dior homme ss02 & the "bloodwound"

in

This brief essay was originally written to supplement a for-sale listing on Grailed and Facebook for a "Bloodwound" button-up shirt from Dior Homme's Spring/Summer 2002 collection. Click or tap an image to enlarge.¹

Possibly the most beloved and recognizable garment of Hedi Slimane’s career, this shirt was the centerpiece of Dior Homme’s Spring / Summer 2002 collection, “Boys Don’t Cry.” Officially produced as a white button-up only in this sleeveless version, the 'bloodwound' has been the inspiration for countless knock-offs and later designs by Dior and Hedi himself.²

Spring/Summer 2002 begins the Dior Homme narrative from which elongated skinny jeans, embellished military garb, and high-heeled boots follow. Bridging the gap from Slimane's early work at Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, SS02 builds upon and perfects Hedi’s reimagining of men’s formalwear. Suiting has always been the essence of all things Hedi; his blazers pioneered the slim-shouldered, high armhole cut that is ubiquitous today. Spring ’02 presents Hedi’s immaculate new approach to menswear tailoring in its most distilled form. Unlike the more complex and evolved Dior Homme collections that would follow, the season focuses on this now canonized suit silhouette, showcasing it in full glory, look after look, with bright white light beaming onto the runway. Arguably the tightest Hedi collection in focus, SS02 employs a strict color palette and doesn’t attempt any form of streetwear, allowing for only one peculiar design motif: the bloodwound.

With the bloodwound motif, repeated across many of the runway looks, Hedi cues the greater significance of his style and design. Suddenly the tight shoulders, lanky models, and perfectly messed hairstyles all make sense. SS02’s models wear a bleeding heart, one rendered with complexity and all but hidden by the conventions of formalwear. Hedi is clothing the young, emotional male, the slender figure fashion has always tried to mask or ignore. Gone is the traditional style of padding shoulders and aggrandizing masculinity; for the first time on the runway, the skinny punk boy’s form is being celebrated. "Boys Don’t Cry” tears down the conventional image of a strong, powerful, broad-shouldered man and invokes the beauty in male vulnerably.

The design itself was, like much of Hedi’s work, inspired by punk music. The blood wound concept can be traced to a photo of punk band Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers, which depicts the bandmembers in white button-up shirts with blood stains over their hearts. Slimane’s Dior adaptation was exhibited alongside the photo in the Metropolitan Museum’s successful spring 2013 exhibition “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” which doubled as 2013’s Met Gala theme.³

In order to create the iconic blood stain embroidery, Dior employed Maison Lesage, a french atelier which has specialized in couture embroidery for almost 100 years. Using almost exactly the same methods as when the house was founded in 1924, Lesage artisans stitch all designs by hand. Lesage’s employees are trained for five to ten years before joining the workshop’s team of master embroiderers.⁴ Generally reserved for grand runway dresses for houses such as Chanel and Dior, Lesage embroidery is rare on a production piece.

Production numbers for this shirt were obviously very, very low, and Hedi Slimane fans have been creating knock-offs since the shirt’s release over a decade ago. A quick google search reveals almost entirely photos of replicas - few know that the blood wound was done on a military-style cotton thicker than standard Dior shirts, with a narrow, rigid collar intended to be paired with SS02’s signature skinny black ties. The white button-up version was never made with sleeves.²

This authentic example is in very good condition... the essay goes on into description of my particular example listed up for sale.

The shirt sold within minutes of posting.

¹ Unfortunately, due to copyright battles, the full SS02 runway show is no longer easily accessible online, but you can view additional stills of the shirt here .

² Exactly how many variations of the bloodwound exist is heavily contested. Collectors who purchased from the Dior flagship in 2002 have told me that only the white sleeveless and black long/three-quarter sleeve versions of the red embroidered button-up were available for purchase at retail. These are the only versions I have seen, in photos or in person. But since writing this, other collectors have come to me claiming there were many variations available, and that a white button-up with sleeves - the silhouette most common with replicas and fakes, not shown on the runway - was indeed made by Dior in extremely small numbers. This may be true, but I am yet to see even a photo of an authentic example; all matching these characteristics in Google searches and across marketplaces and Pinterest are clearly fake.

³ Click here to view the blood wound in the New York Times slideshow from the exhibit Punk: Chaos to Couture.

⁴ Click here to see inside Lesage, courtesy of The Business of Fashion.

my take on Raf Simons' Spring 2018 Menswear show

in

Originally published as a comment response in facebook group The Archive. Click here to view the full collection.

Here are my thoughts. I don’t love this collection but I think there’s certainly a lot to discuss.

I see the collection as mockery, satire of both contemporary men’s fashion and the obsession with and influence of his archive collections on the relatively ignorant audience that parades (and arguably appropriates) his work today. The constants of the collection - the headwear, umbrellas, and boots - all come across as crude figments of futurism, recalling dated attempts at designing the future and referencing sci-fi films like Blade Runner with use of translucent plastic, neon, patent leather, etc. To me, those are signifiers of the obsession with the ‘next big thing,’ which is what Raf’s archives are right now; he penned those ‘futuristic’ designs over a decade ago, to relatively little acclaim, but now they are all the rage. And I believe that with this collection, Raf is highlighting the carelessness and eagerness with which others are citing and borrowing from them as both consumers of fashion and as producers.

One of the most obvious signs of this is Look 17: to me, an obvious play on the appropriation and degradation of the original meaning and context of the Peter Saville cover art, perhaps Raf’s best known motifs. The Unknown Pleasures cover is placed on [from what I can tell is] a blank black tee, and literally ripped in half to make way for the next seemingly copy-pasted image: New Order's Power, Corruption & Lies cover, placed in exactly the same in position and of the exact same size, devoid of any sensitivity towards its context and use. Here, i think Raf went with all black (one of the simplest looks in the collection in terms of color scheme) to ensure focus on the images. Anyone at all versed in fashion will roll their eyes at the laziness in design of simply plastering once meaningful art onto a blank and surrounding it in black. Hard to say whether he's criticizing his own work or calling out imitators, but I think there’s an argument for both. Adding to this effect (still on Look 17), there is almost no silhouette here, no nuance, just those images taking center stage in a way that so clearly screams thoughtlessness of design.

Look 5 echoes this sentiment - the murky black graphic is printed onto an overly large, strangely sized purple blank, and attached to an otherwise unassuming (just a bit oversized) white coat with practically bungee cords. Again, the image is plastered front-and-center on the garment - it's a typical, dark Raf-ian image, but placed seemingly out of context on a bright white coat with the pink headwear and a pink plastic umbrella. To me he's implying appropriation of the image, he's trying to show laziness - perhaps he's pointing out the contextual shortcomings of the contemporary fashion world against his beloved archive collections.

One more, what the hell - Look 11. I’m just working off of the Vogue runway shots so I can’t see every angle (and I haven’t read up on the origins of everything or what everyone else is saying yet), but the first thing that struck me was that the sweater’s design looks almost like a Sterling Ruby painting, and of course is oversized and drapey to the point where it's falling off. This reveals a minimal, crudely cut top in white underneath, and a sort of pink scarf poking out at the waist… I think there are a lot of ways to think about this look, and combined with the crazy bottom half, it’s one of the more thematically interesting of the collection. The trousers are cut amateurishly, cropped to a point of absurdity, mismatched and misshapen, as if the whole bottom half could’ve been sleek all-black but with tailoring gone horribly wrong. Perhaps he's making a point highlighting how ridiculously out of place his usual clichés look across the collection, capitalizing on the point with the umbrellas and stupid looking headgear across each look.

Although I don’t hate it - I think I’m too much of a Raf fan to ever really hate his work - this collection does disappoint me, just as the last several have, visually as well as thematically. As someone who (like many) first learned of Raf by falling in love with individual garments, it’s disappointing to see him go off on all these weird tangents of the last couple seasons, like mega sized sweaters, giant puffy coats, and now big ‘futuristic’ raincoats. Raf is no [Alexander] McQueen - when I look at his collections, I can’t help but also think beyond the runway. Part of what made all those archive shows so damn cool was that they were not only ingenious visually and thematically, they really made you want the clothes to own and wear. But even if you look past that, don’t you get tired of all this referencing of his archives as of late? And however you choose to view it, self-criticism or recognition of imitators, I think the “To the archives, no longer relevant” attitude that we’ve seen the past couple years seems disappointing and stale in comparison to Raf’s much more captivating older work. So no, I don’t believe Raf has fallen off and is completely out of ideas, but to me this season did leave plenty to be desired.

my thoughts on Vetements

in

The following is excerpted from an unpublished conversation on fashion forum KanyeToThe, following the announcement of the first Vetements collection designed specifically for men.

I think it's easiest to split this into two perspectives: my point of view as a consumer of fashion, deciding whether or not I'd wear the brand, and my point of view as a critic, looking at the brand from an objective stance.

From a consumer's perspective, I don't like Vetements because I don't see any beauty or nuance in their wares. The design as a whole seems random and really is the definition of that lovely phrase we all use to death - "fashion victim." I don't really like anything they make, other than some of their deconstructed and reassembled garments, such as this panel hoodie or some of the more elegant displaced-pocket jeans. Both are quite feminine, though, and although most seem to have pushed past the fact that this was for a while an exclusively women's brand, I think it being a women's brand is an important signifier of its truly high fashion aspirations. A $1000 oversized hoodie means something very different in the women's section of Barneys than it does in the men's. And that's not sexism, just a recognition that women's fashion is objectively further along than men's and the tier that Vetements participates in, pricewise, is noticeably less gritty and streetwear-inclined than the corresponding men's bracket. When women spend that kind of money on fashion, chances are it's going to something more elegant than what the average "fashion-forward" male might buy - a pair of sneakers, perhaps, or some jeans. Maybe that's an oversimplification, but as a whole, oversized, uber-casual clothing sticks out more in elite womenswear than in men's. So Vetements, if you'll looking at it from womenswear perspective, seems more surprising, bold, and even perhaps conceptually interesting (more on that later).

But yes, I know, Vetements now has a men's collection as well. To me, it's much much much much worse than the womenswear ever was. It doesn't look like high fashion at all, really; it looks like cheap streetwear, poorly designed at that. Again solidifying my lack of interest in ever purchasing the clothes.

So then why is Vetements so popular, then, specifically with the male population? I will cite the "fashion victim" cause here, but let me go into more detail. The fact that Vetements started out as women's only is a large part of why it took off so well with men. It takes audacity for a man to wear women's clothes; I see people on less progressive online forums all the time losing interest in something as soon as they hear the intended gender. Even when it's something inherently androgynous, like a pair of jeans or a shirt, if it was designed with a woman in mind a lot of men will turn the other way and even begin to criticize. But high fashion today, the next big thing for the world's hungry, pop-culture-addicted youth population, is all about being a little bit risqué. If you could tell rappers in 2005 that the cool thing to do in ten years will be to wear heeled boots and skinny jeans they'd most certainly laugh at you. But being edgy is the new normal, and doing what the previous generation would gasp at is the true mission for all the wealthy kids out there with a bit too much spending money gobbling up "grails" online and flaunting them on forums and social media. Wearing women's clothing, the thing I just said most men shy away from at all costs, just adds to the draw of Vetements on today's youth. It's another step of edgy, and the fact that Vetements is women's yet men are wearing it might suggest that damn, this must really be some next level shit right?

(I don't mean to overstate the womenswear point, just felt like it needs some explaining. I think it's just one factor of why the brand has taken off)

That last sentence leads me into the other, and quite possibly biggest factor of their success, something I explained in a thread a little while ago:

More than anything, I think people just want to say they were a part of the next big thing in fashion. Right now there's a whole generation of kids taking a new interest in fashion who are learning about the legacies designers like Raf Simons have left behind, and looking at how coveted those garments are now, wishing they could've been there when archive parkas and patched hoodies were sitting in Barneys. But the problem is I don't think they totally know why such figures are iconic, or care to educate themselves of the history beyond just the name and the most expensive piece they can find on Grailed or in a music video - they just cling to the popularity, the "hype" (since we're all so fond of that word).

So Vetements comes along and, for a while, has just enough popularity that an explosion seems certain but it's still not yet mainstream. To clarify: Kanye [West] wore this brand quite some time ago, and for a short while only the really dedicated, troyd247¹ type fans knew about it (within the casual young "fashion kid" demographic). But more and more people latched on, because it seemed like something unique and recognizable. But not just that - it has a definite feel of self-importance. The graphics are very abstract and the silhouettes are strange enough that it can't be just an "aesthetic".

So basically this: it makes people feel like they're grabbing a hold of something revolutionary, something very high-brow. Surely those strange silhouettes must mean something! I think people want to be able to say to doubters: "well you just don't understand it" in the way they might with a Raf piece, but now they can feel like they're ahead of the curve as well.


Vetements collections are comprised of loud garments, bold "statement items" that to a relatively fashion-ignorant mind are easier to justify the price of than something more minimal. If you look at what kids are really attracted to on Grailed, it's the crazy stuff, the totally-out-there, virtually-unwearable 'pieces' that people really want. Raf parkas, Lang astro bikers, Rick Owens geobaskets, CCP drip sneakers, ozweegos, those Dior Homme metal derby shoes... Hell the only piece most young consumers could probably associate with Dolce & Gabbanna is the parachute bomber, which is a total outlier in terms of what that label actually signifies as a whole. Now there's nothing wrong with liking the wild stuff, just that the contemporary obsession with statement pieces very clearly shows the current demographic of men's fashion. People want the easy way out, and aren't thinking longterm, they want something COOL to wear NOW, even if that means wearing your $1,200 archive raf sweater or geobaskets with H&M jeans and a hanes tee because you couldn't afford, take the time, or commit to actually building a wardrobe first. These statement pieces are also often the easiest to flip when the next thing comes along. But if you dig into the collections most of these archive "grails" flock from, the collections themselves seem almost lackluster in comparison. Not everything is a loud jacket or extreme shoe silhouette, because that's not how fashionable people dress day to day. But kids aren't thinking day-to-day, they're buying to have something that they can post or flex, not to improve the way they actually dress. Up until a few years ago, one of the things Helmut Lang was most known for was his jeans, whose slim/straight cut was just impeccable, a true achievement of nuanced design. But nuance is hard to see if you're just getting into fashion, so this new demographic is flocking towards the items that are loud and can be appreciated (somewhat) without having to squint for details or actually use your head to think about the meaning of the item. Ironically, a lot of the most 'hyped' archive designers these days were originally accredited with being champions of intent, hosting thought-provoking collections with ingenuity that almost put the physicality second. But the average customer in fashion's now bloated fanbase can't be bothered with watching or scrolling through 40+ outfit collections or reading press releases or reviews when that time could be spent in the more easily digestible world of quick, one sentence postings and photo-laden links to listings of items with bright colors, crazy silhouettes, and high prices.

(I put 'pieces' in quotation marks because the influx of use of this word even further proves my point. Everything is a 'piece' now, something that people buy as the focal point of their outfit or wardrobe. Arguably the current trend in menswear is minimalism, but really it's just being minimal everywhere outside of the one item that sucked up your savings account, whether that be a sweater, destroyed jeans, or a pair of sneakers or boots, etc etc. This is especially apparent with Saint Laurent's current demographic, in which the dreaded "SLP aesthetic" has become, for the most part, spending a lot of money on boots and maybe skinny jeans then filling in the rest of your fit with whatever unobtrusive generic slim fitting shirt or even tee you can find. If you look at Hedi Slimane's runway collections, you'll see that is far from his true "aesthetic", which is quite maximalist, full of loud prints and scarves and bright, complex outerwear.)


So now the flipside. From my snobby (yes) educated (not actually) elitist (probably) perspective. I don't like Vetements because the brand, conceptually, (and sometimes quite literally) is not original. The Margiela resemblance is vast and unforgivable. Once you see it, it cannot be unseen. Being a huge Margiela fan (he very well may be the greatest fashion designer of all time, you're welcome to argue), I started looking into Vetements and becoming familiar with it, as I figured that I'd have to be in order to fairly bash it on a forum. Margiela is everywhere. First of all, no matter what Demna or your fellow KTT poster tells you, there is concept in Vetements. Just like with music, there is always something, however small, going on behind the physical (or in music's case, aural) existence of the collection. Vetements quite clearly shows certain motifs throughout its collections, themes of deconstructionism and being antifashion are undoubtedly there. I personally see a lot of Raf resemblance in Demna's work as well, although I think it's more visual resemblance than conceptual, which I think helps gravitate this new generation of wide-eyed fashion kids towards it.

I've mentioned before that I believe in divorcing designer personality and clientele from the clothing when discussing a brand, and I'll continue to do so here. But Demna Gvasalia certainly isn't doing the brand's likability any favors in my opinion. That said, I am curious to follow his work with Balenciaga, as that's an extremely serious position that I was shocked to hear him appointed to. It is that position that has, several times, made me take a second look back at Vetements and see if I'm simply missing something, but I have found no reason to like the brand to date and have only uncovered more distaste with its practices.

 

¹ Troyd247 was an Instagram and internet forum poster known for exactly replicating outfits worn by Kanye West and posting photos of them side-by-side next to the originals. His Instagram page later became a marketplace for selling popular celebrity-worn fashion garments.