Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant of Coperni Femme debuted their new vision for the label earlier this year: stylish, simple, futuristic.
According to Robbie Sinclair, womenswear editor at WGSN, this new collective of creative talent reflects a seismic shift occurring within the industry. “The choice of young, avant-garde designers makes a bold statement and shows huge progression with the fashion industry in terms of experimentation,” he says. For heritage brands fighting to prove their relevance in a digitalized, youth-obsessed world, fear of the unknown has been replaced with fervor to find out what’s next. Take Demna Gvasalia. The Georgian designer quickly built a formidable reputation with his progressive label Vetements, a design collective that looks to urban culture to craft modern clothes. Launched in 2014, the label quickly caught the attention of the fashion industry and was shortlisted for LVMH’s Fashion Designer Prize just a year later. By the time Kanye West and Rihanna were spotted in Vetements’ signature oversized hoodie, it was official: Gvasalia had arrived.
“I am confident that [Gvasalia] will succeed in embracing Balenciaga’s core values and developing them in harmony with today’s global changes,” stated Isabelle Guichot, president and CEO of Balenciaga as she announced Gvasalia as artistic director in October 2015. Sinclair echoes her enthusiasm. “I’m most excited to see what Demna Gvasalia does for Balenciaga,” he says. “The aesthetic of Vetements combined with the ideals of Balenciaga are a match made in heaven, and reach out to a different kind of audience without alienating Balenciaga’s existing fans.”
“If you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’ll continue to get what you’ve always gotten,” warns an old saying. In recent years, the world’s most illustrious fashion houses have heeded that advice, appointing a slew of creative directors that challenge the status quo with their youth and their avant-garde ideas.
In 2013, Spanish label Loewe (founded in 1846) established London fashion darling JW Anderson at its helm, a gamble echoed two years later when Balenciaga announced Demna Gvasalia as Alexander Wang’s replacement. Over at Hermès, virtual unknown Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski was welcomed as creative director in 2014. Last summer in New York, following Donna Karan’s shock departure from her eponymous label, Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne of Public School, a civic-minded label producing all its output in NYC’s garment district, took over at DKNY. 2015 also saw a virtual unknown, Alessandro Michele, appointed creative director at Gucci, whose urban set-inspiration for the fall women’s collection that year came from the striking, red painted corridor in the Oscar-winning movie Birdman, a far cry from the controlled understatement of his predecessor Frida Giannini. And at Courrèges, where late founder and modernist André made waves back in the 60s with his clean shapes, boxy jackets and mod-minis, French design duo
Loewe walks a similar tightrope with JW Anderson. Lauded as the most exciting designer of his generation, the British designer’s eponymous label has sent one provocative design after the next down the catwalk since its inception in 2008. As a child of the ‘90s, Anderson believes it is essential for his contemporaries to exert influence in the fashion industry if it is to remain relevant. “We need new viewpoints,” he said in an interview with i-D. “The world has changed. The way people communicate has changed. Fashion is about communication, and the next generation who are about
© Loewe, Mark Abrahams
128
JW Anderson