Reading about Vetements and their recent launch of the tee with the DHL logo that sold out in a few hours on the web, I began to reflect on the decision-making power of fashion and the ability to impose diktats on the market. Fashion says people buy. Through its collections, the Vetements brand seems to me to propose an anti-fashion model, a sort of parody that mimics the dynamics that underlie the fashion system. Starting from this reflection, I rethought the Moschino collections and its catapulting logos and mass-produced products onto the catwalks which, estranged from their original context, acquire new value, becoming fashion fetishes. But if Moschino's operation can be compared to Warhol's Pop Art, whose dynamics it borrows, Vetements' is inspired by the critical art of .... jasper jones ??
From here then I also thought of Margiela and her models with covered faces, progressively more and more covered, from collection to collection, up to 2014 ??So I thought that today as well as in Warhol's time, people are guided in their purchases mainly by the power of logos, by what logos represent, by the desire to communicate a message to others through the possession of those logos, a status, a 'belonging. Fashion is this, a code through which one builds one's own style and tells one's self, one's belonging, one's experience. But logos, when preponderant, end up becoming a uniform, a depersonalizing diktat that flattens people to pre-set levels of tastes defined by market logic. Fashion is thus emptied of one of its primary functions.
At the same time the body becomes a support for these logos, a vehicle by which to spread and amplify the seductive and symbolic power of the logos. And this is where the super-models come into play, the IT-girls who lend themselves to fashion (Cara Delavigne, Kendall Jenner) who in turn become brands capable of enhancing the seductive charm of the logo.