And Just Like That, Balenciaga Is Back

Talking to Demna Gvasalia about his first collection for one of fashions most influential brands.

- Cathy Horyn

Three years ago, Demna Gvasalia realized he was starting to hate his job. He was a designer at Louis Vuitton, barely in his 30s, feeding the beast of perhaps the most profitable luxury brand in the world. Not that Gvasalia, who grew up along the Black Sea in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, didn’t count himself lucky. He got to work with Marc Jacobs and then his successor, Nicolas Ghesquière, both creative without bounds. And Gvasalia loved having access to amazingly skilled artisans. That’s why he got into fashion in the first place—he was fascinated by how clothes were constructed. But he found himself questioning the whole structure of the business: The big-concept shows intended to reap publicity and sell handbags. The clothes themselves he didn’t personally care for or think that women would like either.

“I started to ask myself, Why? And who is going to buy this?” Gvasalia, now 34, says. “I mean, the biggest compliment for a designer is to see someone wear your clothes. And that’s something I rarely saw.”

Several of his friends in the business shared his frustrations. “We were all so negative, and that’s when we said, ‘Why don’t we do something for ourselves, on the weekends, to be happy?’ ” he explains. The result was Vetements, a small Parisian label whose name means, simply, “clothing” in French.