From Punkish Spikes To Old Hollywood Waves, The Vetements Runway Was Full Of Next-Level Hair Statements

On Thursday in Paris, Guram Gvasalia staged his first physical show for Vetements and made good use of that palpable IRL runway energy. After obscuring faces completely with masks to anonymous effect last season, his Spring 2023 ready-to-wear presentation served up a cast of exaggerated characters of all ages; ones whose looks wouldn’t be complete without idiosyncratic statement hair.

In the days leading up to the show, Gvasalia and the show’s duo of hairstylists, Pablo Kuemin and Jody Taylor (the former leading women’s and the latter men’s), met with each one of the models individually to discuss what their hair look would be. As a group, they drew inspiration from Gvasalia’s childhood memories, delving into sundry sources including the British punk scene, old Hollywood movie stars, and ’90s street style. 

As Gvasalia told Vogue: “This collection is about my life, it’s about my childhood, and my first acquaintance with fashion. It tells you every single story.” This resulted in directional hairstyles that ran the gamut from gravity-defying liberty spikes to neon-bright buzz cuts to cascades of retro waves — one set worn by Ireland Baldwin in a nod to Gvasalia “falling in love” with her mother, Kim Basinger, in 1990.

“Guram makes me a better hairdresser because he pushes me to always go a bit further,” says Kuemin, who arrived at the pre-show fitting with 200 different HV wigs in tow and pulled out all the stops for the extreme spiked styles, mixing together sugar water and beer (“It smelled like a candy house and an old English pub,” he jokes) for an old-school setting base subsequently cemented with blasts of Virtue Style Guard hairspray. “With some looks, it’s pushed, like absolutely insane, others it’s stripped back,” says Taylor, who tapped into the show’s subversive youthfulness with a mix of punkish undercuts and gleaming “futuristic gamer” crops, some totally self-styled. “We wanted them to be antifashion,” Taylor says of the overarching attitude of the hair looks. “It was completely and utterly, ‘This is me.’”

It’s true that the Vetements show has always been fertile ground for extremes, but what do Gvasalia’s collaborators love most? “You still never know what to expect,” Taylor says.