I became enamoured with Vetements during my later teenage years through using Tumblr. Editorials and runway images featuring gaunt, androgynous models wearing clothing designed by Demna Gvasalia were featured amongst the heavily curated aesthetic of my Tumblr page, where I re-blogged a plethora of images ranging from paintings to 90’s I-D magazine scans to fashion editorial photoshoots. At the time, even the brand’s name, Vetements, being the French word for clothing, seemed to communicate this aesthetic of too-cool-for-you underground queerness that I remember desperately wanting to personify.

After travelling to Europe and entering my first relationship, I deleted my Tumblr blog sometime in 2015, as I grew out of mindlessly re-blogging images of clothes and aesthetics that I could never emulate, replicate or afford to purchase.

Two years after Gvasalia’s brand came onto the scene, it became noticeable that the word Vetements became the essence of the brand’s aesthetic, taking inspiration from the Logomania trend where black trench coats splashed with Vetements in bold white text signified that the wearer was trendy, had a significant disposable income, and mingled with people who were influencers around the time when the careers of online influencers started to become stratospheric.  

When I was in New York City in early 2016, I visited Dover Street Market and found myself in a Vetements pop-up store. There was a small amount of clothes that I actually liked, yet I was still obsessed with the black trench with the ‘Vetements’ logo on the back. Why did I want to purchase it that badly? The coat’s branding was accessible; communicating an aura of exclusivity and style that was a lot simpler than some of the brand’s other left-of-centre aesthetics, such as combining thigh-high leather boots with post-Soviet inspired floral apron dresses, heavily structured blazers for power-dressing perfection, and tracksuits with altered proportions.

Similar to the Vetements aesthetic, where stereotypes of elegance and class associated with high fashion are annihilated, Samuel Nugent’s paintings rework the Vetements logo painted onto images of cat-boys. Cat-boys are characters originating from anime and manga, popularised in online meme culture, cosplay and fan art. They are portrayed as slender, ultra-effeminate and androgynous characters that possess bodily characteristics of cats such as cat ears and tails. Usually donning maid costumes, the submissive nature of the cat-boy evokes polarising reactions, either lust or admiration on TikTok, Reddit or Tumblr, or disgust through the exposure of the cat-boy into the wider consciousness of Internet users or shared on ‘cringe’ Instagram meme pages.

Sam’s usage of the Vetements logo subverts feelings of repulsion upon encountering the phenomena of the cat-boy and transforms the image into an object tailored to consumer desires. The font is reminiscent of the obsession with heavy metal in the fashion world, seen in Balenciaga’s 2012 ripoff of the Iron Maiden logo, Justin Bieber’s Purpose Tour merchandise, Kanye West’s Yeezus branding, and locally, on Distal Phalanx hoodies worn as some sort of underground uniform. The constant re-use of the heavy-metal font from its birth in punk/metal branding to the aesthetics of high fashion, and rebranding in fast fashion brand design, causes the font to lose its original anti-establishment aura. The wearer, in donning a garment branded with heavy metal font, then becomes one of the masses. The use of the heavy metal aesthetic recycles the painting into an object to be purchased. The cat-boy on canvas is now sanitised into a ‘safe for work’ art object that can be hung in the home.

Sam has a penchant for using online subcultures as inspiration for their painted works, such as furries and the Twilight fandom, plucking imagery from aesthetics found online and immortalising them into artworks. The cat-boy paintings are a continuation of what Sam has explored in their art education in the last few years, where the angsty expressions seen on the faces of the cat-boys are representative of the tropes of coming of age and adolescence that Sam investigates in their creative practice. Here, the traditional ‘coming of age’ trope is undermined as the cat-boys renegotiate stereotypical markers of maturity, masculinity and gender.

The cat-boys are painted in erotic positions, where their bandaged, collared and scantily clad bodies are signifiers of sexual submission. The viewer is invited into a voyeuristic exchange between themselves and the cat-boy persona. By the simple act of looking, the viewer takes control of the sexual submissiveness of the cat-boy who is forced to take on the role of the exhibitionist. The sexual dynamics at play in these paintings, including the clothed/unclothed dynamic and the feminine/masculine dynamic common in queer bondage play emphasises the vulnerability and submission of the cat-boy. Sam has purposely accentuated these poses as an act of reclaiming the negativity surrounding the representation of the submissive sexual persona in mainstream culture. By painting these acts of submission onto canvas, Sam seizes kink and BDSM imagery of the tangible and intangible ‘hidden’ places that sexual fetishes are confined into, such as sex shops, dungeons, niche fetish websites and online chatrooms. The viewer is thus forced to confront deviant sexual behaviours within the environment of the art gallery.

The paintings function as snapshots of internet trends in a fast-moving online world. Sam’s next body of paintings may depict an entirely different subject matter. Who knows? For that, it is up to the participants in deterritorialised online communities to delve and find meaning in a moment, an aesthetic or a snapshot within the gargantuan, omniscient monster that is the Internet.