list of favorite designers

[glorydays]

The North Face Urban Exploration line

Tech Denim SS 2019

 

[glorydays]

And in case you guys keep forgetting my obsession with Junya Watanabe

 

 

[glorydays]

J.W. Anderson for Uniqlo SS 2019

 

 

[glorydays]

Andrew Chen and Wesley Scott for 3sixteen

 

[glorydays]

Simon and Hannes Hogeman for Tres Bien

 

SS 2019

 

 

[glorydays]

Tres Bien 

 

FW 2019

 

[glorydays]

How Thom Browne Revolutionized the Suit

 

THE ENTRANCE HALL to Thom Browne’s New York headquarters is austere: Gray marble walls gleam under a runway of fluorescent lights; white blinds obscure glass doors to the offices beyond. A small, dustless vintage desk and chair stand at the corridor’s end.

“What does this look like to you?” asks Browne, 52, as he ushers me in. It is snowing out, but he’s clad in trouser-style shorts of his own design that expose his bare knees, black socks pulled to the top of his calves, a shrunken cardigan and a narrow black tie. His question seems like a test of sorts, one that the uninitiated are bound to fail. Is the hallway supposed to resemble a bank? Perhaps an accountant’s office?

It’s clear that neither is correct—it is supposed to evoke midcentury Italy, he reveals—but Browne takes it in stride and opens one of the glass doors to reveal the bustling studio. Every employee inside is wearing Thom Browne. Fridays are Navy Day at headquarters, while Mondays through Thursdays are strictly Gray Days. Gray has long been a signature color for Browne, whose narrow suits, with their boys’ department proportions and cropped hems, rocked the world of menswear after he launched his brand in 2001.

 

 

He may strike some as an unlikely influencer, yet the Thom Browne look effectively started a sartorial revolution. “There are few people who can say that they created a shift in the way people dress,” says Steven Kolb, president and chief executive officer of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, which has awarded its menswear award to Browne three times in 11 years. “The uniquely and specifically shrunken silhouette of a Thom Browne suit: That wasn’t a trend that came and went; it was something that spread across all designers.”

The word specific comes up relentlessly in conversations about Browne. “His aesthetic is, in fact, very, very, very specific, and I think it rests on a lot of archetypes: the nerd, the IBM 1950s office manager, the suburban conformist,” says Simon Doonan, creative ambassador at large for Barneys New York, which sells both Thom Browne menswear and womenswear (added by the designer in 2011). “But he turns these archetypes so completely and utterly on their head.”

 

 

Browne walks into his office, trailed by his miniature wirehaired dachshund, Hector, who is also clad in Thom Browne apparel (in this case, a tidy red sweater). In an office nook, six oversize painted panels have been propped up against the walls; they resemble, at first glance, abstractions depicting brick walls and patterns of Pac-Man-esque dotted lines. Yet Browne reveals that the paintings, which are his creations, are actually design road maps, giving proportion instructions for one of his collections. If you squint at them, the silhouettes do appear: an Amish-style hat, wide shoulders, narrow hips.

 

 

As the staffers come and go, one gets the sensation of having been admitted to a benevolent cult, comprising eager Ivy League prepsters with a surrealist twist. Browne once chided an employee for wearing pink socks: “You are ruining the message,” he told him. He is unapologetic about such micromanaging, saying he is “trying to establish a strong, very rigorous image. It’s important that we stay true to that message.

“There is so much individuality in uniformity,” he adds. “It’s more interesting when you see someone and don’t recognize what they’re wearing. You see more of them.” There is a catch, however: When someone is wearing Thom Browne, attention is drawn to the clothes; they can’t be ignored. “In some ways, [the look] is identifying a group or tribe,” says Kolb. “It represents someone who stands apart a little bit, but stands among others that stand apart—in a very specific way.”

 

IF BROWNE’S headquarters represents the buttoned-up restraint of his operation, his fashion presentations are its fantastical release—akin to teasing open an elegant clock and watching the springs explode out. The scenarios for his shows vary wildly: One season, there was a nightmarish circus set, complete with models bound as mummies or sent down the runway adjoined in a Siamese twin suit; another presentation mimicked an elaborate, ghoulish funeral. At another, models relentlessly hammered away at a wooden house frame for the duration (a “mock Amish barn-raising,” the New York Times said afterward).

 

 

Transported to Browne’s peculiar universes, audiences can recognize glimmers of references—a hint of Moscow here, Belle Époque Paris there—but for the most part, the mise en scènes tend to be completely Brownean, distorted to his singular vision. He has dispatched models dressed as black-lipped geishas, Blade Runner–worthy punks, plastic-masked robots, satyrs and Communists with gilded lips.

“I’m always slightly palpitating,” says Doonan. “Thom’s a performance artist. To say that he’s a showman isn’t the right word; there are always somber elements. There’s that French quote: Live like a bourgeois, create like a madman. That’s what I always think about Thom.” (For the record, Browne says he has no objection to being called a showman: “I love it, actually. And if I wasn’t able to do the shows I do, I wouldn’t be interested in fashion.”)

 

 

Browne has long shown his men’s collections in Paris, and this past fall, he presented his spring 2018 women’s collection there for the first time. It was a symbolic yet risky move: “When you take a brand to the mothership of Paris, you can never be certain that you’re going to hold your own among those legacy brands who’ve been around for decades,” says Kolb. It was a similar gamble when Browne launched womenswear seven years ago: Would the same elements that proved influential in the world of menswear resonate in worlds beyond? He was banking on the idea that women appreciate the almost-obsessive craftsmanship of his designs; he says that even his ready-to-wear is constructed like couture. While womenswear comprises only 30 percent of his current overall business, he’s had encouragement from high places: Lady Gaga, Laura Dern and Solange Knowles have been clients; Michelle Obama wore a gray-and-black Thom Browne coat and dress to President Barack Obama’s second inauguration ceremony in 2013.

 

 

Staged at Paris’s grand Hôtel de Ville, this latest show featured extravagant confections of brightly hued, knitted tulle; models also sported oversize costumes, transforming them into rotund yet delicate creatures from another realm. As a finale, Browne sent out two models, clad in diaphanous white tulle with gauze bubbles encircling their heads, leading a life-size, loping unicorn puppet. The audience gasped and went silent; even the most jaded attendees seemed moved by the spectacle. “Your hair stood up on the back of your neck,” recalls Valerie Steele, the director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “There are very few shows where you start to cry. A couple of McQueens, a couple of Rei Kawakubos. I can only compare it to hearing a soprano who’s really triumphing.”

For days after the show, photos and videos of the unicorn went viral on social media. The brouhaha pleased Browne. “With the presentations, I want them to transcend fashion; I want them to cross the art, entertainment and fashion worlds to become one experience,” he says. Yet when pressed about the symbolism behind the unicorn—which is currently enjoying a less-than-pastoral retirement, residing in several boxes back in New York—he withdraws. “It came from a simple, sophomoric idea about two little girls playing,” he says. “It was just a fantasy that came out of my head.”

 

LITTLE ABOUT Thom Browne’s own childhood portended his current world. Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1965 to two attorneys, he was raised with his six siblings on an all-American diet of Lands’ End apparel and competitive sports. From age 6, Browne trained as a swimmer: “Six hours a day; there were earaches, backaches; I was always cold. I remember at my last meet in college, I thought, ‘I’m never going to have to jump in the water again.’ ” (He now runs daily instead.) He took art classes as well, but says he didn’t particularly distinguish himself: “There were definitely kids who were way better than me.”

 

Browne attended his father’s alma mater, University of Notre Dame, where he studied economics but realized he had no interest in business or law school. If Browne’s eventual trajectory made him a black sheep in his family, they supported him—with a caveat. “My parents were competitive,” he says. “Their attitude was ‘You can do what you want, but you should try to be the best at it.’ ”

 

 

After college, Browne moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting. “I was a horrible actor,” he admits. “I took classes and went to millions of auditions and got no work.” Perhaps his lowest point: an audition for a Hot Pockets commercial. “You get to a point where you say, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’ In the end, only 5 percent make a living at it. And looking at the other 95 percent, I thought, I don’t want to be that.”

 

It proved a crucial chapter, however, for Browne began a flirtation with fashion during his brief Hollywood tenure (95 percenters couldn’t afford new clothes). He started buying vintage suits for himself and began experimenting with the proportions with the help of his local dry-cleaner-based tailor. Sleeves and pants were made shorter; everything was made narrower.

 

 

He eventually abandoned Los Angeles for New York City, where he landed a receptionist gig at Giorgio Armani; he later rose to the sales department before moving to Club Monaco as a designer. It became increasingly clear that he had an unusual vision, and in 2001, he launched his own collection with five made-to-measure suits. By 2003, he had a store on Little West 12th Street in the Meatpacking District. He became his own best model, wearing his suits to breakfast each day at Pastis, a popular brasserie up the street. “People would ask, ‘Why does it look like your clothing doesn’t fit you? Do you need a tailor?’ ” recalls Browne. “And once, when I was passing by this school on the Lower East Side—I used to buy my fabric nearby, on Orchard Street—there were all these kids laughing and saying, ‘Look, it’s Pee-wee Herman!’ ”

 

 

If some beholders ridiculed Browne’s looks, well-placed people in the industry began to take notice. Bergdorf Goodman came and bought his first collection. Determined to control the context in which his clothes were displayed, Browne instructed the department store on how to best showcase his clothes. “I insisted on a 10-times-bigger space, with gray marble and vintage furniture,” he says. “I wanted it to be housed the way I wanted to live myself. And they did it. They were very visionary, and really took a huge chance.” How did it go over with customers? “It didn’t sell so well,” Browne admits. Yet luminaries like David Bowie and Richard Avedon became clients. When Bowie came to visit in 2005, Browne says that he was “painfully, embarrassingly nervous” as he worked with the musician, who nevertheless left with a gray herringbone suit, a shirt, a tie and wingtip shoes.

 

 

Browne asserts that he never grew discouraged or wavered in conviction about his aesthetic. “I always knew that the classic part of my work could be understandable to a lot of people,” he says, “and would give me the luxury of doing the conceptual part of what I do. I want my business to be as big as it can be. I feel like, if you’re going to do something, why settle?”

 

He and his team, including CEO Rodrigo Bazan, are ambitious for the company. Thom Browne garnered over $100 million in revenue in 2016 and is growing at 20 percent annually. The company has more than 300 wholesale accounts and 29 flagship stores in the U.S., Europe and Asia; five more store openings are planned for 2018. (Browne also designed collections for Brooks Brothers and Moncler for eight years.)

 

 

Much of the expansion is taking place overseas, especially Asia, where Browne’s homage to Americana is proving popular, according to the company. Browne says that he revels in being an American designer and, what’s more, a New Yorker. He and his partner, Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The disciplined Thom Browne aesthetic governs their apartment, which can be a challenge for Bolton, whose natural habitat is more dusty library than austere bank vault. Hector the dog delights and chagrins them in equal measure. (“He’s always up to no good,” says Bolton. “Once we were at Azzedine [Alaïa]’s place in Paris, and Hector was quiet for an hour. It turned out that he had quietly been eating one of Azzedine’s fur coats.”)

The couple insist that they’re boring after-hours, eating Chinese takeout from Shun Lee or fare imported uptown from the West Village’s Morandi. They watch movies; Browne says he likes Fellini and Visconti, but is also a sucker for Working Girl. He borrows film references for his collections, although studio mood boards are bereft of scene screengrabs. “I never give my team a picture,” he says. “If you do, you fall into the trap of re-creating that. With a lot of designers, you get overly referenced collections, which I think is not always so interesting.

“I love to be provocative,” he concludes. “I want people to love or hate something; I never want people just to like what I do. When I’m backstage at a show, and I look at the people [in the audience], everyone’s so deadpan. It’s like, ‘Come on, guys. Why aren’t you laughing? Why aren’t you crying?’ “

 

Edited February 23, 2019 by glorydays

[glorydays]

Todd Snyder

 

SS 2019

 

 

[glorydays]

Ovadia and Sons

 

FW 2019

 

 

[glorydays]

Johanna Uurasjarvi for J. Crew

 

I have my reservations about J. Crew today since the last CEO and creative director just used J. Crew as a stepping stone for their other projects. But, I believe that a combination of pulling back their stock and updating their look would bring back the affordable "ivy league" fare they were always known for.

 

[glorydays]

J.Crew’s sales have suffered for years. Now it’s trying a whole new look.

 

J.Crew is known as one of America’s foremost preppy brands. But after four years of plummeting sales — a downward trajectory that only ended in the most recent quarter — it unveiled a new look today in the hope of fully reviving shoppers’ interest. In fashion, a total image revamp can turn a stale brand into a soaring success, and the stakes for this much-teased overhaul are high: Loaded with debt, J.Crew has recently been ranking on business outlets’ lists of brands that are on the verge of bankruptcy.

In an effort to combat this, J.Crew’s design and marketing teams are rolling out a version of the brand that’s more wide-ranging than ever before, with the explicit purpose of appealing to as many people as possible. But going broad also has made J.Crew’s identity more diffuse: It looks more like every other clothing company on the market.

 

J.Crew’s fall from grace

In its early days, J.Crew was a destination for classic rugby shirts, chinos, and roll-neck pullovers. Its catalog, launched in 1983, depicted couples with sweaters slung over their shoulders and around their waists, and sun-tanned men wearing white button-downs, striped ties, and rolled-up khakis on the beach. During the mid-’00s, however, J.Crew transformed into a brand that was still preppy, but increasingly fashion-forward and quirky, with sequins highly encouraged for daytime use.

That look, pioneered and embodied by former J.Crew creative director Jenna Lyons, was a smash hit until it wasn’t. Its greatest strength — it was so singular and clearly defined that you could spot it a mile away — also contributed to its downfall. Longtime J.Crew shoppers ultimately wanted something less edgy and trendy. Sizing and fit issues further alienated customers. Sales slid and kept sliding.

Lyons left her post in the spring of 2017, followed by Mickey Drexler, the CEO who engineered J.Crew’s reinvention during the aughts. His replacement, Brett, came from the Williams-Sonoma-owned home goods company West Elm. In June, Brett brought in a new design chief: Johanna Uurasjarvi, who had worked with him at West Elm and Anthropologie.

The departure of Lyons was cause for mourning among many J.Crew fans, even those who saw her exit as an inevitability, because she defined the style of the early 2010s. Uurasjarvi’s welcome has been more muted: She isn’t a well-known quantity, and her first designs won’t hit stores until fall 2019.

 

J.Crew’s new look is all about going broad

Even before the official relaunch, we’ve had some sense of what to expect from the new J.Crew. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in late August, CEO Jim Brett emphasized the brand’s mission to expand beyond its New England preppy past. The J.Crew of today is meant to offer something to everyone.

“You can’t be one price. You can’t be one aesthetic. You can’t be one fit,” said Brett, who was hired as J.Crew’s chief executive in June 2017.

With its relaunch, J.Crew is offering tailored herringbone blazers and striped button-downsfor the traditionalists, flowery maxi skirts for the modern bohemian, and plush leopard coats for the Kate Moss admirers. J.Crew is aiming to hook as many shoppers as possible through the use of sub-brands, which vary by price point and vibe.

J.Crew is going for breadth. It’s uptown, downtown, trendy, and as classically casual as the Gap. (Indeed, one photo of three men wearing jeans, pullovers, and denim jackets could very well be a gap ad.) And that has the effect of making much of its merchandise feel very familiar, as though it’s summoning influences from all around the fashion world.

 

At times, J.Crew taps into the city-wise, French Girl-inflected aesthetic of Madewell, J.Crew’s little sister brand. A low-cut floral blouse worn with high-waisted denim makes for very Madewellian styling, and sweaters that say “Merci Beaucoup” and “Je t’aime NYC” recall French slogan pieces from Madewell’s collaborations with the Paris-based brand Sézane. In a T-shirt product shot, a J.Crew model wears a little red bandana around her neck, a styling trick that pops up in Madewell’s advertising.

Though Madewell is younger and more casual than J.Crew, the two have always shared some DNA. (They often use the same models.) But it makes sense that J.Crew would be borrowing more heavily from Madewell right now, because it’s the best thing that their parent company, J.Crew Group, has going for it. While J.Crew’s sales have slumped (by 5 percent in the second quarter of 2018), Madewell has been rocketing upward (by 29 percent during the same period) and is about to launch a men’s line.

Upper management is well aware of the extent to which Madewell can give J.Crew a boost: In February, the company said that it was starting to open Madewell shop-in-shops within J.Crew stores.

The J.Crew of today is less distinctive than it was before, and harder to define. That’s a tough pill to swallow from a critical perspective. But then again, J.Crew isn’t courting the fashion establishment anymore — Brett made that clear when he told the Wall Street Journal, “This brand should never show at New York Fashion Week.” The only thing that matters now is what customers think.

 

[glorydays]

Hirofumi Kiyonaga for F.C. Bristol

 

SS 2019

 

 

 

[glorydays]

Nepenthes editorials for Engineered Garments and Needles

 

 

[glorydays]

holy shit

 

4000 fucking views

 

that's fucking rad

[glorydays]

Thom Browne for Spring Summer 2019

 

always whimsical...none of this shit ends up being sold

 

 

[glorydays]

Universal Products by 1LDK shop founder Hiroyasu Fukuzawa

 

 

[glorydays]

Bedwin and the Heartbreakers by Masafumi Watanabe

 

 

[glorydays]

Raf Simons on Life in New York, Designing Under Trump, and the New Generation of Designers Who Look Up To Him

 

 

Raf Simons has settled in to New York. He’s relocated his life, his business, his partner, and his dog—a tall, intimidating beauceron named Luca. That’s who greets me with a few stern barks when I enter Simons’ office in midtown. “She just barks,” Raf tells me. Luca is a protector. The dog laps the perimeter of the room a few times before settling into a bed just outside the door. The wall by the elevators says Calvin Klein, but I came to talk to Raf Simons about Raf Simons, the label Raf started in Belgium back in 1995. Next week he will present the Fall-Winter ’17 collection of his namesake line at Gagosian Gallery in New York during NYFW: Men’s. Later next month, he will show his first collections for Calvin Klein, where he is now serving as chief creative officer. He’s wearing an oversized varsity cardigan from his acclaimed "Twin Peaks” collection, frayed and mended like he’s had it for decades (even though it’s from this season). A plate of pastries is delivered to the table in front of us and we begin.

 

GQ Style: Have you found your favorite coffee shop and place to get a martini in New York yet?

 

Raf Simons: I have to be really honest with you, we didn’t really do a lot, besides working. It’s the first season—maybe I should say seasons—and I know exactly how that goes. It’s the third time I’m doing it. It requires full focus, so we are always here, basically. And when we have the opportunity to take some time, we go out with her [Luca]. We go out of the city where it’s beautiful and green. We go to the Berkshires. We’ve been to Connecticut. I’ve been coming for many years to New York, for whatever reason. I come here for three days for a shoot, or a week to just hang out, and we’d do so much. Everybody always says, “Yeah, but when you live in New York it’s not like that.” I’m like, “No! I’m going to see shows every day, museums every day.”

No. I haven’t done a lot since [we arrived]. I saw a couple of shows. The Agnes Martin show at the Guggenheim, for example. Some gallery shows. In the beginning we’re taking care of the house. You close down the whole thing in Europe, move it over, organize the the whole thing. It’s a whole different life. We have a big dog. So no. Not yet. No coffee shop and all that. The house, yes. We have a house and it’s really nice and really together now. We feel very at home there.

 

Does living and showing in New York have an effect on your creative output?

Yes. Big time. The city is always inspiring. But I think when you are here all the time it is inspiring in a different way, obviously. I can be very honest about it: Both collections are going to relate very much to how I experience it. How I see it. How I have always seen it. And how I might want to see it. It relates to myself and my roots and Europe. Both collections, in a very different way—maybe one more America, the other one Europe.

 

You’ve come to New York during a fraught time. Do socio-political situations influence your work?

Yes. But I’m not gonna say—I’m gonna show. It’s too fragile to express in words. It’s something you have to feel. I’ve always thought that it’s interesting if I can cause a relevant dialogue, or a constructive dialogue.

 

 

Do you think that fashion and design can be a form of rebellion or resistance? With a situation like Donald Trump’s presidency, can it be a form of protest to design or to just get dressed in the morning?

Yes, I think it can be a form of resistance. But no more than any other person taking a position or speaking up. I don’t think that because it’s fashion it’s more of a resistance.

It’s also difficult to talk about because one thing is that when you come as a European to America, it’s already quite something. My whole existence had a very specific foundation in Europe. Belgium, Paris, Milan. My company was established there and is based there still. But I had to rethink the whole thing because the one thing that I said is that, if I step into a new creative director position, I’m not traveling anymore. I came to an age where I found that to be the very annoying part of the job. Because I’m really still challenged by doing these two different things. I always like to do that. In the early days, before I became creative director of Jil Sander, I was also always doing two things. The brand and art curating. Or the brand and teaching at university. And then it became two brands. Jil-Raf. Dior-Raf. Now Calvin-Raf. And it’s very interesting for me, those two roles. I think it makes me very alert. Instead of becoming lazy in your own settled thinking process and environment. But I just can’t cope with the travel anymore so everything was restructured. My people come here. We have an office here for my company.

So all of that together is a lot. Coming here. Living here. Your partner. Your dog. It’s a new city. New experiences. Starting a new job. And then suddenly—woosh!—something happens which is like the last possible thing you could even imagine.

 

Donald Trump.

Yeah. That’s how we experienced it. Literally, you start thinking, Oh my god. What did we decide here a half-year ago? And then you can go and sit there and [cry] or you can just say, I’m going to do my thing. I have things that I have to do. And I have not only a responsibility, but a challenge.

I’ve felt a lot lately like I felt a very long time ago when I started in fashion. I had a love hate relationship. I’m not trained as a fashion designer, I’m trained as an industrial designer. It’s quite a different kind of dialogue that people have in that world. It’s more like the environment of architecture and design and art. It’s a different way of behaving. A different dialogue. A different speed, also. A different process to come to an end result. I used to have this love and hate relationship with fashion because I thought it was a lower form of creative expression. And at the same time I started to feel that it was dull. I thought, Oh my, we just keep on producing clothes, clothes. Like, we could do something so much more relevant, you know? Until one person said to me—and I’m not going to name the person—but the person literally slapped me in the face and said, you have to start looking at it differently, because otherwise you’re never going to be proud and happy about what you do. Because you inspire people. You bring something out that they literally need. So you do a good thing. Not a bad thing. And that’s how I’ve started to think lately.

 

 

You ask these questions, I cannot answer them literally. I can just say that I know that I’m doing something that people are going to feel good about. I know that. Maybe some of them hate my stuff, and they can go somewhere else. But I’m not doing nothing. I’m already doing something. I think that if people have to deal with this thing that they can’t deal with, and there is something they really like, it’s going to make them feel better.

I’m constantly thinking about what could I do on a bigger scale. I’m thinking a lot about it. And I’m watching a lot of the people who do speak up. Like the march and all these women. But I also question a lot. Like, What is this all going to become? I open the newspaper and I see that he’s ordering a wall. I’m like… It’s almost like the middle ages or something. I cannot believe it. You know, I’ve been doing this thing for 21 years. People do their thing. I do my job. Then you watch a television series like Game of Thrones and you think, Oh my god, it was like that back in the days. Then you see all the evolution. You know, we went through the sexual revolution—I thought.

 

The civil rights movement.

It’s almost incredible that something like that has been manifesting in a country like America.

 

Throughout your career, you’ve referenced youth and rebellion. How has your perspective on that changed? Because in the 21 years since you’ve been designing, what it means to be a young person has changed radically.

This collection is going to relate very much to your question.Very much. I’m thinking a lot again about that period when there was a political climate that caused punk. My thing is not gonna be punk, but you know, what it meant, and why it came at that point—the whole thing with England and Thatcher.

I’ve been thinking also about the bourgeoisie of fashion—and the new youth of fashion, who has no interest whatsoever in the bourgeoisie of fashion. Then I’m thinking about the structures of the high fashion world. And I’m thinking about all these young kids who have a whole new world out there which does not relate to the events where the high bourgeoisie is. It’s also about the relationship between things which are the highest and the lowest. Which could possibly be the garment itself. What could be the lowest of the lowest, and what could be the highest of the highest?

And then there’s this other thing: The mother and the son thing. Also with Thatcher and the punks—I think that a good president or a good king should be a good father or a good mother to their children.

So thats where it started when I began thinking about doing that kind of collection, which might be the beginning of a series that I’ll try to do. It’s eras with me very often. There was this era where I started to think a lot about the relationship between audience and spectator. And I made them all standing again, and there was a party mood and freedom. I said what I needed to say. Now we’re talking about something else. And I think that body of work that I’ve been showing in that last 3 years maybe, with all these shows, from the Sterling [Ruby] show on—the Twin Peaks show and the Florence show—they were not reactive shows. They were not reacting against or reacting. They were just shows that were more related to a collaboration, for example, with Sterling. Or they were related to things that were always in my mind, whether it was Twin Peaks and horror movies, or my parents. Right now it’s way more related to what's going on in the world for me.

 

 

What do you mean when you talk about the new youth of fashion? Do you mean young designers?

No. Spectators. And people that just bring out their opinion. People that have dialogue with other people. I’m analyzing and analyzing and analyzing, trying to take it all in. Trying to figure out what it is that changed in fashion so much. And what changed in fashion so much is that it no longer belongs to a bourgeoisie small environment.

 

It isn’t just for the elite anymore.

 

I was actually someone who was very often saying that fashion keeps thinking that it can serve everybody, that it can be there for everybody, high fashion. I’m sorry, but high fashion was always for a small environment. High fashion by nature used to be extreme. Right now we define a lot of things as high fashion, but they’re not high fashion. They’re clothes. They’re clothes on the runway with a nice little twist of styling and coloration. Everybody thinks it’s high fashion. Bullshit. There is very little high fashion.

Now, the high fashion world used to have, for many decades, almost all through the 20th century, a bourgeoisie. But bourgeoisie is not necessarily a bad word. That’s not what I mean. Let’s say a high court audience. And it never changed and evolved. Because our world structure kept it like that. Up until young kids said, "We are going to look and consume and react and say something and have a dialogue. Even if we are not in that show. We are not in the court. We are not in the castle." And that’s what’s happening now. And we designers, we are completely out of that whole thing. We have to think, how are we going to deal with it? Because the bourgeoisie, they really still think it’s all for them. They spit on the youth. Nobody dares to say it, but it’s like that. They spit on the youth. They don’t even realize that they are going to lose the game.

 

There are some designers now—and I’m thinking of Virgil Abloh at Off-White, Demna Gvasalia with Vetements, Gosha Rubchinskiy—who are connecting with the youth through fashion in a new way. Are there any young designers today that inspire or excite you?

Yes.

 

Anyone in particular?

Not Off-White. He’s a sweet guy. I like him a lot actually. But I’m inspired by people who bring something that I think has not been seen, that is original. It’s not always about being new-new because who is new-new? And of course you have to have people who inspired you. I’m not just trying to be politically correct here—trying to be nice and sweet about people because that’s what we’re always supposed to do when these questions come up in interviews—but honestly, are you asking me if I think that these people are inspired by my brand?

 

I think they absolutely are.

 

Because in the fashion world, and especially in the high court, but I’m sure with all the young kids online, who talk a lot, when they say it, it’s ok. But when the designers themselves say something like that, it’s not ok. I don’t know if you read the interview I did with Miuccia [Prada], but the only topic we talked about was that. Because we are the only ones who are supposed to shut up. And we suffer from that. And I know it’s the same thing for Marc [Jacobs]. I know it’s the same thing for Phoebe [Philo]. We all feel like we have to shut up. But we are the activators. I hate to talk about this because it always makes you sound pretentious, but we are the activators. Fashion doesn’t exist if we don’t exist. But it’s possible that the ones who talk will not exist. So I find that it’s a very difficult thing to talk about.

If it comes to somebody like Demna, I think he knows what he is. What I liked about it is almost what everybody hates about it now. That it was going back to something that I like: Martin Margiela and myself. You know, to have the guts to go so direct. Because it’s what people like. People like Martin. They love Martin. And people like youth and that rebellion feel. And all these things are what he brought. But you cannot escape from it. He knows it himself as well. It’s been there for many decades at Martin. Oversized hoodies with text prints. It’s been there.

Now, that’s not a critique. At all. I think he’s a smart one. And I think there will be things coming up. I don’t think you can compare him at all to the guy from Off-White. So I cannot talk about these people in the same way.

 

 

How important is it for you to remain connected to the art world? And why is it important for you?

It’s natural. It’s like breathing and drinking. It’s very natural. I am not working with anybody the way I see big artists and big brands work together. It’s not that kind of relationship. I have had a relationship with Mapplethorpe since forever. Not with the foundation. The Sterling thing is something thats been building for 11-12 years now. I will do other things with Sterling. It’s very natural.

 

Do you think about going beyond collaboration and going into other mediums?

Thinking, yes. But I will not do. Not now.

 

Because of time? Or that your creative expression is best focused on fashion?

Definitely not because of time. That would not be a reason. It’s always horrible, time. If you’re convinced about something, you will manage it. It’s not that, I think it’s more that if I would step into another field it would require full dedication. People have been asking, why would you not want to be an artist, sometimes we think you’re an artist. But no, I’m not an artist. I’m a fashion designer. If ever I would do it, there cannot be fashion anymore in my life and I would do art. But how are you going to erase 21 years of fashion?

 

Helmut Lang did it.

Yeah. He kind of did.

 

And Tom Ford made a movie.

[Raf does a small bow in his seat] Really. I bow for that one. I find it really mind-blowing. The work that has to be done to get to the point that this movie is coming out, aside from doing the collections. Wow. I find it mind-blowing. I don’t know if I could do that similarly. I think that I would just want to, not erase, but try to have a clean slate. I can’t even say what it would be. There are a lot of things that inspire me. But I would probably have a fear to do art. Because it is the world that I still kind of idealize probably too much.

 

Do you feel like at some point in your career you turned a corner and went from being a hot contemporary designer to being a legend who is adding to the legacy of his career?

It feels always the same. Nothing feels bigger than many, many years ago. Nothing feels more important than many, many years ago. What feels new to me is how people look at the brand. There is this hunt for pieces. That is a very new thing for me. Honestly speaking, the first moment it happened I was like, Oh, am I getting old? They started to collect it. I started to see pieces going to auctions. It’s like how I perceived old brands. Like, ah this brand from a very long time ago. It’s weird to experience it when I feel in full bloom. But then it’s nice, also. I would be like that for a Helmut piece or Martin piece, but they’re both out. The brands exist but they’re both out. I’m completely in it still, and I’m starting something new again now.

 

 

Well, there are plenty of young people just getting into fashion and discovering your past collections, and people want to find and own those pieces. Especially when Rihanna or Kanye are seen wearing them. What do you think when you see people wearing the past collection?

Rihanna, famous, or unfamous people that go into the old collections—the weird experience for me is that it makes me feel like I am from yesterday. But I understand. I do it myself. I go to things that come from the past and mean a lot to me... this thing from the past that I think is an incredible foundation and I know it’s going to last forever and I’m going to like it forever. I guess it’s the same for them. I’ve had my archive my whole life—you know, you’re a designer, you have to keep your archive—but lately I’ve started to be very, very protective about certain pieces. Because all the time they disappear. They go to an exhibition and don’t come back… I was never really worried, but lately, now I seal it, also. 266 looks that were in the exhibition in Florence, now they are sealed, packed, well taken care of. They will become important in the next seasons for some things we might do. I started to realize: You have to take care of your archive. It has a relevance to people and to the world. Certain companies do not hold a good archive and it is almost sad. I understand the nature of it. Somebody like Jil did not hold an archive because she did not have that thing with the past. She was just like, get rid of it, get rid of it, get rid of it. Always the future. And I was actually very much like that. I didn’t get rid of it, but I wasn’t paying too much attention to it. Always romanticizing the future. And now I start to understand that it has an importance and I should care about. I know it’s important. And for a long time I thought not. But it is important. Otherwise there wouldn’t be pyramids.

[glorydays]

Rei Kawakubo for BLACK comme des garcons

 

 

[glorydays]

elephant TRIBAL fabrics

 

FW 2019

 

 

 

[glorydays]

Demna Gvasalia on Appropriation, ‘Ugly’ Sneakers and the Curse of Pre-collections

 

 

Demna Gvasalia loves ugly sneakers. He’s sanguine that so many brands have copied the ones he did for Balenciaga. But he’s full of anger at the world, which he vents on the Vetements runway.

 

Wrong, wrong, wrong. It seems the designer is as prone to being misunderstood as he is for spawning trends.

In a wide-ranging interview, Gvasalia cleared the air on a number of misconceptions about his design process, confessed to reading “The Power of Now” daily, articulated the thinking behind Balenciaga’s unconventional Instagram account, and also let slip he’s had it with pre-collections, and all-night partying.

 

Oh, and the designer who initially made waves by draining collections of seasonal themes and narratives, simply drawing up lists of garments before embarking on a new collection, is now getting in touch with his cinematic side and eager to tell stories on the runway.

 

“If I wasn’t making clothes, I’d probably be making movies,” he said over a plate of perfectly piled French string beans at Caviar Kaspia in Paris, his lanky frame shrouded in a roomy black Vetements hoodie with an arm patch reading “One size fits most.” “We work kind of like in a movie, dressing this cast, this community of Balenciaga people.”

 

In fact, his next Balenciaga show in the French capital, scheduled for March 3 during Paris Fashion Week, will be the first to showcase a chosen narrative, tackling the mythic Parisian and her legendary style.

 

While it’s rare for a designer to divulge the theme of his or her show ahead of time, Gvasalia rarely goes the stereotypical route, and has confessed his affection for grittier, alternative parts of the French capital — and a desire to expose this reality.

 

It’s also rare for a designer to arrive at an interview so well prepared, and so much on his mind that he allotted two hours to chat and welcomed follow up. He scrawled his talking points in red ink on two folded sheets of paper, and let rip.

 

First topic: Appropriation.

 

Gvasalia is held up, and occasionally derided, as a visible pioneer of appropriation, first at Vetements with Paris fireman polos, DHL T-shirts and the like, and later at Balenciaga with his take on Ikea’s blue shopping bag and rubber car mats turned into clothing.

“It’s a big word everyone is throwing around left and right, but nobody really knows where it actually comes from and why. And that it’s not Demna who started this,” Gvasalia said of appropriation.

 

He accepts that he recently popularized the lifting and referencing of obvious signposts of consumer culture, but he traces the practice back to French artist Marcel Duchamp, a pioneer in taking found objects and presenting them as artworks. A bottle drying rack signed by Duchamp in 1914 is considered his first “Readymade,” while his autographed urinal, titled “Fountain,” is considered among the most famous and influential works of the 20th century.

 

An immense fan of Duchamp’s work and approach, Gvasalia is tickled that the term Readymade echoes the later invention of ready-to-wear, creating a mental link between Duchamp’s artistic practice and the designer’s playful send-ups of ordinary objects, usually culled from outside the realm of fashion, into covetable items.

 

 

“I have discovered Duchamp by discovering myself in a way as designer, because it explains to me how I work,” he said.

Gvasalia pointed out that Cristóbal Balenciaga similarly lifted ideas from the everyday, and thrust them into the rarified realm of haute couture. Fishermen in Spanish villages inspired some of the late designer’s most iconic looks, including a loose shirt known by its French name, “Vareuse,” and a hat with long, sloping brim at the back that has prompted comparisons to Darth Vader’s cowl.

 

“It was a uniform of the poor that he turned into an icon for the brand,” Gvasalia said of the Vareuse, whose shape he has transposed into short dresses in several recent Balenciaga collections. “I just wanted to point out that appropriation didn’t start as a concept in fashion with me. I’ve just maybe modernized it in a way that’s understandable for my generation of consumers who I talk to. Because we grew up with the same values, the same interests, and I would call this the first Internet generation.”

 

And a footnote about his DHL T-shirt for Vetements, famously modeled by Russian designer Gosha Rubchinskiy in 2015, sparking a maelstrom of indignation in the mainstream media, given its $300 price tag: It was derided variously as anti-fashion, a scam and a subversion.

Gvasalia now contends it wasn’t even strictly appropriation. “It was just a joke actually,” he said. “But I don’t usually joke when I make fashion. I’m really serious about making clothing.”

 

In fact, personal stories typically underline Gvasalia’s appropriations — indeed most of his work in fashion. For example, he did a version of the Ikea Frakta bag for Balenciaga, in blue leather and retailing for $2,145, because of a fond memory of using the $1 shopping tote when he was a fashion student at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Antwerp.

 

He and other classmates used them religiously because they were affordable, and large enough to tote a Stockman, on which students present their design prototypes to teachers.

 

“It’s a perfect example of Readymade, but there is a little bit more to it,” he said. “We changed the logo and we made it beautifully out of leather and that’s why it costs so much money.”

 

Gvasalia also did a version in yellow leather at Balenciaga, also for personal reasons. When he was a student in Belgium, he wanted to have a yellow Frakta bag. “But you couldn’t because otherwise you would have to steal it from Ikea. They don’t sell it,” he lamented. “Some designers get inspired by looking at birds, so they embroider its feathers, but my way of design is looking at some keyholder and making a bag out of it. But it’s never in competition with its original source, obviously.”

 

Au contraire for the scores of brands that have been inspired by Gvasalia’s designs, much to his chagrin.

 

“My work is being appropriated right and left,” he contended. “And not my conceptual appropriation of fashion but direct appropriation of products that I produce.”

 

He said the best example of that is Balenciaga’s Triple S, which dropped in September 2017 and which was widely credited with sparking a trend to ugly “dad” sneakers.

 

That was absolutely not the designer’s intention.

 

 

“Triple S was supposed to be a chunky sneaker,” he said, noting that many executives within Balenciaga were initially skeptical of the offbeat style, with its layer cake of rubber soles, patches of color and grubby aspect. “It was really absolutely a proportional exercise of footwear, and not any kind of a gimmicky play with what was ugly or not ugly in shoe design.

 

“I’m not part of this ugly fashion. I never liked ugly stuff really,” he stressed.

 

In fact, Gvasalia has a penchant for shoes as large as his sweatshirt.

 

“I hate to see small feet visually. A lot of guys don’t like to have small feet,” he said. “To me, large shoes are more stable, and more masculine. Also, I believe when you create a new silhouette, the product succeeds.”

 

Gvasalia is widely credited with popularizing anew blown-up proportions — to the point where Frankenstein shoulders and sleeves dangling past the fingertips invaded runways in all fashion capitals in recent years, not to mention the high street.

 

“Oversize, it’s my territory,” he said. “I definitely intend to defend what is my design territory.”

 

Big clothes are part of his personal fashion lore. Growing up poor in Soviet-era Georgia, he wore hand-me-downs from cousins who were five or six years older than him. New clothes were purchased in larger sizes to grow into. Hence, Gvasalia is like a fish out of water when he isn’t swimming in his clothes.

 

And that’s why he feels so at home in the house Cristóbal Balenciaga first opened in 1937 and helmed until his retirement in 1968. Among the most famous designs of the late Spanish-French couturier, prized for his spare and sculptural designs, are the cocoon coat, bubble skirt and semi-fit jacket.

 

“He worked on volumes first and foremost, and not decoration,” said Gvasalia, who in an early collection for Balenciaga transposed the flaring back of the semi-fit jacket into a black sweatshirt. “What I found at Balenciaga was kind of a gift for me. I found Cristóbal Balenciaga’s approach to volume was so perfectly suitable for me with my personal taste for volume.”

Indeed, while stereotyped by some as a maker of expensive streetwear, Gvasalia prides himself in being a tailor — and he intends to flex these muscles more in the future.

 

“I actually can make a jacket for myself in one day with my own hands,” he said, crediting his Antwerp education for his technical skills and characterizing his four years at Maison Martin Margiela as his master’s degree. “I learned how to work three-dimensionally with garments. That’s what happened there, but tailoring, and the know-how and technical part of dressmaking were always my primary interest actually,” he said. “So far from being a T-shirt and hoodie designer – even though I love those things and I wear them and that’s part of my wardrobe — I know how to make a jacket.”

 

Gvasalia is also convinced that the success of a product is often linked to its cutting.

“There is a big difference between an oversize shirt and an oversize shirt I make. Because there is a study of an attitude in this oversize. There is a study and reflection behind the product when I make clothes,” he said. “That actually is a real recipe of success behind the product for me. The moment it will not be, I will stop doing fashion and will do something else.”

 

For the moment, Gvasalia’s unorthodox approach at Balenciaga is working wonders. Anointed one of the fastest-growing brands at French parent Kering, Balenciaga saw sales more than double since the designer’s arrival in late 2015, according to market sources.

In reporting full-year results earlier this month, the French group trumpeted a “stellar” performance from Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen, which are lumped in with “other houses.” (It only details sales and profits results for the Gucci, Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta brands. Other houses also include Boucheron, Brioni, Pomellato, Ulysse Nardin and Girard-Perregaux.)

 

Kering chairman and chief executive officer François-Henri Pinault has predicted Balenciaga will top the 1 billion-euro sales mark this year, propelling it into fashion’s major leagues. It counts 150 stores worldwide.

Gvasalia doesn’t bill himself as a disruptor, even if his methods often run counter to tradition and his references — scoured mostly from the Internet or what he sees people wearing in daily life — are far from the arch glamour epitomized by Richard Avedon fashion photography.

To be sure, he gleefully upends typical “fashion rituals” such as using a single image-making team. “There is no longer monopoly in my way of working fashion,” he explained. “There is not one casting director, there is not one stylist any longer, there is not one photographer we should collaborate with.”

 

To be sure, Vetements and Balenciaga have been in the crosshairs over models several times; the former brand criticized for a lack of diversity in some of its early shows; the latter called out in 2017 for making 150 girls wait in a dark stairwell for three hours in order to try out for its show. Balenciaga immediately issued apologies, and made radical changes to its casting process, including discontinuing the relationship its then casting agency.

 

“Unfortunately, I had to learn my lesson like this through not being experienced in doing this kind of big show with big brands,” Gvasalia said. “I learned my lesson and I think it would be difficult to find a more inclusive and more diverse cast today, so I’m proud of that.”

 

The designer also took an atypical approach to Balenciaga’s Instagram account, which boasts 8.9 million followers and counting. Gvasalia scoped out about 80 users of Instagram, some stylists and photographers — others true amateurs with negligible audiences.

“And no influencers,” he noted. “Sometimes somebody who never actually had a camera in his life produces a better visual image today than a very known photographer.”

 

Balenciaga loans its clothes and pays a fee to the Instagrammers for the resulting photos: white boots propped on a plastic patio chair; a cat nestled inside a logo handbag; a man lying on the ground smiling, his face and extremities dwarfed by his multilayer coat.

While not quite as impassive, gritty and disquieting as Vetements’ feed, the Balenciaga account certainly telegraphs an unvarnished, quirky take on luxury.

Gvasalia said some people write to the company asking if the account was hacked. No matter. “It has proven to be a huge success,” he said.

According to figures provided by Balenciaga, its Instagram account had 1.2 million followers before Gvasalia joined. The designer introduced the new strategy in May 2018, and the audience size vaulted 258 percent that calendar year.

 

 

“I wanted Balenciaga not to be looking like a brand Instagram, or a corporate brand in fashion,” he explained. “I thought it has to look like somebody else’s Instagram, like a person’s Instagram or a group of people. Basically our Instagram today is a kind of Balenciaga community that we build that visually represents my vision of Balenciaga.”

 

Balenciaga doesn’t identify its contributors or tag them “because it’s not a promotional platform. It’s the Balenciaga visual expression,” he explained. “They just create visually strong content. That’s my criteria.”

 

The designer is also going against the tide by scrapping pre-collections at Balenciaga, starting with its fall 2019 show later this week.

“Three months to make a collection? Everyone knows it’s a problem. People have burnout, creatives are going crazy, and merchandisers have no idea what to merchandise. It’s a big confusion going on in our industry and I’m one of the few to speak about it,” he said. “I realized that I cannot go on doing it because it’s somehow almost disrespectful to the creative process, and to someone who wants to transform an idea into a credible product.”

 

Gvasalia’s proposal for Balenciaga is to now make two large collections a year: one combining winter and spring, and the other summer and autumn, more in line with weather patterns, lifestyles and shopping habits. (Previously, Gvasalia did a runway collection that would inspire the following pre-collection.)

 

 

“The idea of seasons today, it’s very theoretical,” he noted. “For spring, I have requests to do fur coats.”

Gvasalia said the new approach would reduce waste, and show that “ideas can be durable,” while still serving the needs of retailers to have multiple deliveries. The spring 2020 offering, already designed, will be presented to buyers during the pre-spring/resort market in May and June.

“The new, more sustainable way of working for me is not only, you know, not using toxic gas etc., but it’s also not throwing out ideas that are sometimes very good,” he said. “I don’t know if people realize that it takes a lot of effort to have an idea.”

 

Likewise, he also asserted it’s “more sustainable to have two shows per year, and to unify women’s and men’s under one vision,” as Balenciaga has since last fall’s fashion week in Paris.

 

“For me, luxury fashion in the future is about inclusivity, and gender is part of that, too,” he said.

In Gvasalia’s view, traditional ideas of luxury fashion are outmoded.

 

“Luxury used to be so exclusive that it would sell a dream to the people who could afford it, and to others who couldn’t afford it to still dream about,” he said. “For me, fashion has to be inclusive and cannot be exclusive any longer to survive. It no longer sells a dream, but it sells an identity to people.”

 

In Gvasalia’s estimation, people gravitate to a fashion brand not only for the look it gives them, but for the values it upholds and promotes: He wants Balenciaga to be socially involved, and he wants to use “garments as a tool of communication.”

“My actual quest at Balenciaga is to create a modern luxury brand that is inclusive, that is sustainable, that is involved and that is avant-garde, because that is in its DNA,” he said.

 

 

Gvasalia’s first project in the socially engaged vein was with the World Food Programme. For his fall 2018 collection, he made baseball caps, T-shirts, sweatshirts and fanny packs bearing the WFP logo. Balenciaga donated 10 percent of sales of these items to the organization, the largest humanitarian aid group fighting world hunger. He recently followed up with a capsule collection for Farfetch that championed species conservation.

“We need to be involved as a luxury brand,” he said. “We live in a world of transparency.”

 

His commitment to sustainability isn’t there because it’s a corporate diktat from Kering, recently named the world’s second-most sustainable company in the world across all industries by Corporate Knights Global 100 Index. (Danish bioscience firm Chr. Hansen topped the list.)

“I think it’s murderous not to be convinced about it,” he said. “It’s a different mind-set this generation. We can change it still. I’m extremely optimistic at the moment.”

 

Gvasalia links shifts in his working methods to change in his personal life, and the outcome of “self-exploration and self-discovery” through his repeated reading of Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now,” plus sessions with a therapist.

“I found love and I found home,” he said, the latter a reference to his move to the Swiss countryside when Vetements shifted its headquarters to Zurich from Paris in 2017. “It gave me confidence. I have more belief in what I do.”

 

Through the self-help book, which he reads every day, he “learned how to be happy and love myself.” He now abstains from alcohol — getting his thrills by wearing wacky Balenciaga and Vetements prototypes to food shops in Swiss villages — and now follows a vegetarian diet.

“I feel good,” he said. “Ever since I moved there, my vision has become so much more clear for me personally, I don’t know why.”

There, he also learned to stop repressing his inner James Cameron. His last two Vetements shows boasted palpable and powerful storylines. The one last July, staged under a bridge with models stomping across banquet tables, explored painful memories of the Georgian Civil War in ways menacing, but ultimately uplifting; while during the men’s shows last January, he delved into the perils of the Internet and the Darknet, including the loss of personal privacy.

 

“My work is my best tool to express what’s inside of me,” he said.

“It’s important for me to do the storytelling, without necessarily telling it verbally. I realize I was oppressing it in myself. Maybe I was scared of it, not confident enough in myself, listening to much to other people maybe,” he mused.

 

“That’s the difference now, and the reason why I don’t work so much anymore with the collection plan anymore — you know the lists of T-shirts, coats, jackets — but more with creating this identity and a story, within which there will always be a little black dress, there will always be a sexy, fitted pant for a woman or a man. You know, it’s part of the vocabulary with me that I don’t think it will ever change to be honest. Maybe there will be new additions like, I don’t know, some weird leg warmers or something.”

 

His future plans include adding more classic products “with a smaller fashion twist” to Balenciaga’s range, such as “a nice, beautiful cashmere pullover” — things even his father could wear, to make the brand more inclusive. “I want to introduce new categories that I haven’t yet done, that are part of the luxury wardrobe, I would say,” he recounted. “And I will do more tailoring, and more exploration of eveningwear at Balenciaga because that’s my platform for exploring a category of fashion that I never do [at Vetements], that I’m extremely excited about, and that I think I have so much innovation to bring to it.”

 

While strident in his creative methods, planning show themes and venues even years ahead of time, Gvasalia does not take himself — or fashion — too seriously. And while his Vetements shows typically exude urgent, angry airs, heightened recently with his penchant for face-coverings (out of a need for privacy in the all-seeing Internet age), he said he now approaches fashion from a positive place.

 

“I think before I felt like a lot of artists do, in a way, and fashion designers do — you need to be depressed to be creative,” he said. “But I realize it’s not the best formula. You can be much more creative when you’re free in your mind and actually when you realize what you are doing,” he said. “We’re just talking about fashion, and at the end of the day, it doesn’t have to be all so gloomy.”

 

In fact, Gvasalia insists he’s not anti-anything. “I’ve never been,” he said. “I’ve been anti people telling me what to do. That’s the thing I’ve always been against.”

[glorydays]

I don't like vetements or Balenciaga, but I do respect his tenacity and persistence.

[glorydays]

Southern trad is rare and not many designers hail from that area of the U.S.

 

Besides Mark McNairy, Billy Reid is really the only other designer I know of.

 

Billy Reid SS 2019

 

 

[glorydays]

417 by Edifice SS 2019

 

[glorydays]

Takahisa Maede for TONE SS 2019

 

 

[glorydays]

Kazuyuki Yamakawa for * A Vontade

 

SS 2019

 

 

[glorydays]

Dior is fucking rad and the fact Kim Jones is now the lead designer of everything ready made....its just perfect

 

Spring Summer 2019

 

 

[glorydays]

I don't usually look or care for "high fashion" designers aka Italian couture but I thought the visuals were pretty stunning

 

 

[glorydays]

WTAPS Spring / Summer 2019

 

 

[glorydays]

and cuz Junya Watanabe don't play