Vetements, Evolving

PARIS — “Warning!!” the T-shirt read. “What you are about to witness will disturb you. Even shock you. There is a dark side of humanity the censors won’t let you see … but we will.”

That’s a Vetements promise. Shock and awe are arrows in the quiver. “View at your own risk” is the T-shirt’s final caution. But Demna Gvasalia, Vetements’ maestro, clearly hopes they look. He hopes they can’t look away.

Shock is a gambit. When it works for Vetements, it works well.

The label announced itself to the mainstream in a blast of controversial ugliness: thrift-shop style with atelier tailoring and boutique prices. It jangled the nerves of the bourgeoisie, then charged them for the privilege. They — we — paid.

The trouble is, shock needs constantly to be sharpened to remain potent. Mr. Gvasalia’s latest collection for Vetements, held Thursday among the giraffe and elephant and zebra figures at the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution in the natural history museum of Paris, had the usual elements but less bite.

It took, as its subject, the internet — “and,” Mr. Gvasalia said, “everything the internet does to us.”

He and his team dived deep, including, he said, into the recesses of the dark web, where everything from drugs to weapons are for sale.

(To judge from the model’s accouterments, what he brought back from the abyss was primarily VHS copies of the 1996 teen horror film “Scream.” He made them into clutches.)

But it was the web as mind-warp, rather than marketplace, that most impressed him.

The internet offers unprecedented opportunity for self-creation, a freedom to do, say or be whatever one wants, all under the mask of anonymity. Hence the masks and hoods that gave the show its hint of menace, one amplified by anarchy symbols and snarls.

The anonymous are free to comment, the rabble free to riot. Not for nothing did the show begin to the sound of sirens.

By the end, the hoods had morphed into full, snout-like veils that covered the wearers’ faces; beneath them, the models lit their way by punching at their iPhone screens.

The hoods created, literally, a zone of privacy that’s all but impossible in public — Mr. Gvasalia said he’d dreamed of a hood like these for the train rides between Paris, headquarters of Balenciaga, where he is the artistic director, and Zurich, where he lives and works on Vetements — as well as a wry comment on our absorption into our digital worlds.

The hoods suggested humans lost in the digital ether, devolved into blinkered, internet-powered machines. It fit the venue, Mr. Gvasalia said: The internet is the latest milestone in the evolutionary chain.

That it is, but that observation didn’t do much to move Vetements forward. The show had a cut-and-paste feeling, an online flatness where even the jolts were rote. The faux-cheapie printed T-shirts, the tablecloth florals, the tonic blasts of neon: Vetements has offered them up before.

Mr. Gvasalia has made shocking, exciting tweaks to silhouette and form over the last few years; like him or not, he has helped to evolve fashion. But the ultimate evolution of the Vetements ethos as expressed here wasn’t about the dark web or the censors. It was a hooded sweatshirt, printed with the phrase: “It’s My Birthday and All I Got Was This Overpriced Hoodie from Vetements.”