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Remember when courier chic announced its arrival on the fashion scene?
That was a full two years ago. Street style starlets and industry insiders at the time frothed over the Vetements T-shirt emblazoned with the DHL logo, while the rest of us fretted whether we could ever justify the almost $340 price tag.
Margaret Zhang at Paris Fashion Week in the original Vetements DHL tee Credit: Getty Images
And while Vetements, the design collective headed by Demna Gvasalia (also the creative director of the post-Ghesquière, post-Wang era Balenciaga) has since even more firmly entrenched itself in the fashion landscape – not just as a brand, but as an arbiter of fashion’s cultural zeitgeist – courier chic did not endure beyond its first 15 minutes.
That may all be about to change however. Gvasalia has worked his magic reappropriating the banal into the covetable, the conventional into the delightful and the prosaic into something subversive yet again. In this iteration, his discerning eye has been cast not only on garments existing in the world at-large, but also on pieces in Vetements’ collections gone by.
Vetements Mens SS18 Credit: Demna Gvasalia
The latest collection revisits the hero (and arguably, only) piece of the courier chic movement. The branding of DHL is reimagined into a striking yellow anorak, and the bread and butter of the logistics company, parcels, becomes a black colour-blocked panel that breaks up the expansive yellow of the jacket. The destination label, purely functional on packages, takes on a decorative edge and serves as Vetements’ own branding – just in case members of the public confuse the well-heeled for a well-dressed courier.
And to really complete the are they or aren’t they aesthetic of dubiousness, DHL-yellow caps printed with the three bold letters in red feature in this collection too. But don’t worry, the embroidered Vetements logo at the edge of the visor is a dead giveaway. You’re not the courier – you’re just courier chic.
