Hype vs heritage: can Vetements- the label which brought us £900 jeans- ever hope for a permanent place in our wardrobes?

Demna Gvasalia and his brother, Gurum, launched their label, Vetements, back in 2014. The house’s subversive, streetwear-inspired collections immediately captured both the fashion zeitgeist, and the imagination of a generation of followers. Amongst its offerings were the now legendary £185 DHL t-shirt, £900 reworked vintage jeans and cigarette-lighter heeled sock boots- demand was stratospheric and Vetements rapidly achieved cult status. 

Snapped up by stockists, from Net-a-Porter to Nordstrom, and photographed on the back of a plethora of street style stars, by mid-2015 the label’s popularity had reached fever pitch- queues snaked down streets when new drops landed and pieces sold out online within hours of becoming available. When the label teamed up with Matchesfashion.com to host a garage sale in Seoul in 2016, fans lined up from 5am to get their hands on one of the 2500 items up for grabs. 

Then, last week, fashion website Highsnobiety declared Vetements to be ‘over’, citing a ‘sharp decline in street style sightings’ and general whisperings amongst ‘anonymous’ on-the-pulse buyers. One London department store has also quietly stopped buying the label which swiftly responded with an Instagram statement (the only way to communicate with an engaged millennial audience) deploring ‘fake news’ and declaring the brand to be ‘the strongest it has ever been’; several named buyers leapt to the brand’s defence.

The incident puts a spotlight on a wider fashion conversation, around the role of ‘hype’ and whether labels can ever convert a wave of popularity into long-term, established brand success? Too easily a label’s trajectory can lead from niche, to cult, to ubiquitous, to nowhere in barely the space of a few seasons. Over-exposure (and over-expansion) sending a label to the doldrums before it has time to establish itself.  

Over-exposure is something that Vetements has been at pains to avoid. The label offers its buyers maximums, rather than minimums, rigorously controlling the distribution of its collections. Demna has often discussed the importance of scarcity to luxury brands, so collections are designed and produced on the premise that once a design is sold out, there will be no reorders, building in rarity. It is a principle that other cult brands, like New York-based Supreme and London brand Palace have built their business around. Both labels regularly deliver limited edition drops which draw queues around the block.

For Vetements, an awareness of the fate of over-ordering collections is another reason to control production - in February a window installation at London’s Harvey Nichols saw the label shine a light on both brands’ and consumers’ sustainable responsibilities via a clothing dump.

The role of social media in establishing (and measuring) hype around a brand is undeniable in today’s world. The cult of the influencer, and the power of digital marketing has the power to make or break a brand or collection. The global buzz around Vetements’ collections has seen the label amass 2.7 million Instagram followers since launch. Supreme’s followers are 9.9 million and counting, Palace, 1.2 million, while Off White, another ‘hype’ brand has 3.2 million.

But managing an audience is a careful tightrope to walk - becoming too available on social media can have the same effect as over-producing. Kanye West’s Yeezy is a case in point. The brand itself doesn’t have a dedicated Instagram, with the musical icon instead choosing to manage its exposure via influencers, including West's wife Kim Kardashian who modelled pieces from the season 6 collection in fake paparazzi images which promptly went viral . It’s a strategy that works - to date the Yeezy hashtag has more than 8.2 million posts. The relative newness of social channels as a marketing platform means the real long-term value of an engaged social audience to a brand is difficult to measure.

One key difference, however, between Vetements vs Supreme and Palace, is the demographic of their followers. The latter two labels are rooted in skate culture, and have quietly established a loyal following over a decade, or two, in Supreme’s case, before the fashion crowd caught on. And while many followers may still see Vetements perspective as fresh and dynamic, ultimately the label is at the mercy of a primarily fashion, and notoriously fickle audience with little heritage to fall back on.

There’s no doubt the Demna Gvasalia has a knack for judging the mood of a moment, and delivering pieces which answer that mood. His collections for Balenciaga, the Parisian house established in 1919 for which he is creative director, have generated a similar level of buzz to his Vetements collections (the Highsnobiety article noted that the rise of Balenciaga has mirrored the decline of Demna’s own label as he delivers his ‘most original’ ideas to the French house).

It’s not the first time a fresh eye has breathed life into an established label - the popularity of Gucci’s collections since Alessandro Michele was made creative director in January 2015, shows no signs of abating. Alongside the runway collections, which are swift to sell out, the label’s core product- a line-up of logoed bags which in the early noughties would have been termed ‘it’, horsebit loafers, myriad GG-buckle belts and a line-up of t-shirts and swimwear sell out as fast as they can arrive in store, currently keep the label at the forefront of the fashion set’s wishlist.

Crucially, Gucci isn't leaning on a single mercurial demographic for its booming sales (a 49% uptick in the third quarter of 2017, for example) but has pieces which appeal to teenagers, 70-somethings and everyone in-between alike. 

Over the last few years, other labels have achieved moments of ‘hype’ to varying degrees, via product - Givenchy’s rottweiler sweatshirts, Fendi’s furry monsters - or an exciting creative director- Hedi Slimane at Saint Laurent, Olivier Rousteing at Balmain. Each time the brand rides the buzz wave, sees it taper off, and returns the next season with a new point of view. The difference, perhaps, with these particular labels, is the history.

How much the popularity of certain of the moment labels, collections, or styles, is down to a current trend for ‘logo’ remains to be seen. Fashion is cyclical, trends change, hype comes and go, the most successful labels know their brand, their point of view, and their customer, inside out.