Fashion in the days of Bitcoin, Onlyfans and conspiracies in Vetements' FW22 Flat-earther couture?

Again, the best thing about Vetements' latest FW22 lookbook is the show notes. A file that simulates a Wikipedia page, in which the brand's creative team ponders about «the illusive nature of wealth» in the age of bitcoin and the Internet, where anyone can become a millionaire by chance or bet, where privacy has become so poor as to be defined «today’s true luxury» while conspiracies about aliens, 5G technologies and flat earth spread like a virus. A world that can sound, depending on the point of view, futuristic or dystopian, very far from the era in which «couturiers focused on a new type of clients - industry tycoons and their families, who made money with everything from oil & real estate to butter & chocolate bars» yet strangely similar to it, with the shift that is taking place from the old to the new millionaires and therefore from an old to a new luxury.

What is certain is that, at the current state of affairs, Vetements has at least the merit of having remained the only brand to dialogue so openly with pop culture and the Internet culture: the references to 5G and Bitcoin and the slogans on flat earth are current, ironic, scratchy and make it seem for a moment that in reality there is still Demna to lead the brand's collections. In a perfect world, we should be able to talk about Vetements without necessarily mentioning Demna Gvasalia – yet it's almost like the brand wanted to force us to think about him, even if it's time to move on. A few months ago, when the collection of the secondary brand VTMNTS was released (which is not clear whether it is a diffusion line, a simple branding variant or a sub-label in its own right) we wondered if the brand still had something to say after its restructuring and the abandonment of Demna – and the truth is that,  with this collection, this uncertainty remains. It will remain until the creative team behind the brand finally takes a definite position and the narrative of Vetements manages to get out of the huge shadow of its first creative director and overcome his legacy; or until it turns out that Demna Gvasalia had never left and the whole story of his departure was just a very elaborate stunt.