With No Twist: The Metamodern Sartorial Statement of Vetements

The sartorial expressions of the second decade of the new millennium have been marked by the unprecedented presence of familiar, functional, everyday garments — e.g. t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, and trackpants — that became ubiquitous not only on the streets, but on catwalks and in expensive retail outlets. Observing the proliferation of this type of clothing into high fashion and recognizing the transformation of this ordinary wardrobe into an active participant in the cultural and social discourse, this chapter analyses the changing politics of sartorial signification as a result of the emergence of the new cultural paradigm that comes to replace the waning postmodern state (Morgado 2014). I argue that the rise of the familiar, the ordinary, and the mundane in clothing in the beginning of the 21st century, is a manifestation of a new sensibility shaped by a variety of trends across the cultural, socio-economic, and political spectrum. In this chapter, I focus on the work of the young French high-fashion brand Vetements as exemplary of this shift. The brand is known for openly denouncing the principles fashion has been predicated on— the new and spectacular, instead promoting an approach that is grounded in the investigation and reinterpretation of the ordinary staples of the Western everyday wardrobe posing a challenge to the definition of fashion, and reconsidering its meaning and value.