Vetements, Memes, and Connectivity: Fashion Media in the Era of Instagram

This article relates the contested design collective Vetements to contemporary scholarship on digital connective mediational practices and Internet culture. Vetements has included central ingredients of contemporary Internet culture into the core of their design practice, and applied these strategically. Their design and communication practices are pervaded by Internet meme logic, heavily bringing on participation culture and connectivity. It taps into, and reflects currents in the field of art (and post-art) and go with them – not against them. Key to understanding how this design collective is part of a changing aesthetic in fashion mediation, is to inquire into their mediational activities in the light of recent research on Internet culture, with a particular focus on Internet memes. Via appropriation and ready-mades, Vetements’ positioning in the digital visual media ecology is investigated via the proposed concept of fashion memes.