So many designers have been referencing army uniforms and camouflage in menswear this season, it’s been easy to lose count. The disturbing Vetements show by Demna Gvasalia today took it to a place far and away beyond any superficial referencing—it was cathartic self-disclosure from someone whose childhood was torn apart by civil war. “It was like dressing a documentary of my life,” he said. “I dedicated this collection to Georgia, the Georgia where my brother Guram and I grew up together in the ’90s, and the war that happened where we lived. I tried to face this angst and fear and pain in this show. I didn’t want to remember before, I didn’t want to go that far.”

Gvasalia had been seeing a therapist for two years, and felt ready. “I thought, Let’s just go for it. I’ve never felt so creatively happy, so I think I felt safe enough to put it out there, to get it out on the table.”

So it was, literally: staged on a runway which was a white table, set up like a wedding reception under a bridge over the Périphérique in an area of Paris where migrants, displaced by so many conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, live in encampments along the road. Insensitive irony, or pointing in a direction everyone should be made to look? His answer: “I feel everybody today talks about war, refugees. And I am like, yes, I know exactly what that means. It’s weird. This is about my life, but also it’s about everything you see on CNN, as well.”

Bring on the fashion, then: The first look out was a guy in a tattoo-printed flesh-color body T-shirt, black skinny jeans, and shiny, pointy shoes. Social media kvetching instantly attacked the fact that both Martin Margiela and Jean Paul Gaultier designed tattoo T-shirts in the early ’90s (as if Gvasalia didn’t know everyone knows that). What was significant about it went way beyond first appearances: In the configuration of the tattoos, Gvasalia mimicked the patterns criminals in Georgian prisons have inked to display their mafia authority. More than that: When a phone is waved over it with a Vetements app, he has arranged that the viewer is directed to a Wikipedia page dedicated to “Ethnic Cleansing of Georgians in Abkhazia.”