A little over a year ago, the cheeky Parisian streetwear label, Vetements, made headlines for selling a $240 t-shirt emblazoned with the DHL logo. The shirt was, for all intents and purposes, identical to those worn by employees of the international courier, yet it enjoyed remarkable popularity among the fashion cognoscenti. The Vetements edition quickly sold out and entrepreneurial fans turned to DHL’s own website, where a nearly identical design could be purchased in bulk for $6.50 a shirt. Soon these shirts—counterfeit versions of the Vetements original, or authentic versions of the Vetements copy—began to appear on eBay.
A similarly bizarre spectacle occurred this spring when Balenciaga released a $2,000 Italian calfskin replica of the FRAKTA, a $0.90 blue plastic tote sold in Ikea checkout aisles worldwide. The faux-FRAKTA was nothing less than a global media sensation, spawning headlines like Politico’s, “Is This $2000 Fake IKEA Bag a Sign of the Apocalypse?”[1] Jake Woolf of GQ praised the designer for his willingness, “to challenge society's accepted ideas of luxury.”[2] Raquel Laneri of the NY Post called the designer “lazy.”[3] The vast majority commentators were simply incredulous: $2,000 for that?
Perhaps not surprisingly, the DHL t-shirt and the faux-FRAKTA were conceived by the very same designer, Demna Gvasalia, who is both the founder of Vetements and creative director at Balenciaga. In just six years, Gvasalia has catapulted Vetements from unknown upstart to trendsetting powerhouse, pioneering a chunky street-wear silhouette that has become de rigueur amongst celebrities like Kanye West and Selena Gomez. Since his appointment as Balenciaga’s creative director in early 2015, Gvasalia has quietly released a handful of critically lauded collections, but none of his designs had crossed over into the cultural mainstream quite like his antics at Vetements—that is, until the faux-FRAKTA was released.
Thus far, critical response to the bag has been limited to aspects of its design: people either find the bag witty and subversive or frivolous and banal, two equally valid perspectives that miss the point entirely. The faux-FRAKTA is not a bag per se, but rather a self-contained guerilla marketing event, a product that was conceived precisely in order to attract headlines and clearly delivered against this agenda.
Gvasalia is a talented designer but his greatest strength is the ability to engineer a spectacle. The DHL t-shirt demonstrated how to make a garment go viral; the faux-FRAKTA proved that such a phenomenon is replicable. At a moment in which print media is in decline and the most powerful players in advertising are located in Silicon Valley rather than Madison Avenue, Gvasalia has found a way to engineer coverage and to do it for free, earning himself celebrity, notoriety, and a fortune in unpaid publicity. There are a great many overpriced garments, only Gvasalia's make headlines.
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The faux-FRAKTA and the DHL t-shirt share several prominent characteristics. Each was inspired by an object or service considered sober, economical, and practical, and was transformed into a product that is none of these things.
Price, which is always exorbitant and rarely (if ever) correlated with the cost of production, is also central to Gvasalia’s work. In 2016, Vetements released the following collaborations: a $720 Champion sweatshirt, an $830 Eastman Backpack, and a $360 Hanes t-shirt. The seemingly preposterous disparity between price and content suggests that the price is in fact a design element itself—no more or less integral than print or pattern. Consider, for example, the DHL t-shirt, which would be utterly unremarkable at $40, but at $240 becomes preposterous. Preposterousness, in this case, being the object’s chief quality.
The extremely limited quantities that Vetements releases—no more than ten pieces of a given style per store—are used to justify the expense. In other words, value is established through scarcity, as is typically the case with art, rather than materials, as with luxury goods. A Warhol print is expensive because it is rare; a Rolex is valuable because it is expensive to produce. Gvasalia’s work disrupts these seemingly fixed boundaries, proving that the price of a object is whatever a consumer is willing to pay.
It is perhaps significant that a designer who grew up in Soviet-Georgia, and who has stated that he wouldn’t purchase his own clothing because of the expense, [4] would come to be known precisely for setting prices so high. This practice appears to come less from an instinct toward profit maximization than an aspiration toward social commentary. Gvasalia recognizes that price and quality are often conflated in capitalist economies. From a certain perspective, his clothes might be interpreted as a playful attempt to push this false equivalence to its breaking point by selling extravagantly priced garments that are effectively indistinguishable from the cheapest and most economical options. The popularity of his designs says more about Western consumer psychology than about the man who designed them.
Gvasalia may look and act the outsider, but he studied at the prestigious Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts before stints at Margiela and Louis Vuitton. His aesthetic is best understood within the context of this background. The DHL t-shirt, for example, can also be see as a sarcastic riff on the famous monogram of his former employer. It both satirizes luxury branding and testifies to its influence. Most importantly, the DHL shirt demonstrates that symbolic meaning is elastic by transforming the banal (DHL) into the exclusive (Vetements), through a few tricks of clever marketing.
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In a curiously post-modern twist, Balenciaga’s faux-FRAKTA may only have ever existed as an image. Consider the following: the bag was available exclusively through Barneys website, it never appeared via an alternate retailer or in a physical store. At the time of writing, just four weeks after the bag was released, it is no longer available on the Barneys website. The page on which it was displayed no longer exists. A Google image search of the bag reveals countless parodies, photographs of the Ikea original, and the bag as it appeared on the Balenciaga catwalk, but not a single image of a customer, blogger, or magazine editor in possession of the bag.
Vetements regularly offers items for presale online. In a recent interview with Business of Fashion Gvasalia explained, “(Vetements) hasn’t even bought fabrics for pieces which have already sold out on the online stores.”[5] It is seems entirely plausible that an image of the prototype was posted online with the understanding that the bag could be rushed into production if necessary. Balenciaga, which produces leather goods by hand, enjoys far greater flexibility with regard to its production schedule, not to mention shorter manufacturing lead times, than a company that relies on mechanization and mass production. Conducting business online through presale affords several advantages: one can test demand, minimize the risk of overstock, and raise cash before investing in materials and labor.
That is, of course, assuming that the bag was ever intended to be purchased—itself a dubious proposition. A $240 t-shirt is an expensive ga, but a $2000 satirical handbag is likely to give pause to even the most ardent of Gvasalia's fans. No, it seems far more likely that the bag was designed not to be purchased, but instead to be talked about. It was a publicity stunt, a Macguffin of sorts, a chance to get Balenciaga’s name in the press in the hope that coverage might translate into increased sales elsewhere in the collection.
Alas, whether or not the faux-FRAKTA was manufactured is a matter of personal speculation. The hundreds of articles written about the bag, however, are undeniably and incontrovertibly real. This, more than anything, confirms that the bag itself is a great deal less important than the frenzy it created.
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Facing a marketplace in which battles are increasingly won and lost over social media, large and established brands have recently tapped young, good-looking, and well-connected upstarts for creative direction. Gvasalia’s predecessor at Balenciaga, for example, the American designer Alexander Wang, has some 3.4 million Instagram followers. Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing has an astounding 4.6 million (The designers were appointed creative director at 29 and 25, respectively). Which raises an interesting question: what does the role of creative director at a prestigious brand entail in the 2010’s? Is the creative director responsible for articulating that brand’s aesthetic vision, or is the position closer to that of brand ambassador? Is the creative director responsible for simply for existing in the public eye and promoting the brand through his/her own celebrity while the actual design is delegated to less well-known subordinates?
The majority of young creative directors—this includes Wang and Gvasalia at Balenciaga and Jonathan Anderson at Loewe—have elected to continue to manage their own brands simultaneously, raising potential conflicts of interest, not to mention the risk of overwork and a dilution of creative energy. Each of these designers was a hired gun, appointed to the top job without any prior company experience or affiliation. The pressure of balancing one’s own enterprise with the interests of a paid employer, coupled with the responsibility of adapting to the strategy and company culture of a large, multinational corporation would appear to be an almost insurmountable challenge. The high degree of turnover amongst young creative directors testifies to its difficulty.
Meanwhile, one brand has elected to pursue an alternative strategy. In 2015, Gucci promoted as creative director Alessandro Michele, a former accessories designer who worked his way up through the company over a period of nearly a dozen years. Though Michele was virtually unknown outside of Gucci prior to his appointment as creative director, the designers has recently been fêted for having revitalized the brand. Jaden Smith, Roger Federer, and Dakota Johnson have sported his embroidery-heavy designs on the red carpet. The Financial Times recently reported that Gucci posted record revenue growth of 51.4% in the first quarter of 2017.[6] Michele may be less well-known than his Instagram-famous counterparts, but anybody who has leafed through a fashion magazine in the last year will recognize the influence of his designs.
Evidence suggests that established companies are best suited by strategies that emphasize brand heritage. Perhaps the best indicator of a brand’s overall health is its performance on the resale market: currently a fifteen billion dollar business in the United States alone.[7] The resale market functions like a stock exchange for luxury goods, patterns can be harvested by studying its data. Compared with quarterly revenue figures released by the brands themselves, the resale market has the advantage of being insulated from trends and seasonal fluctuations, as well as regularized across regions. In an industry as volatile as fashion—one in which fortunes are made and lost from season to season—the resale market is relatively stable, making it ideal for observation.
Hermès and Chanel, whose designs retain up to 80 percent of their value on the resale market, are the strongest performers. The Hermès Birkin bag for example, which was designed in 1983, continues to be exceeding popular. Like jewelry or a classic car, the Birkin retains its value. The brand Vetements however, was recently singled out by Christina Binkley of the Wall Street Journal as one that typically underperforms on the resale market. This shouldn't come as a surprise. If forced to decide between between Gvasalia’s witty and ephemeral designs and the staid elegance of certain established brands, an item's potential resale value, or, at the very least, the long-term prospects of its wearability, may prove the decisive factor.
It remains to be seen whether Gvasalia’s sardonic provocations will prove a tenable, or even a sensible, strategy at Balenciaga over the long term. At an upstart like Vetements, the value of exposure outweighs the particularities of coverage: a negative article is preferable to no article, and a vehemently negative article can even be advantageous if it helps to raise awareness of the brand. At Balenciaga however, things are more complicated. The brand’s product is traded on the prestige of its reputation, thus the maintenance and preservation of this reputation outweighs any secondary considerations. It would be a mistake to assume that the same strategy could be applied with equal success at two very different companies with very different positions in the market. When the incumbent begins playing by the newcomer's rules, its position atop the marketplace comes to look increasingly tenuous.
[1] Chrisman-Campbell, Kimberly. “Is This $2000 Fake IKEA Bag a Sign of the Apocalypse?” Politico. May 3, 2017. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/03/is-this-2-000-fake-ikea-bag-a-sign-of-the-apocalypse-215097
[2] Woolf, Jake. “The $2,000 Balenciaga Ikea Bag Is Actually Awesome.” GQ. April 20, 2017. http://www.gq.com/story/the-2000-dollar-balenciaga-ikea-bag-is-actually-awesome
[3] Laneri, Raquel. “Balenciaga’s Ikea-bag Knockoff is Even Dumber than it Looks.” New York Post. April 19, 2017. http://nypost.com/2017/04/19/why-balenciagas-ikea-bag-knockoff-is-even-dumber-than-it-looks/
[4] Finnigan, Kate. “Demna Gvasalia on race, that DHL T-shirt and why he wouldn't pay for his own designs.” The Telegraph. May 18, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/people/demna-gvasalia-on-race-that-dhl-t-shirt-and-why-he-wouldnt-pay-f/
[5] Amed, Imran. “Demna Gvasalia Reveals Vetements’ Plans to Disrupt the Fashion System” Business of Fashion. February 5, 2016. https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/demna-gvasalia-reveals-vetements-plan-to-disrupt-the-fashion-system
[6] Agnew, Harriet. “Record sales at Gucci owner Kering see shares jump 11%.” Financial Times. April 26, 2017. https://www.ft.com/content/c2560660-29d7-11e7-9ec8-168383da43b7
[7] Binkley, Christina. “Ranking the Resale Value of Designer Fashion Labels.” Wall Street Journal. June 8, 2016. https://www.wsj.com/articles/ranking-the-resale-value-of-designer-fashion-labels-1465414071