https://www.vogue.com/article/vejas-kruszewski-pihakapi-fall-2018-preview
https://www.vogue.com/article/vejas-kruszewski-lvmh-prize-winner
When the eight finalists of this year’s prestigious LVMH Prize were revealed in March, the name Vejas Kruszewski was little-known — even within fashion-industry circles. That’s about to change.
Kruszewski, the youngest ever LVMH Prize finalist, is a 19-year-old, self-taught fashion wunderkind. His fledgling label, Vejas, is less than two years old, but has already attracted retailers from Melbourne to Mexico City. Loosely unisex, the eminently wearable line upends classic streetwear staples with dynamic proportions and lush materials. Simply put: You’ll want to wear spring’s paneled sweatshirts, ribbed flight jeans, and grommet T-shirts immediately, and they’ll never really go out of style. Even though the small-batch designs are handmade in Toronto with deluxe fabrications, several styles still retail for less than $300.
Remarkably, Kruszewski launched his namesake label fresh out of high school and without any formal training. Instead of a pricey degree from Parsons or Central Saint Martins, the enterprising Montreal native learned to make clothes by reading Japanese lifestyle magazines with foldout patterns, inspecting and deconstructing Céline and Miu Miu sale finds, and working at a local cut-and-sew manufacturing business for one summer. “It’s mostly just been trial and error,” he admits when we meet at a coffee shop in Toronto near his studio. “There’s a lot of things, technically, that I have to continuously teach myself…but the advantage [of being self-taught] is that you can approach things from a different [perspective], rather than being shown how to do it a specific way.”
An independently minded risk-taker, Kruszewski moved to Toronto in 2014 and was willing to stay with relatives and crash in a friend’s hallway until he could afford his own apartment in the city, even while investing in top-notch fabrics from Italian mills for his eponymous collection. “I decided to [come here] and launch the label, which in hindsight was very clueless because I had started it with really no money at all, and I didn’t really know what I was doing,” he recalls. “The first initial seasons didn’t work out.” Despite the rocky start, things turned around, and his first full collection, for fall 2015, was quickly picked up by Opening Ceremony and Japanese stockists Radd Lounge and Sister following its New York Fashion Week debut.
