What you or I choose to wear is a small personal statement: something we say every day. However if you happen to be priveliged enough to oversee a fashion house, then you have the power to use clothes (and those wearing them) as a platform for public declaration.
Tonight’s Vetements show contained some interesting points. Happily none of them were as disingenuously firestarting as spring 2026’s opening looks. The closing appearance of Sharon Stone was possibly the punchiest, and seemed a continuation of the house’s history as a vehicle for airing Guram Gvasalia’s apparently unresolved family issues. At his opening show at Gucci in March, Demna showed a dress that seemed a pretty straight homage to the famous white Ellen Mirojnick design worn by Stone for the interview scene in Basic Instinct. So tonight Guram closed his show with Stone: boys will be boys.
The great actress wore patent thigh highs (so quite Pretty Woman) under a roomy white blazer, a black shirt, and a black tie ingeniously arranged—as all the ties in this tie-heavy show were—to be worn with the tail facing forward and the blade at the back. It was a fitting last look for a show that opened with a series of sexy executive looks that seemed extremely sleek at first glance but, on second glance, revealed themselves as slightly unhinged: jacket sleeves were rawly unfinished, and blouses tucked into skirts burst out again below the belt line.
Gvasalia seemed to be undertaking an office audit, working down the lines of seniority. We got to a butch office manager toting a belt of keyless keyclips in a “Femme” tanktop, and a young Prince Harryish type in pristine white jeans and a preppy harrington jacket and club tie who might have been a nepo intern.
Then the workspace line fell away as the show swung between butch and femme womenswear looks, which spanned finely made rough-edged black organza dresses to black tailoring, trenches, and jeans. You noticed that sometimes the male models wore the same almond-toed jeweled pumps as the females. There was a clue towards archetypes in the ‘Bundeswehr’ T-shirt, signifying government-contracted garments manufactured for the German armed forces such as the famous (and Margiela-adopted) GAT sneaker. Inside-out outerwear seemed, like the ties, to suggest that Gvasalia was intent on flipping convention.
Colored lace sheaths pressed into transparent fabric layering and some (as usual here) excellently sinister pieces of black outerwear were among the highlights that followed before Stone’s conclusive walk up and down the tunnel we were hunkered in. Vetements’s knack for turning worn enclosure into a form of disclosure continued tonight.
