While the fashion world has been preoccupied for the past few years with numerous stalls and shifts pertaining to designer leadership (Let’s skip listing them all, shall we?), the rest of the world and, yeah, the fashion industry, too, have been taken by one designer and brand in particular: Demna Gvasalia of Vetements. Never heard of Vetements? That’s okay. A few years ago, neither had we. That’s because it didn’t exist. But if you thought Kanye’s takeover of Madison Square Garden was enough to turn this fairly placid industry on its head, that’s nothing compared to the waves Gvasalia and his largely anonymous design collective have been making in recent seasons. The designer and brand are polarizing, and many critics within the industry harbor opposing opinions of the Vetements vision or its viability as a brand. One critical camp believes that a hoodie — the Vetements signature — is just a hoodie, and that charging $1,000 or more for it is an atrocity. The other camp begs to differ; they see that hoodie, as well as Gvasalia himself, as nothing short of visionary.John Galliano and Alexander McQueen appeared during a time when the fashion industry was snoozing amid widespread, seismic changes to youth culture (with the anti-establishment, overmedicated, and underwhelmed generation of grunge Gen-Xers). For similar reasons, Gvasalia is important today because what he has to say about who we are as people is different from other designers. Those who buy Vetements are the gender-fluid urban youth who don’t differentiate between “men’s” fashion and “women’s” fashion, much less highbrow and lowbrow. It’s a movement that assumes that the established rules are for the past generations, and Gvasalia has made it clear that he doesn’t intend to follow them.But Gvasalia is as important for what his intentions aren’t as much as for what they are. Amid the praise for his first three collections, there were many people (including us ) who criticized his all-white runway casting, pointing to the hypocrisy that the collection was inspired by the poor, urban youth of color he saw frequenting a thrift chain in Paris. His last collection was presented during a winter stained with race-related violence and religion-affiliated acts of terror around the world, and police shootings that highlighted the structural and unconscious racism in America. It had become clearer than ever that “colorblindness” was a false bandage to pretend generations of racial inequality didn’t have lasting impact, and that politics, commerce, and art — when they are good — are one and the same. And it seems that after the think pieces and hot takes, Gvasalia has himself adapted; he retooled his casting strategy during his spring ‘17 collection in July and featured a much more diverse lineup. As a contrast, it’s hard to imagine a member of the old guard, like Rei Kawakubo or Anne Demeulemeester, who’s been similarly criticized about white-washing respond in the same way, and that’s evidence that Gvasalia is something we haven’t seen before.But no matter what you think, Vetements is the most talked-about brand among a fanbase consisting of communities as diverse as Snapchat-wielding Generation Z teens, nostalgia-obsessed millennials, and cash-rich blue bloods around the world. It’s a brand worn by celebrities as diverse as Kanye West and Celine Dion. It’s hard to put a finger on the reason for its mass appeal, especially considering that the hallmarks of the brand so far — the DHL logo, a Titanic hoodie, deconstructed jeans — seem as high-fashion as a strip mall. But as Gvasalia told us, it might have something to do with the market gap the brand has filled.I met up with the Georgian-born designer to discuss his new industry-breaking collection, what tickles his creatives senses on a daily basis, what exactly he’s selling, and perhaps most importantly, why people are so hungry to buy it.