Balenciaga Is in the Business of Making Memes
There are infinite ways to get people riled up on the internet, but one surefire tactic is to sell a weird thing for a ludicrous amount of money. That’s precisely what Balenciaga designer Demna Gvasalia has done with this “T-Shirt Shirt”: literally a blue check button-up sewn onto a T-shirt. The shirt takes the idea of boardroom-to-the-bar seriously to a fault, and Balenciaga even touts “two wearing options:” wearing the button-up with the tee draped across the back like a cape, or as T-shirt with the button-up in the front. That sort of unparalleled versatility will set you back a cool $1,290.
Naturally, this unnerved fellow internet users. “Balenciaga sewed a button-down shirt onto a T-shirt and people aren't having it,” wrote USA Today. “Holy shirt: Balenciaga is selling a 'T-shirt shirt' for $1,290,” The Guardian’s headline read. Fortune cut right to the chase: “Balenciaga's ’T-Shirt Shirt’ Is Breaking the Internet.”
This T-Shirt Shirt is the ready butt of any joke: it tees up anyone on the internet to create some good content out of it and Twitter users immediately obliged. There are the obvious jokes about the ridiculous price but also people just riffing: “When yer da gets divorced and can’t figure out laundry,” “Balenciaga’s Steve Bannon collection.” Others scattered phrases like “help me” and “this sh— ugly as f—” around the dour-looking model’s head. Even Michael Rappaport got involved with one of his trademark obnoxious rants.
This was a full-on internet moment that just happened to involve high fashion—bringing Balenciaga the type of fervent internet chatter (and press) largely reserved for goofiness like the RompHim or “The Dress.”
The internet wasn’t just upset that Gvasalia made a strange shirt—or at least not entirely. What really is unsettling about this shirt is that it’s not really a piece of clothing in any traditional sense—you wouldn’t just throw this on with jeans and a jacket. That’s because the T-Shirt Shirt is something else: it’s a meme.
And this isn’t an accident—it’s strategy.
Plenty of Gvasalia’s work at Balenciaga and Vetements qualifies as bizarro nonsensical design—but he only rarely hits on something that transcends the world of fashion. There’s typically no reason for someone like Rappaport, sentient “Breaking” chyron Yashar Ali (273k followers) or USA Today to engage with the fashion industry unless someone like Gvasalia can create these larger cultural moments. He’s done it successfully in the past: reworking a cheap Ikea-looking bag and putting a $2,000 price tag on it, creating a capital-F fashion pair of Crocs that retailed for over $800, or designing monstrous chunky sneakers that have defined sneaker’s biggest trend over the past year.
Memes have become a useful tool for other big-name designers and brands, too. Last year when Gucci wanted to promote its new watches it used a collection of memes. Earlier this year, the label sent models down the runway carrying their own heads—an image that quickly spread across Twitter and Instagram. Balenciaga, though, isn’t limiting its memes to runways and campaigns—it’s doing it with clothing itself. Just like the Triple S, the T-Shirt Shirt feels like a parody—a piece of clothing that would make more sense in Zoolander 3 than in Barneys. And much has been written about the way Gvasalia designs with the intention to troll the fashion industry at large and the people who wear these clothes. It’s a tactic that works only in the age of the internet, where people can find some strange sense of community in roasting a novelty shirt. The T-Shirt Shirt doesn’t even really look like a shirt—it looks like the kind of badly Photoshopped image meme-makers dream of.
Bizarrely, this is good business: Balenciaga’s CEO Cédric Charbit recently said the brand is the fastest-growing label under the umbrella of luxury conglomerate Kering (which also owns Gucci). The label is particularly hitting with meme-fluent audiences. “Millennials represent 60 percent of what we sell,” Cédric Charbit told a Financial Times reporter, according to Reuters. “Together with men, these are growing faster than any other (category).”
As the old saying goes, there’s no such thing as bad press—and a thousand memes about a shirt means a thousand sets of eyeballs on Balenciaga. Every other formerly ridiculed Balenciaga piece sold quite well, and there’s no reason to expect this shirt won’t similarly fly on shelves. And our sustained attention has wrought an act of transformation: by talking about it so much, we’ve made this T-shirt a calling card for any person trying to claim Absurdly Wealthy Fashion Person bona fides. Anyone who spends time on the internet won’t be able to see this shirt without knowing two things immediately: it’s Balenciaga and it costs almost $1,300.
Gvasalia, it seems, is keenly aware of the cultural resonance his clothes have, whether it’s sparking an internet phenomenon or maybe even taking well-placed stabs at the idea that people will buy anything so long as there’s a hot brand name attached to it. He’s pushed the limits of that idea even further with this T-Shirt Shirt. Part of the gag is on the people who unwittingly buy these clothes. But others are paying for something different, and more than a little weird: the privilege of being the butt of a fashion designer’s joke.
