“Really, they should name a street after Demna Gvasalia,” a friend says over coffee on a cold November morning in Tbilisi, “because of how much attention his work has brought to the country’s fashion industry and contemporary culture.” Indeed, the rapid rise of Georgian-born Demna Gvasalia, from founder of the marginal French label Vetements to ultimate fashion royalty as creative director of Balenciaga, has put a bright spotlight on Georgia. Despite the fact that Gvasalia moved out of the country in early childhood, it quickly became the search field for the key to his outsider vision. Yet it’s not the first time Georgia has become an unlikely sensation in the eyes of the global fashion community — it also happened in 1989 during a visit by Comme des Garçons’s Rei Kawakubo.
Source: http://calvertjournal.com/features/show/7166/tbilisi-special-report-fashion-designers-georgia-demna-gvasalia