(Ap)Praising Vetements: the Celebrity Digital Surface and the Making of a Leading Fashion Brand

Abstract

In this paper, I situate the meteoric rise of the Parisian fashion collective Vetements within the paratextual circulation of celebrity images that have accompanied the press, media, and publicity coverage for this brand. I argue that “selling out” is a pithy turn-of-phrase that is useful for understanding Vetements’ aesethetic and business sensibilities. As the literalness of the translation of Vetements into “clothes” makes clear, Vetements strips the wide-eyed lure of luxury fashion –one that evokes both the extravagancy of the runway or red carpet and the expert craftsmanship of couture—and replaces it with a form of what I am calling spectacular mundanity, offering products that are simultaneously more and less real than your mother’s weathered, vintage Champion hoodie. The brand’s exchange value, I argue, is made extravagant not through any notion of intrinsic worth, as is the case with couture and the logics of congealed labor and expert craft held therein, but rather through the symbolic surplus value generated through the brand’s proximity to celebrity culture and its discursively constructed status as an “it brand”.