Provocative Paris show exploits faux-poverty style
There are few things more relaxing on a stifling summer’s afternoon than sitting in the smog beneath the Peripherique (Paris’s M25, but uglier) waiting for a show.
Except maybe, taking the Metro to get there. What would normally have been 150 times cheaper and seven times faster than one of those chauffeur-driven limos the fashion crowd goes in for, didn’t quite pan out because there was a body on the track.
That was depressing enough. Things only improved marginally when I got there. The 20th arrondissement is not one of those dinky Parisian quartiers with red and white bistro chairs lining the boulevards, or even a gritty but gentrifying hipster area like the 18th. This bit of the 20th is hardcore, with brutal concrete high rises and a burgeoning shanty town of plastic, cardboard and corrugated housing. Jacques Tati it is not, and the loveliness of Paris’s more touristy quartiers makes their jarring contrast with the camps more shocking.
There are, apparently hundreds of makeshift, no-basic-amenities “settlements” throughout France. The police keep dismantling them and moving the largely Roma and refugee inhabitants on. It’s an unholy mess.
Demna Gvasalia, the Georgian-born creative director of Vetements (and concurrently Balenciaga), must have known what he was doing when he chose this location. Gvasalia is a provocateur with a talent for pushing buttons, even if some of his customers remain blithely insensate. He could hit buttons with a cartoon hammer and they’d think it was “fun and edgy” and pay £395 for a T-shirt bearing the DHL logo or £2,500 for a string bag.
His understanding and manipulation