In the smash-and-grab world of aesthetics in the internet age, designers Demna Gvasalia and Gosha Rubchinskiy, are totally cool with bootlegs. In fact, in April, Gvasalia basically blessed the Vetememes coat produced by 22-year-old Davil Tran in his bedroom, and both Gvasalia and Rubchinskiy collaborated with brands including Juicy Couture and Reebok for their most recent collections. Basically, everything is up for grabs.

Even the designers’ own image, it seems. They’re no doubt beside themselves, then, with the release of these T-shirts with their faces on, done out to look like the kind of item more usually found with Biggie Smalls or Tupac Shakur staring out of it on a market stall. A fanboy T-shirt for a fashion designer? Now, that shows they have really made it. With Rick Owens and Phoebe Philo enjoying the same treatment, they’re in distinguished company.

There have been fashion fan T-shirts before – see the American- football-style ones with the designer’s name and year on the back, such as Miuccia, 49. Or Henry Holland’s rhyming tees back in the New Rave days (UHU, Gareth Pugh). If those were quite in-joke, these take that to the next level.

Adding designers’ faces to the format of a bootleg hip-hop T-shirt is a new kind of hero worship – one that has all the familiar-in-a-new-context, bad-on-purpose aesthetic of a Vetements or Rubchinskiy design. They also reference a sort of clip art, entry-level Photoshop, early-days-of-the-internet nostalgia that will appeal to the twentysomething fashion kids buying them. Win win. If you see them on the catwalk for either designer come September, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.

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