, or bathos were all well served by this evening’s entertaining enough Vetements installment. We were directed to a pigeon-infested corner of a Montparnasse mall that had the same heady odor Nicole Phelps described at the breakout Vetements show at Le Depot nearly a decade ago. This once underground brand might now be overground, but it maintains the appearance of sedition.

Travis Scott opened the show in a lacquer-finish black moto look, the first of many moto pieces to roar past. Gigi Hadid wore a minidress version of the yellow duct tape catsuit worn by Kim Kardashian to watch a Balenciaga show a few seasons back: the other difference was that Hadid’s tape was stamped with the DHL logo. You can unwrap that for yourself: the Gvasalia saga rumbles on.

And on. The collection bickered its way through multiple chapters of looks which echoed themes seen in past collections both here and at Balenciaga. In amongst all the self-referential fraternal trolling there were some cool enough things—and Carmen Kass’s pregnant runway walk was great to see—but watching this often felt like overhearing a one-sided argument.”

• Luke Leitch

Vogue Magazine

“” The Gvasalia brothers, Demna, the designer, and Guram, the business brains behind the Vetements phenomenon, pulled off a coup for the fashion credibility of Paris with a show in the Galeries Lafayette tonight. On many levels, it was an event which satirically contravened half a dozen arcane regulations of what is supposed to be the correct way for a label to operate. It was a collection made entirely with other brands, including Brioni, Schott, Levi’s, Comme des Garçons Shirt, Reebok, Canada Goose, Dr. Martens, Alpha Industries, Eastpak, Lucchesse, and Manolo Blahnik. It was both women’s and menswear, and it was magnanimously welcomed by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture as the big ta-da opener of couture week. Yet it was so far from being traditional haute couture that it was shown, cheekily, in a department store—during regular hours, at that.

Twisting the conventions in terms of pre-existing generic garments—hoodies, trench coats, bomber jackets, jeans—is always Demna Gvasalia’s thing, and this was just one giant logical step further along that path. “We thought we’d go straight to the brands who make all these things best, and ask to do something in our way with each one,” he said. “The people who work at Vetements don’t really wear designer fashion—a lot of these are the labels they wear all the time.” The brands, from Mackintosh in Scotland to Lucchesse cowboy boot manufacturers in Texas, were approached by his CEO brother who set the legal and logistical negotiations to do with manufacturing, joint labelling, and selling. The clothes will mostly be made by the individual brands’ own specialist factories. “I’m explaining it to retailers that this is not one collection, but 18, which they will receive in different drops throughout the season.”

The “best in category” collaborations went to a couple of high-level places as well. One was the classic Italian tailoring company Brioni, who agreed to Vetements’s sacrilegious processes of gigantic oversizing, unpressed seams, and fusing linings to cloth with glue. Another was Manolo Blahnik, who was game for going all the way with exaggerating his duchess satin stiletto boots for them. “We’ve done thigh-high, so we asked, could you go waist-high this time for us?” Demna noted. He was also happy to add a personal touch to the Vetements collab by autographing his classic satin pumps in bleach. More difficult, said Guram, was winning permission from Levi’s to have an embossed Vetements stamp on its label: “This has never been allowed before in its history!”

Still: It was drive and the energy with which this collection of collections came together that actually mattered, and especially at the end, when it moved into innovative high fashion gear with Vetements first real dealings with eveningwear. There was a brilliantly subversive “couture” collab with Juicy Couture, using its signature stretch velvet in skin-tight catsuits and incendiarily sexy long skirts, which are slit all the way up to the bottom and are kept on with an internal thong. Finally, there was a series of chic asymmetric dresses in slinky ’70s jersey or chiffon, and then Lotta Volkova Adam, ending the show in this Winter’s new Vetements floral dress, this time with blue flowers on a white background. That, laughed Demna Gvasalia, was “a collaboration with ourselves!”””

• Sarah Mower

Vogue Magazine

“”The entity that goes under the name Vetements has caused quite a quake through fashion—bottom-up, from nowhere. Just when—by looking at mainstream corporate luxury-goods norms—it seemed that cool was dead and buried and nothing “alternative” could ever again survive, along came a couple of brothers, Demna and Guram Gvasalia, and their collective of friends, to prove skeptics wrong. There’s no faking the concrete truth of that. The visible evidence of their breakout is in the number of Vetements’ oversized blazers and giant MA-1 jackets, recycled firefighter sweaters, “Antwerpen” slogan shirts, and, especially, the flower-printed tea dresses with sweatshirting inserts that are being worn around the shows. Nobody seems to have consulted each other on this: They just went to shops, women and men alike; tried on the Vetements stuff; loved the way it made them look and feel; and impulsively paid up.   That’s why those impulsive ones, plus a large contingent of the professionally curious, enthusiastically headed to Belleville today, to what turned out to be a large Chinese restaurant, to see the Vetements follow-up for Spring. The audience was not to be disappointed.   The buzz and energy in that cheap and cheerful establishment, the freakishly beautiful club of the young and the strong who modeled, and the wildly impressive clothes they were wearing had all the makings of an unforgettable fashion landmark. At top speed, Demna Gvasalia and his co-conspirators confirmed everything their following likes about their off-kilter, elegant, giant-jacketed tailoring and clunky romantic dresses, and then bettered it all. There were argyle knits under sober menswear suits, sexy sawn-off skirts with Vetements-labeled thigh boots under coats, brilliant flashes of neon yellow and toxic green, striped men’s shirts with superlong trailing cuffs, and corset T-shirts.   Then came the dresses, in a stunning number of new, colorful, and punchy-sophisticated ideas. There were loose versions of prairie-flower prints with matching trailing coats, a green Lurex yoked smock, a navy polka-dot dress anchored on a black satin slip, and one outstanding mauve velvet dress cut to cling and slither across the body.   And that was far from all. After most of the crowd had filtered out into the streets, Demna Gvasalia explained, “There’s something in the collection which means a lot to everyone who’s worked on it—like those rose-printed plastic tablecloths we made into aprons and dresses were an ode to my grandmother. We’ve worked really hard on developing more jeans, too, and leather.” The point is that the Vetements collective has a lot of pooled talent and experience to call upon. Idealistic as they are, they haven’t started as naive lambs to the slaughter of the industry. One core ally is the Russian stylist Lotta Volkova Adam, who walked last in the show. Other people have worked silently with them, moonlighting from jobs elsewhere. Demna Gvasalia himself learned the ropes at Maison Martin Margiela, before setting up Vetements and getting on with proving that there can be a different way of doing things. Apart from their stylistic insights into what people really want to wear, it feels like the beginning of something else, too—perhaps something like the power of niceness and friendship in an industry that could do with a lot more of that.””

• Sarah Mower

Vogue Magazine

“”If anyone had Demna Gvasalia down as purely a streetwear revolutionary who shot from nowhere to lead a youth cult, then they'd have been taken aback by the sight of the silver-haired madame in dark glasses, fur coat, and a pencil skirt who stepped off the escalator at the Centre Pompidou to open the Fall 2017 Vetements show. “She’s the Milanesa!” Gvasalia chuckled, while he was marshaling his set of characters—a broad-ranging and subversively selected cross section of people-types—upstairs at the museum. “I got tired of just doing hoodies and underground clubs; we’ve done that at Vetements,” he said. “A new stage has to come. What we do here is always a reappropriation of something which already exists. So we took a survey of social uniforms, researched the dress codes of people we see around us, or on the Internet."

Surprise is crucial in fashion, especially when there is so much pressure on a new designer in an era when constant praise, social media visibility, and global sales have accelerated him from zero to warp speed—fame! followers! hiring at Balenciaga!—in the space of little more than three years. The trouble, in these compacted, constantly connected times, is that backlash, the critics, and the trolls can set in really quickly with who knows what damage to reputation and sales. So, surprise, change Gvasalia did. Fall 2017 was a different kind of reality show, embracing all types of people, from that Milanese lady to a German tourist with a plastic anorak to a European policewoman, the stereotypical bouncer, a United Nations soldier, and a couple of shaven-headed skinheads who may belong to the Gabber club.

Is this creativity as we know it? Yes, on a technical level. The generous, oversize outerwear has been constructed from two garments joined together at the hems and looped up over one another. Hence, the glam Milanesa was actually sporting two fur coats, which, Gvasalia hastened to note, were vintage and upcycled pieces. That’s a one-off, limited-edition item by nature, but the double-layering of more generic garments, like nylon blousons, has genuine cold-weather usefulness about it.

What will keep people talking longer is the satirical symbolism—bleakly realistic, angry, and hilarious by turns—which came embedded within Vetements’s collection. When the Commando in his camouflage turned his back, he had a United Nations peacekeeping symbol printed on his back: “He’s a soldier, but he’s a good boy! It’s not his fault!” The Nerd, wearing a double-layered flannel shirt and Barbour jacket, had a T-shirt printed with a takeaway pizza menu. The down-and-out Vagabond, meanwhile, was sporting possibly the most topical garment of all: a falling-apart sweater printed with the flag of the European Union.

Does this collection, with its upgraded level of innovation, signal Vetements’s distancing itself from its roots? Not at all. The cult hoodies and T-shirts are being kept in a continuing, more secret category of their own—adding a value-protecting aura to them, and the possibility of distributing them in ways that defy the fashion system’s rules. Meanwhile, Gvasalia notes, pieces in this runway collection which prove commerically popular will be added to the permanently available range.

Moreover, there are bigger plans afoot for the company being laid out for the long term by Demna’s younger brother and CEO Guram Gvasalia. Vetements is reportedly about to move its headquarters and design offices to Zurich in Switzerland. Whatever surprises and sociological quips come from this direction next, these brothers mean to harness the growth their disruptive strategies have generated, and create something the industry is likely to take very seriously indeed.””

• Sarah Mower

Vogue Magazine

“”In the months between Vetements' second collection last September and its third tonight, the design collective headed up by Demna Gvasalia became a semifinalist in the second annual LVMH Prize contest. But if you thought the recognition would get Gvasalia and his gang to go mainstream, think again. Instead, Jared Leto, Kanye West, and the rest of us were in the basement of Paris' famous gay club Le Depot, the hour edging toward 10 p.m., a distinct scent of bathroom all around us, and not 2 feet between the knees on opposite sides of the runway. Nobody was unhappy to be there. On the contrary, it felt fairly electric in the dank surroundings, a seedy reprieve from the hauteur and polish of much of Paris fashion week.

As for the clothes? An editor who would know declared afterward that this, not Alessandro Michele's Gucci as the headlines went last week, is what fashion looks like when you take the L train to Bushwick. Brooklyn or Paris, the kids are wearing vintage Levi's nipped and cropped for a sexy fit, spliced and diced sweats, seriously oversize outerwear, and the occasional welcome-mat skirt. It wasn't necessarily groundbreaking—Margiela, where Gvasalia once worked, traversed this territory in his day—but it was definitely energizing. The best pieces, deconstructed and reconstructed "Sapeurs-Pompiers" and "Sécurité" T-shirts, looked like they might've been sprung in response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks that terrified then unified Paris earlier this year. If we had to call it, we'd say Vetements is a long-shot favorite for the LVMH Prize. But then we wouldn't be able to come back to Le Depot next season.

It's rare these days in Paris—or any other fashion capital, for that matter—to see this much edge at a show, and rarer to see it delivered with this much skill. With or without the imprimatur of an awards jury, Vetements is a label to watch.””

• Nicole Phelps

Vogue Magazine

“”Under normal circumstances, Guram Gvasalia presents as the slick and canny businessman with a machine-mind for numbers and a formidable insider knowledge of the industry. This season it was jolting to hear a much, much more vulnerable man talking about the harrowing and pitiful personal memories embedded in the Vetements garments for spring. “This collection is about my life, it’s about my childhood, and my first acquaintance with fashion,” he said, standing in the raw, bunker-like concrete shell of the about-to-be-demolished Tati store in Pigalle. “It tells you every single story.”

That is, about the meaning of the objects he attached to as a Georgian child refugee from a proxy war with Russia in 1992, his use of imagination as an escape, and the simultaneous repression of his socially taboo gayness, while also being assigned to the role of responsible good-boy future financial savior of the Gvasalia family. This, he said, was his “coming out” collection as Vetements’s sole creative director.

“The only toy I had when I was a child after the war was this twisted teddy bear thing, here, like this jacket.” He was pointing to a tan-colored fake-furry bomber, with another one spilling out of its side. “It was so patched.” A red plaid ankle-grazing poncho reminded him of “blankets that we got in a refugee camp, because we didn’t have the clothes when we were escaping; we were stuck in the mountains for over a month. And there were no clothes, no food. Nothing.”

It’s only too obvious why these memories should be resurfacing in Gvasalia’s mind now. Is he feeling re-traumatized by watching Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? “I’m super-traumatized, not just (about) Ukraine,” Gvasalia replied. “I’m traumatized with the world.”

Amongst the urgent stomping march of the broad-shouldered tailored suits and super-wide distressed jeans, there were special moments that harked back to the five-year-old Guram’s first inklings about fashion. He has a vivid memory of “falling in love” with Kim Basinger in 1990 (pre-war in his family’s home, the Abkhazia region). Also, he said, “my cousin had a Malibu Barbie. I saved up all my birthday and Christmas money to buy it from her. Then I would wait for everyone in the house to go to sleep so I could play with her.”

Vetements’s Malibu Barbie had a grown-up sugar pink tailored coat and fluid-legged trouser suit, and—full circle—Gvasalia had wrangled Kim Basinger’s daughter, Ireland Baldwin, to walk his show. The twist, as in Gvasalia’s re-tread of traditional tropes, is that the tailoring was made from puffy sweatshirt material. Some of his wasp-waisted men’s jackets were also cut in sweat fabric, and disguised by tweed prints. Punk hairdos bristled with another innocent memory. I would go to school on the bus and imagine what the driver or a lady next to me would look like as punks! We didn’t have that in Georgia.”

He pulled it back to the present with checkered raincoats made out of fabric that looked like the red-white-and-blue of the Tati bag pattern. Tati itself might be obsolete—the building Gvasalia chose, once a popular French shopping destination, is about to be demolished. Here’s the thing about childhood memories, trauma, and shared cultural experiences, though: They can never be erased. Sooner or later, there’ll come a time when it’s possible to transform them into some sort of creative shape that people will want to wear.””

• Sarah Mower

Vogue Magazine

“”According to Jun Takahashi of Undercover, he and Takahiro Miyashita of The Soloist worked on this shared show pretty much in isolation. Yes, they agreed on a symmetrically reflective theme—order/disorder against disorder/order—beforehand. And, yes, they consulted on the mutual finale that saw a line of models in black synthetic jeans and crop-top harnesses emerge from Miyashita’s backstage, and an opposing line of models in white floor-length pleated skirts emerge from Takahashi’s. These were the overlaps: the folds in the show structure that contained them both at this remarkable Pitti presentation. But beyond them they had no idea what each other was planning in their respective studios: “[Jun] only saw [Takahiro’s] collection two days ago!” said Chieri Hazu, Takahashi’s translator and right-hand woman.

To review them, then, demands the collections be treated as they were created: in isolation, just as they are in the Paris showroom of Michèle Montagne, where these designers normally show their menswear. Alongside each other, but apart.

Takahashi’s last women’s show played with the idea of twins and culminated in a bloodcurdling finale re-creation of The Shining’s Grady sisters. Here, he seized upon another unsettling Stanley Kubrick movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, yet at first the reference was repressed. To Joy Division’s “Atmosphere,” a model emerged in fine-knit gray: a cap, a sweater, and a pleated skirt. Then there was a navy version over a white shirt, and then two check iterations with an inbuilt, perhaps metallic-mix, stiffness, and then a final skirt-y look in beige, possibly velvet, possibly terry, that betrayed the first Kubrick reference: a shoulder-slung bag on which was written Caution: Contains Explosive Bolts, a sample from the writing on the escape hatches of the Apollo. For fans of the film, the references continued from there, woven first among looks that included heavily flocked fleece suiting and tracksuits, backwoodsman-in-summer forestry ensembles, HAL 9000 LED-eye fanny packs, and a series of raincoats emblazoned with slowly dawning warnings of digital chaos to come. Warning. Human Error. Computer Malfunction. Then a swerve to printed pieces showing the moon obelisk and 2001’s hapless crew. The final piece was a tattered-hem lilac gown and loose pajama suit with embroideries of the character Poole adrift in space, while the finale itself featured a line of five “astronauts” in primary-color quilted jackets with backlit face masks and zippered jersey pants.

Reducing this first half of tonight’s show to bare description feels like a simplification of an Undercover collection that charted the assumption of human control into the chaos of AI gone wrong, all imposed on handsome for human and hu-woman alike clothing.

Miyashita presented a far less overtly readable collection only because of his lack of literal references. The nub of it was a north and south of conventional menswear; tailored pieces in houndstooth, check, or all black that were framed by artisanally complicated utilitarian-wear whose technicity was baroque in its beauty. The conventional items were either worn beneath the tech or slung like backpacks, but fully wearable and ready to swing into action from the shoulder. Footwear included boots and rubber geta, and there was—at least to this culturally ignorant eye—an undertow of traditional Japanese dress in the armored complications of bindings and quilted cloaks. He threw in a few slight asides to his own withdrawn, nomadic persona—the cowboy hat slung on the shoulder of one look—and was typically (and frustratingly) gnomic when asked to explain this interpretation of disorder/order: “I don’t remember!” To this eye, Miyashita’s postapocalyptic apicultural attire—only sometimes leavened by fringed logo blankets—was a futuristic defense against an undefined scourge to come: some nonspecific disorder.

Conclusion? Sometimes compelling, sometimes confusing, sometimes cathartic, this was a kick-ass, semidetached conversation between two of the most thoughtful spirits in menswear. Disorder? More like order, two of everything.””

• Luke Leitch

Vogue Magazine

""It wasn’t a surprise to find out that Jun Takahashi has an affinity for jazz. Improvisation is a key quality of that art form, and it’s a fundamental part of his own work. Takahashi is one of fashion’s most playful spirits and he loves a good hybrid. Today’s was a coat that was an army jacket up top, knit in the middle, and Lurex-shot tweed at the hem, the different materials needle-punched together. “I wish I had that right now,” whispered a seatmate. Takahashi’s trick is that his experiments result in wearable rather than overly conceptual clothes, and it’s made his show a cultish Paris must-see.

Jazz, as it happens, is a newfound affection for Takahashi. He got turned on to it about two years ago and now he listens every day. “It helps me relax,” he said backstage. To convey his enthusiasm, he used musical instruments and album art as motifs. There was a saxophone printed trompe l’oeil–style on a simple T-shirt to start, and to finish he sent out a trio of bright leather outfits patchworked with trumpets, violins, keyboards, and drums. The last group elicited a few giggles, clearly not from jazz fans. If those pieces were de trop, the cool factor of midi-length shirtdresses printed with album art was high. Takahashi gave shout-outs to Miles Davis and Sonny Clark. Judging by the number of times his name turned up, the designer has a special fondness for jazz pianist Bill Evans and his standard, Waltz for Debby. For the finale, Takahashi sent out a crew of bespectacled models in matching brown suits made in Evans’s image; it was a quiet, minimalist coda to a snappy collection.

Not a jazz adherent? The best looks in the show—mismatched suits with inside-out jackets and baggy pants, and a trompe l’oeil band jacket paired back to tweedy cargo shorts—betrayed little about Takahashi’s musical theme besides an unstudied, off-the-cuff grooviness.""

• Nicole Phelps

Vogue Magazine

""There is a theory—silly but compelling—that Edgar Allan Poe traveled in time. This is based on the fact that in two of his novels and one of his poems he seemed to predict, with startling detail, events and discoveries that unfolded after his death. Believe it or not, but tonight Poe traveled not only in time, but also between two fashion dimensions (as a recurring motif in this evening’s double-headed collaboration between Valentino and Undercover, presented back to back on the Paris schedule). As Jun Takahashi confirmed when asked afterwards about the significance of Poe, that crazy “time traveler” theory was the basis of the unlikely web of connections across two fashion shows tonight.

Watching this Undercover show delivered the source code—and the logic behind it—for many of the graphics we had already seen on the runway of Pierpaolo Piccioli (who was here and said afterwards he planned to order at least 25 pieces from Takahashi’s collection).This collection was an built around Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, his 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s short but shocking dystopian novel of ultraviolence and state-administered extreme psychiatry. Malcolm McDowell’s saturnine features in his role as the protagonist Alex—sometimes sinisterly smirking beneath bowler, sometimes bloodily fanged, sometimes with eyes clamped open—was repeated on the garments. So too were fragments of Nadsat—Alex’s melodious bastard dialect—and the face of Beethoven (“the old Ludwig Van”) and recording details of the Berlin Philharmonic microcassette that Alex plays as part of his flawed aversion therapy.

But. Unlike Takahashi’s masterful Pitti paean to 2001: A Space Odyssey, this was a collection that voyaged—via Poe—in time as well as space and Kubrick. The invitation was a cropped section of Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (the version in London’s National Gallery) that shows the flung-wide arm of Cleopas and his scallop shell pilgrim’s brooch. This was a heavy hint. In the opening section of the show a group of models emerged wearing musketeer-ishly feathered bowlers hats, businesslike gauntlets, and cloaks tethered by ropes. Jarringly they also carried laser-pointer canes and wore technical trainers with IV-tube detailing. They swaggered about, in a fair attempt at menace.

As the show unfolded, cutting back and forth between early-17th-century streetwear and Clockwork Orange–inflected contemporary equivalents, it seemed that Takahashi was reimagining Caravaggio as Alex. This made a biographical sense, sort of. Because although the painter created work of eternal beauty he was apparently quite the roistering belligerent beast when not at the easel. He once beat up a waiter because he thought his artichokes had been badly cooked, and he ended his life on the run for murder after killing a man in a duel, apparently over a tennis game.

So this Undercover man was Alex, and Caravaggio as Alex, along with his time-traveling banda droogs. Poe acted as trans-dimensional connective membrane and Beethoven via Wendy Carlos delivered the musical accompaniment. There was also a section that delivered Takahashi’s take on the flying saucer, Poe, and Beethoven graphics first presented at Valentino just two hours previously. It was meta-meta. “Like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now,” this was a collection that stretched your gulliver wide open but was worth the stretching: horrorshow fashion show. If only Poe had been sat amongst us to see it . . . although maybe he was?""

• Luke Leitch

Vogue Magazine

""Lest we forget, John Galliano is a British man living in France. Among all the noise and polarized positions generated by Brexit, one of the slogans frequently voiced by the right is that British independence is “what we fought for in the war”—a trigger phrase which totally ignores the fact that the fight was against the forces of fascism in Europe. His Spring collection was a timely salute to the ordinary young men and women—the nurses and airmen, the army and navy boys—who stepped up to win the victory against Nazism in alliance with the French Resistance in occupied France.

The march of the Margiela liberation army is all about what’s going on today, of course.

“Reverence for the lessons of history and what they taught us,” read a thought line in his press release. “Stories of hope, heroines, and liberation are forgotten as history draws ever closer to repetition.”

Call to witness his first volunteer, a nurse in a navy serge cape, white hospital sleeves, and a gray serge pencil skirt. Second, a girl in a black dress with a veiled hat trimmed with a feather, somewhere out of the ’30s or ’40s—maybe one of those chic-against-the-odds Frenchwomen of the Resistance who went about their undercover work carrying secrets and explosives in their sensible handbags.

Later on, when a couple of girls came out with poufs of fabric floating behind them, you had to wonder: Were those partial evening dresses or vestiges of the parachutes used by that secret army of female agents who dropped behind enemy lines? Where there was jewelry, it was in the form of decorations, medals, pins, and military stripes.

The fact that Galliano turned to exploring uniform—the ultimate built-to-last clothing—chimed with fashion’s current drive to put forward clothes with substance and value. In recent seasons, his consciousness of the digital world, social media, and what the Gen-Z interns bring to his studio has sent him into explorations of creative chaos. This still wasn’t a collection of literal costume narrative—there were layerings of coats with holes—but the feverish fragmentary collaging and back-to-front and upside down-ness of recent shows were largely gone, replaced by a sense that this is a time for shaping up and showing what you stand for—skills and beliefs included.

What he showed is that he’s a tailor who cuts it with the best, be that in a man’s civvy street double-breasted pinstriped jacket, or a subverted airman’s uniform, the jacket cropped to the midriff over way-up-high pleated trousers.

Also in the mix was a pure white mackintosh, made-in-Britain trad as its most timelessly classic. There is plenty to be proud of in heritage, he seemed to be saying, but that includes the right to freedom of self-expression, inclusive of defending the LGBTQ+ rights that have been enshrined in law—only very recently—since Europe has been united. It was exuberant; it was fun; it was a celebration of male eroticism—a platform for everyone’s right to camp it up in vertiginous platform knee boots. Somewhere in there too was the hope that all that progress won’t have to be fought over again.""

• Sarah Mower

Vogue Magazine