Demna is the co-founder of the luxury clothing brand Vetements, and he was its head designer from 2014 to 2019.13 In 2019, he left the brand to focus on his role as creative director of the prestigious Paris-based haute-couture brand, Balenciaga, which hired him in 2015. During these four years, Demna held a position in both brands—for Demna Vetements and Balenciaga are “two diferent, independent stories that happen to share one common factor, which is me” (Demna quoted in SSENSE, 2016). Vetements launched a symbolic revolt against the established fashion system by unashamedly embracing cheap popular culture, something risky for a brand positioning itself as luxury. Vetements collaborated with low-end companies, such as DHL, IKEA, Reebok, and even Crocs, and occasionally chose equally banal venues for their shows, including a McDonald’s restaurant and a cheap Chinese restaurant in Paris. These synergies were controversial insofar as they challenged the exclusiveness of the luxury fashion system, yet they made the brand look confidently cool in its undertakings. The scandalousness of these collaborations gained extensive media coverage from major media outlets, such as the New York Times, the Guardian, and Vogue, among many others. As the scandalous provocation is a classic avant-garde tactic for drawing public attention, the charismatic figure of Demna proved key in attracting media publicity.
While luxury fashion designers have likewise embraced avant-garde tactics, including banality and ugliness before, Vetements under the direction of Demna (and after 2019 of his brother, Guram Gvasalia), pushed this idea to its limits. Tellingly, when asked about one of Vetements items, Demna stated in 2016 at the height of Vetements success that “it’s ugly, that’s why we like it” (Demna quoted in Wolf, 2016). This avowal reverses a commonsense truism of the fashion system, that is, that fashion is about beauty, through an unapologetic celebration of its exact opposite. As Duchamp vocally disassociates art from the burden of handcraft or beauty by exhibiting a prefabricated and banal bicycle wheel, the love of ugliness here has a similar efect vis-à-vis luxury fashion: it strips it from its raison d’etre. The timing for Demna was more ideal than Duchamp, however, as Demna’s endorsement of unorthodox aesthetics resonated with the body positivity movement that entered fashion and culture at large at least after the 2010s while Duchamp’s practices were only institutionalized in the art system in the 1960s and 1970s (partly via the symbolic and economic capital associated with Warhol), that is, more than 50 years after their initial appearance.
Atmospheres of Banal Luxury in Digital Warhol Economies
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