At Balenciaga, Demna Goes Back to His Roots
Balenciaga’s Sunday morning show is always one of the most anticipated of Paris Fashion Week, though this season the anticipation was of a less celebratory sort. In November of last year, the brand, which has undergone an incredible seven years of transformation under creative director Demna, became embroiled in scandal. Two separate ad campaigns lent themselves to social media paranoia about pedophilia, and a lack of clear communication on Balenciaga’s part snowballed into a perception that the brand was involved in a horrifying international conspiracy at worst, or was simply derisive and arrogant at best.
Even those who understood the mistakes and unfortunate coincidences that led to the outrage seemed to be calling for the designer’s head, expressing exhaustion with his brand’s close alignment with celebrities (especially Kanye West, with whom the brand severed ties in October over his use of hate speech), his meme-like takes on luxury (Ikea-like bags priced at upwards of $2,000), and his insistence on positioning sneakers and hoodies as true luxury products. Demna is one of this era’s most misunderstood designers; there’s a large crowd of skeptics who tend to see cynicism and pranks where he means to express sincerity and innovation.
I’ve always found this a bit odd, because so many of his efforts have been convincing. The brand spent six years crafting their own universe of “misfits,” like artists and curators and DJs, before they teamed up with actual celebrities like the Kardashians. Demna’s partnership with Kim Kardashian was actually strange and hilarious, daring a celebrity to wear clothes that expressed the public opinion of her—a superheroine? A globally-traveling package of promotion? A void? Just a doll?—rather than her own feelings. And Demna’s dismantling of luxury has transformed the way we value objects and things; why can’t a hoodie be as precious to you as a cashmere coat is to someone else?
For Fall 2023, Demna expressed a desire to go back to his roots. I think he was absolutely successful in that effort, but before we get into the clothes, I want to think a bit about what “roots” mean for Demna specifically. He is not a nostalgic designer who takes an adoring and churchlike approach to “house codes.” He grew up in post-Soviet Georgia, a time and place when Western goods were flowing into the country years after they appeared in the rest of the world, so sneakers and sweatpants and logoed T-shirts and shell jackets are the magical, aspirational fruit of his youth. (The critic Natasha Stagg has written brilliantly about this. “The Balenciaga-Vetements styling trademark of an oversized, cheap-looking garment in traditionally feminine materials paired with something as emblematic of Western style in the ’80s as thigh highs explains it best: in ’90s Russia, East met slightly dated West, creating a unique style all its own,” she writes, and later adds, “This is fashion at its best, and its most frightening—a fashion that mines the past to predict the future.”)
He is clearly fascinated by Cristobal Balenciaga, but he has always found inspiration in the master’s work in his own innovative way, with the first and most successful being the incredible 3-D printed seven-layer coats from Fall 2018, which echoed Balenciaga’s intuition for creating volume in Demna’s native language of performance-wear. And his couture is a contemporary answer to Balenciaga’s demanding, cognoscenti-only clothes that could appear dowdy or uninteresting to those not in the know (if you don’t know what I mean, read Truman Capote describing Mona von Bismarck’s couture clothes in Answered Prayers). When Demna was first making a splash with Vetements, the brand he founded as a collective and which is now run by his brother Guram, the pieces that captured everyone’s attention were joyful and oddball reworkings of the most anodyne clothes, like hoodies made way too big or given a fashion-y makeover with a shoulder pad, or Glen Plaid fabric cut into a pencil skirt or dress made to look like it was sitting on top of rather than over the body, with the tag and back collar visible.
These days, Demna’s skeptics seem to blame him for cynically promoting phenomena that he actually invented: the dad sneaker, the hoodie as a fashion status symbol, repositioning what seems ugly or generic as beautiful and exclusive. (His couture collections are also responsible for ushering in the fervor for strange, 1950s couture shapes we’ve seen this season everywhere from Balmain to Prada to Bottega.) Maybe those things all became too big (and isn’t that a sign of their success?), but they articulated the menace and confusion in our world, and the possibilities of creativity and invention within all that chaos, in a way that was more immediate and resonant than perhaps any other designer has done in the 21st century.
Now to this season’s collection. Backstage, Demna spoke about wanting the collection to be “200% me,” and wanting to bring the focus back to the clothes after a handful of shows staged in a cavernous and nearly pitch-black airport hangar. (Indeed, he showed Sunday’s collection in a low-ceilinged white box.) He started with this idea in October, before the scandals of November; no logos, no celebrities, just clothes.
But as things unfolded, he sought refuge in trousers, and that defined the collection’s opening section. “I spent a few days at home in the most difficult moment for me last December, where I needed to find some place for me to focus on something else,” he said. “And I really found that place, that shelter, in cutting and stitching. I took a bunch of pants that I basically cut up and decided to make other kinds of clothes out of it. Jackets, coats. And it became actually the whole tailoring part of the collection.” His mother reminded him that pants were the first garment he ever had made for himself. “It almost felt like I needed to deconstruct that to construct something new. Symbolically speaking, that’s why it was in the beginning of the show.”
Pants became jackets, minidresses, other pairs of pants. Some of the suit trousers had trousers attached to them, so that two front leg panels flowed forward as the model’s walked. (You can see how those pieces are like a more luxuriously refined version of the Margiela-ish ideas he first created at Vetements.) He followed with more pure Demna: tight-as-a-knot hoodies and outerwear and jersey pants, fitted with an inflatable device that allows you to blow it up like an airbag, worn with enormous pointy motocross boots, which created both cocoon and hourglass shapes—“two very important silhouettes for me and for Balenciaga,” he said. There were also a series of immaculate and totally distilled coats: a floor-length rounded knob shoulder coat in a printed lynx, black leather, and glossy red snakeskin, which were three of chicest pieces of outerwear shown in a season when coats seem to be brands’ big statement.
The final section was the most sophisticated, in terms of execution and intention: a series of evening dresses completely distinct from the couture, which he emphasized he wants to keep separate. “Couture is a lot about heritage and how I modernize it,” he said. “In ready-to-wear, though, there is this part of my aesthetic that people don't really know of me.” Working again with the knob shoulder, the dresses were hyper-contemporized approaches to evening archetypes like lace, sequins, and ruffles. “It’s somewhat romantic and classic, but still twisted in some way that it makes it more modern. And that's something that I really wanted to include in the show,” he explained. “There is also this part of lace and embroideries that is not couture; it’s not made in the couture way. It’s industrializable garments.”
I’ve seen a lot of chatter online (and heard a bit in person) that this collection should have been more of a mea culpa, that it was too much of the same, that he should have made a collection in veneration to Cristobal Balenciaga. I think that would have been arrogant—oooh, I’m sooo good, I hope you forget my mistakes!—whereas these clothes, crucially, felt humble. And anyways, Demna is not the type of designer to find refuge by hiding behind someone else’s ideas. To me, the clothes were terrific and playful and will please the legions of longtime Balenciaga fans whose out-there definition of beauty and sophistication are articulated by no other brand in fashion. He is so creative and clearly has much more to say. If it’s Cristobal-ish purity you seek, you’ll likely find it in his couture collection in July. (And again, I thought the coats and gowns were radically pure.)
Late on Sunday evening, a young designer I follow on Twitter posted that he ran into Demna getting off the Metro and then “[watched] him take a photo of a sparkling Eiffel Tower with a big smile.” He included a picture. It warmed my heart because that’s the designer I’ve come to admire through his best clothes. Tender, totally individual, and wowed by life’s simple pleasures.
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