Demna Gvasalia Announces Vetements Is Stepping Off The Runway

Big changes are coming to fashion. In a year when the conveyer belt of runway shows is moving at lightening-speeds, there’s breaking news that will bring the industry to an abrupt halt: Vetements, one of the hottest young brands to come out of Paris in recent years, has announcing it’s stepping off the belt. “We are not going to show in the classical system any more,” Demna Gvasalia told Vogue. “I got bored. I think it needs to enter a new chapter. Fashion shows are not the best tool. We did the show in the sex club, the restaurant, the church. We brought forward the season, we showed men’s and women’s together. It’s become repetitive and exhausting. We will do something when there’s the time and the need for it. It will be more like a surprise.”

Gvasalia shared the shocking news during a phone conversation with Vogue from Zurich, Switzerland, where he and his brother relocated the label’s studio after Paris Fashion Week. “I completely changed the lifestyle. I stopped the clubby, Parisian way I’ve been living for the past few years. Zurich is a kind of nature paradise, and it’s probably the most boring place in Europe.” And it’s this exact reduction of pace that gave Gvaslia the epiphany to detach Vetements from the over-the-top, over-crowded, non-stop runway show production.

Gvasalia and his brother are putting on the breaks to prioritize authentic business development. “It’s like we’re putting Vetements into an artificial coma,” Gvasalia mused. “It’s like we’ve got this big baby, and we’ve got to take care of it. In five years, it’s gone so fast, it started to become something else. I want to bring it back to where we started. No more oversize hoodies any more! We’re independent. We can do what we choose. That’s the beauty of Vetements.”

Gvasalia shared with Vogue he began to grow tired of the sped-up cycle of runway shows during his models’ last tromp down the catwalk. “For the first time last season, I was able to watch our own show from a balcony,” Gvasalia explained. “I could see everybody filming it on their screens. I realized that 80 percent of the clothes we did were not really seen or understood. And it cost so much. You cannot put on a show for less than 25,000 euros. That one cost in the region of 100,000 euros, with the venue. And there are brands now putting on shows around the world which cost millions. I think it’s a complete waste.”

Vetements has certainly gotten the boll rolling, and this is likely just the beginning of a larger revamp of the industry and its schedule. In today’s world, fashion consumers desire instant gratification, which is something runway shows do not appear to provide. It seems time that the fashion industry catches up in order to make the most of their creative collections, which may mean eliminating the over-done runway productions that have traditionally come right along with them.