Balenciaga (Q1846)
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French fashion house and company
- House of Balenciaga
- BALENCIAGA
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Balenciaga |
French fashion house and company |
|
Statements
2015
artistic director
junior designer
apprentice
1950
model
jewellery designer
Absent Demna for a direct quote, he’s issued a pre-fall lookbook with another kind of directness about it. According to press notes, it was shot on his phone. Captured during styling sessions at Balenciaga’s showroom on the Rue de Sèvres in Paris, this is the full run of Demna-isms we see before us: his exaggerated silhouettes reconstituted from generic garments, in-jokes in the shape of ‘fan t-shirts’ printed with the faces of house ambassadors on the front and signed on the back, plus collabs of the season. Featuring Scholl and Automobili Lamborghini.Fashion eyes will whizz to the weirdness first. That would be men’s jersey underpants sliced open to be worn as micro-skirts—a hilarious outrage you can bet on catching fire all over the place. Not so sure about the new ‘Zero’ shoes—footwear reduced to clip-on heels and a kind of stall wrapping the big toe. These you may find so creepy, orthopedic, and disgusting you can’t shoo them out of your mind. But yet again, that’s just another aspect of the Demna we know of old: made you look, made you talk.But also: he’ll make you smile. This is likely the instant you see what he’s done with the classic built-for-comfort Dr. Scholl’s slide by turning it into a spike-heeled fashion mule. It stretches credulity that the Balenciaga hybrid can possibly remain a comfort-shoe in the wearing—but who cares? It looks so ineffably cool when worn with a great big gray hip-length bomber and a flared knee-length skirt.In this extensive lineup of product, there are moments which have the flourish of genius-grubby elegance that first distinguished Demna as a talent. In that category are the swathed mega-scarves which appear to be made from cut-up coats, trenches, and the like. These looks—and the Cristobal-ish echo behind them—should please hard-core fashion followers. And in the meanwhile, Balenciaga has an entirely separate Formula 1 fan base on the go. The collab features the 2025 Lamborghini Temerario, the company’s ‘second hybrid super sports car’ on a t-shirt. Lamborghini Shield logo patches are dotted on sleeves and bags. It’s just a foretaste of a full collection that will be rolled out (as it were) in the spring.
2 December 2024
“The time has come for fashion to have a point of view.” That was the straightforward message Demna delivered backstage today at Balenciaga.The show we had just witnessed played out in a darkened room, on a polished dining table lined on both sides with editors in chief, celebrities from Nicole Kidman to Katy Perry, and Balenciaga and Kering management. His grandmother’s table is where Demna discovered he was interested in clothes as a young boy in Georgia. “My earliest memories of fashion start with me drawing looks on cardboard, cutting them out, and making ‘fashion shows,’” he wrote in a note distributed to the press.Demna may have been trying to reconnect with his inner child, but there was nothing guileless about this collection. A significant portion was dedicated to the cocoon silhouette, one of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s icons. It’s a shape Demna said he finds too retro if done literally, so he applied it to the cropped puffers and bombers of the under-25 set and teamed them with jeans that barely clung to jutting hip bones. A pair of pieces that came later also hewed to Cristóbal’s striking sculptural lines but pushed the experimentation further. Built to be ingeniously multipurpose, the men’s featured what Demna called a “Medici collar from the 17th century” that was actually a corset “engineered into the neckline”; the women’s starred the same jacket, only it was worn as a leather bustier top. And yes, on Looks 49 and 50 were jeans starched stiff and standing in for turned-up lapels.Riffing on an evening dress made entirely from bras shown for fall, Demna created assemblages that looked thrown together. “I like the mess,” he said. “I think the fashion world is trying to be so perfect and polished and impeccable in everything…but that’s not how fashion is for me. Fashion needs to get messed up. It needs to get fucked up…. It needs to not be based on fear.” It was the most unambiguous précis of the industry we heard all season.Walking the talk, Demna opened the show with lingerie, a trending category for spring 2025 (“It’s a no-clothes season,” a fellow runway watcher weighed in post-show) but one he’s never really explored. “My aesthetic is not based on that kind of very direct sex appeal or that kind of fragility,” he said. And so, of course, he turned the proposition on its head by layering or embroidering the bras and teddies and garters on flesh-colored body stockings. “It’s trompe l’oeil,” he said. You can see the idea catching on.
On a parallel track, together with his team he came up with a clever hinging mechanism that allowed them to make barely-there tops that clicked on around the rib cage, leaving the whole expanse of the back exposed. Talking about that innovation backstage, Demna genuinely did sound as charged up and enthusiastic as a little kid.
30 September 2024
The Balenciaga show was soundtracked by a guided meditation. “In today’s session we will learn a pathway towards a happier life,” it began. We were encouraged to slow our breathing, to picture a color we associate with happiness, imagine that color as a cloud, and “feel the fresh air and all the positive energies coming in.” The guide reminded us that joy is a state of being we can cultivate, through empathy and compassion, and the release of negative thoughts. It was not all that different from the meditation Demna listens to daily; he does it, he explained, “to find this kind of Bluetooth within myself to my creativity.”This was the Balenciaga creative director’s fourth haute couture collection, and his most subversive in its rejection of the formality and fineries typical of the metier, if not Cristóbal Balenciaga’s silhouettes. Demna took up the couturier’s 3/4-length sleeves, cocoon shapes, and elaborate headwear, only instead of the gazar and other fabrics that Balenciaga relied on, he turned to the materials of his own practice these last 10 years: denim, leather, track suits and technical outerwear, and the hoodie,bien sûr, bonding them to a satin scuba material that helped him achieve his sculpted forms.“I wanted to create a fusion or a tribute to my personal vocabulary as a designer, which is subcultures… but I needed to bring in that kind of equilibrium with Cristóbal, obviously, because this is couture,” he said. The first mashup combined a sculpted oversize gray tee and slouchy faded jeans engineered to look like a jacket was tied around the waist, with a saucer hat of the kind he introduced in his couture debut—call it Demnaiaga.A black puffer, a gray sweatsuit, and a lumberjack shirt, among other things, all got the same treatment: curving sleeves in a perma-scrunch north of the wrists, with a saucer hat, pants with those built-in jackets suspended from the waist, and witchy boots for punctuation. “I think it’s important to bring these textures into couture,” said Demna, “so it’s not just satin and tulle, but other materials that need to become part of the couture vocabulary, at least in my work.” The metal head T-shirts, he pointed out, were hand-painted in oil, with Balenciaga cast members playing the rock-’n’-rollers’ parts.
As the show progressed, it moved into the fancy evening silhouettes associated with couture, only they were patchworked together from denim and colorful parkas that looked like they could’ve been repurposed from Demna’s earlier collections for the house. Or he constructed them with new fabrics and techniques; one column dress was made from melted plastic shopping bags molded onto the body—you could see a stray barcode here and there—and a strapless number was constructed with golden aluminum foil.These pieces asked you to reconsider the ways in which we ascribe value to clothing and why we consider one thing and not the other to be precious—provocative questions in a world with too much stuff. A dress of flocked leather Demna described as a “wearable jewelry display” for a 1960 necklace by Cristóbal himself that was released from the archives for the show demonstrated a healthy respect for the house and all the work that has come before.The final look was a swirling mass of black nylon, chosen because it best evoked Cristóbal’s precious gazar. It was constructed just prior to the show, a one-off piece of “ephemeral couture” that will come with three Balenciaga staffers for its assembly for the client who buys it. Outside on the Avenue George V afterward, an elite stylist wondered if it represented the jumble of negative thoughts you toss out of your head at the end of a productive meditation session. It was not the reading that Demna offered backstage, but I bet he’d like it.
26 June 2024
The Balenciaga takeover of Shanghai began at the Pudong International Airport where, upon exiting immigration for baggage claim, travelers were greeted by larger-than-life black-and-white photographs of actress Yang Chaoyue sporting a Le City bag, looming over the luggage carousels. It extended to the impossibly chic Regent hotel on the Bund, where room keys came in Balenciaga card sleeves, and on to the fashionable Xintiandi district, where the Nu Xiang Mu Dou restaurant, famed for itsxiao long baoor soup dumplings, would host a four-day commemorative collaboration à la the infamous black Erewhon smoothie from six months past: a custom-created Balenciaga steamed vegan xiao long bao, filled with French black truffle. The skins, expertly rolled out by hand and pinched to create 16 perfect pleats, were tinted the same Balenciaga gray as the pyramidal umbrellas shading the tables out front.It’s clear that Demna does not do anything by halves, and the creative director took the occasion of his first runway show in China, which houses more Balenciaga stores than any other nation, to indulge in a creative exercise deeper than chinoiserie. “It’s such an important place for Balenciaga, we have such an important audience of people here,” he said backstage after the show, which had been years in the making. “You know I don’t believe in doing cruise collections and going on the boat or whatever… but what I believe in is bringing what I do, my vision, to people who appreciate it, consume it, and China is that place for me.”Balenciaga chose to unveil its spring 2025 men’s and women’s at the Museum of Art Pudong, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel. Alas, the steamed win-win cakes—a little Shanghainese confectionery meant to symbolize good fortune, dyed lucky red and stamped with the double-B logo—were not able to stave off the rain, which began falling in the late afternoon and into the evening show. That said, the rain did nothing to deter the crowds lined up beyond the barricades, donning plastic ponchos and clutching umbrellas to await celebrities like actress and house ambassador Michelle Yeoh.Inside the stark white museum was a sea of black. Black visors and wraparound shades, strong-shouldered suits, lace-trimmed dresses, denim slashed from top to toe; even the sea of black umbrellas, provided by the house, met the unspoken dress code. Demna has always played with the artful clash of high and low, blurring the lines between good and bad taste.
It’s no wonder that his work has won so many fans here in China, whose local fashion has, for so many years, toed a similar line. A 40 yuan top, fetched from a street vendor, would not have looked out of place, and neither did the man wearing a plain black t-shirt that said Contemporary S**t.
30 May 2024
Demna sent a voicemail before his show. The kicker in it was his line on the definition ofluxury—luxury in the old-fashioned sense of things that are limited by scarcity. “What seems truly rare and finite right now is actually creativity itself,” he said. “I believe that creativity has secretly become a new form of luxury.”In a preview at Balenciaga HQ, he was talking about examining his own body of work, reconnecting with what fashion means to him and how that relates to the work of Cristóbal Balenciaga, who famously shut himself off to create in a world without distractions. “It’s 10 years since I came out as a fashion designer,” said Demna, meaning the anniversary of the foundation of Vetements. Ironically, that’s meant becoming a lot more Cristóbal in order to rediscover how to be a lot more Demna. “In my personal life, I’ve started to kind of detox around me, I would say,” he observed. “You know, the way I perceive things, letting go of stress, just being happy, like learning how to love yourself and not having toxic people around me who just create obstacles for me and my vision.”Ironically, that is, because Demna was about to plunge us into a scenario that was all about being mentally surrounded by a billion distractions. His Balenciaga tribe—gum-chewing, septum-ringed, eyes wrapped in futuristic silicone masks—marched headlong through a digital AI–aided visual cacophony playing on hundreds of wall and floor screens. Demna’s description: “It starts with landscapes of like, film, like, I don’t know—Iceland and prairies and all of that, the natural beauty and reality of the world we live in. And then it gets deconstructed and edited, live. Photoshopped into the fake reality, into basically the overload of content that is killing our society, in a way. You know, like TikTok videos.”It was a Balenciaga immersive spectacular. We saw dawn break, supposedly naturalistically, over mountains, glaciers, and deserts, then forests, where trees started to be moved around by some invisible computer hand—or was it AI?—that was busily altering landscapes into implausible collages. We watched familiar footage of Paris and Tokyo streets morph into totally wrong geographies, then cute digital cats, bunny rabbits, dogs, and sheep rising up everywhere. Then the invasion of a wallpaper depicting a zillion cell-phone videos—dissolving into a “nightfall” scene grabbed from city Christmas light-bedecked trees. And, finally, a fade to multicolored digital static.
It says a lot for the human brain that there could be any attention spared for the clothes at all. Or rather, it says a lot for Demna’s human-made capacities that the collection stood out on its own strengths—his techniques, his displacements and repurposing of garments, the wardrobe he owns that runs the gamut from Academy Awards chic to streetwear.The most fun Demna had with this was with the looks that came at the end—tailoring cinched around with tape; a cocktail dress made of a straggly boa, a bit of a bikini, and a slip; an evening dress entirely collaged from bras. “We have this one-minute-to-create-a-dress challenge in the studio, likeProject Runway,” he said, laughing. “So we were throwing things on the body and then taking pictures together. It’s very playful.” Ultimately, he said, the question for him among this creative spontaneity is “what’s more important, perfection or imperfection? For me, it’s actually this coexistence of both, because that’s what makes us human now—the imperfection, the failure or the ‘miss.’ I love that idea. I think it’s beautiful. That’s what differentiates us from machines.”
3 March 2024
For out-of-towners, Los Angeles has the quality of the surreal. The palm trees, canyons, and golden light, the Facetuned faces and super-toned bodies, the cult of Erewhon, the Hollywood sign. Demna, Balenciaga’s Georgian creative director, is not immune to its allure. After his pre-fall show in LA today, he called it “my favorite city in the world,” saying, “all my cultural evolution, when I was a teenager growing up in this kind of post-Soviet vacuum, it really came from here, through movies, music—I mean, everything that I kind of absorbed, that later on started to kind of become my fashion references.”There was certainly something surreal about Balenciaga’s gothy black clad guests turning up en masse on a well manicured stretch of Windsor Boulevard in Hancock Park, with that famous Hollywood sign presiding in the distance. “It feels like we’re going to a funeral in sunny Transylvania,” a fellow editor cracked. Or like stepping into a Tim Burton movie shot in Technicolor.This was the brand’s second destination show in the US. Last year, Demna chose the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to present Balenciaga’s “Garde-Robe,” collection of “upscale classic garments” with an emphasis on tailoring, one of his specialties. This collection skewed more SoCal, starting with the exercise clothes, gym bags, and souped-up sneakers of the first few looks. The circa Y2K velour jumpsuits and giant high-heeled shearling boots that came next will be familiar to readers ofUS Magazine, which would’ve been another way the young Demna got his celebrity content, unless it was the famous Steven Meisel Hollywood shoot inVogueItalia that did it for him.Back in those pre-social media days, the paparazzi lurked outside the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Circa 2023, it’s Erewhon smoothies that the stars are clutching. Timed to today’s event, Balenciaga collaborated with the LA grocer on a juice. Made in part with activated charcoal powder, it’s as black as the stretchy turtleneck and tight jeans worn in the show by Brigitte Nielsen, taking over the actress-moonlighting-as-model role from Isabelle Huppert. “I don’t know what’s in it,” Demna said. “I just wanted it to be black.”Wellness culture is one of LA’s most successful exports. The show’s powerful soundtrack, made as usual by Demna’s partner BFRND, poked not so subtle fun at its presumptive hollowness.
Demna rejected the idea that he approached the collection—or LA itself—with irony, but there’s something comically perverse about a paper grocery bag made in leather.The sensational evening clothes—some perhaps headed to tomorrow night’s Academy Museum Gala down the road—were as Hollywood as the rest of the show, but it was easier to read earnestness in their elegance and drama. There was a respectful nod to Cristobal Balenciaga in the grand volumes of a white wedding gown whose funnel neck extended to just below the model’s eyes. Two other dresses conjured post-coital bed sheets tied at the bust, if bed sheets came in patent leather. These were pure Demna, and you could make a connection between them and the trash-bag bag he designed for fall 2022, the show that took place days after the start of the Ukraine war.We were in one of LA’s prettiest enclaves today, but Demna’s not blind to the city’s extreme inequalities. Los Angeles is often called a shallow place, but this Los Angeles lover is deep.
2 December 2023
“I have to be me. I can’t repress my creativity. I can’t castrate my vision. I just can’t do those things. It’s not me. So this collection is a celebration of everything that I love about fashion.”Demna was coming off a year during which, he said, “I felt very alone.” In reaction, his spring ’24 show was a gathering of “the people who have meant most to me in my personal and professional life,” from his mother, who opened the show, to his husband Loïck Gomez, also known as BFRND, who wore the finale wedding dress, and mixed and scored the soundtrack.There were a whole lot of hot topics to unpack. When Demna talks of what he loves about fashion, he defines it in opposition to luxury. Some of his people were carrying faux passports with boarding cards to Geneva (where he lives) slotted into them—they were Balenciaga wallets, in fact. “Because it’s more about identity, to me,” he said. “I questioned a lot about that: How is fashion created? For me, I have to be honest: I don’t care much about luxury. I don’t want to give people a proposition to look like they’re rich or successful. Because ‘luxury’ is top down, and what is often seen as quite provocative about me is—I do bottom up.”Demna’s last ready-to-wear show was his comeback from the controversy that embroiled Balenciaga in 2022. “I look back at it, and I really hated it,” he declared. “It’s a good show, but it’s very polished. In many ways it was a show of fear. I don’t like it when it’s polished. I like it when it’s rough. That is my aesthetic, and I have to stay loyal to that. What I showed today was probably my most personal and my most favorite collection, because it was about me; it was about my story.”With his cast of family and friends around him—including Linda Loppa, and other academic staff who taught him at Antwerp Academy—the collection reiterated and underscored all the Demna-isms he’s impressed upon fashion at Balenciaga, and before that at his first business, Vetements. Humungous tailoring, oversize hoodies and jeans, sinister leather coats and military camouflage were represented. So were plissé evening gowns, floral prints, bathrobes, motorcycle leathers. Demna’s jokey accessories were everywhere: Balenciaga sneakers grown even more absurdly vast than ever; supermarket grocery totes reproduced in leather; marabou-trimmed men’s kitten-heeled boudoir slippers, and hand-carried shoes converted into clutch bags.
1 October 2023
“Making clothes is my armor.” At the end of the Balenciaga haute couture show, Eliza Douglas, walking in a shining, chrome-laminated 3D printed bell-skirted suit of armor, reminded Demna of Joan of Arc—and also of himself. “Maybe she wouldn’t have been burned at the stake for wearing men’s clothes if she was wearing that,” he remarked. “Because all my life I suffered because of what I wear.”Demna wasn’t in a dour mood at all as he speed-extemporized these thoughts in the quick post-show debrief to journalists. Whatever inferences to embattlement, self-protection and resilience might have been fleetingly caught in that conversation, his main point was that being immersed in making clothes is his happiest place. “Couture to me is specifically about clothes. There was a narrative that somehow happened by itself. It was kind of making a bridge between the past and now, which is the reason I wanted to do it from the beginning.”So: back to the beginning of that “bridge.” Demna opened the show with a replica black velvet Cristóbal Balenciaga haute couture dress. It was worn by the exquisitely elegant Danielle Slavik, who originally modeled it for Balenciaga himself. Grace Kelly ordered it, with its integral pearl necklace, for her 40th birthday. Slavik had told Demna that it was her favorite dress ever.His to and from between tradition and innovation began with his own fascination with tailoring. For a start, he probed the structure of tailoring for day. He who shot to fashion fame by making jacket shoulders humongous now made them disappear altogether, cutting wide funneled necklines into narrow women’s coats and jackets. That idea, he said, had come from turning jackets upside down. In one way, it read as a couture elevation of the suiting inversions he’d started in ready-to-wear. In another, it was surely a nod to the founder’s signature obsession with sculpting dresses to frame the beauty of his clients’ faces.Menswear occupied an extensive section of the collection. It took in ultra-rigorous black-tie formality and normal-seeming business suits, right through to couture treatments of all the casual generics Demna’s been known for since day one. Menswear traditionally played no part in haute couture, it should be remembered.Silhouette-wise, with his extended-toe shoes poking out from trousers and jeans, it all appeared to be not so different from Demna’s signature ready-to-wear.
In fact, he said, a slew of hidden trompe l’oeil handcrafted techniques had been lavished on oil painting fabric to imitate fur, printing Japanese denim to mimic Prince of Wales check, and ‘windswept’ raincoats and mufflers sculpted to look as if they were caught in a storm. “Because I like the couture that you see, and I like the couture that you don’t see,” he said. “What’s really important is the techniques that maybe aren’t so visible. That’s a big part of who I am, and who Cristóbal Balenciaga was, too. So I wanted that balance. Couture shouldn't always be in your face, and like ‘this is a gorgeous dress.’”But there were gorgeous dresses, too. Isabelle Huppert came out in a heavily-pailletted full-skirted black dress like some gothic Infanta. There were others which, again, looked as if they’d been caught in movement; a taffeta neckline dramatically blown to one side, a slick black twist of a thing spiraled around the body.Some of it had been made in a complicity between advanced technology and the human hand. A red lace dress became a stiff, bell-shaped filigree. The warrior in shining silver armor, of course. All this is just as costly as anything traditionally ‘haute couture,’ of course—whilst being super publicity generating. Which is of course, very Demna, too.
6 July 2023
Ever since Demna founded Vetements, wry observation of how people dress on the street and for various occupations has always been a dynamic behind his design. The scenario playing out in his new Balenciaga video is very much that way, except that this time the street is the Avenue Georges V. The time-lapse slice-of-life captures people busily going in and out of the Balenciaga maison at number 10, or passing by. Whether they’re denim-clad teens, a motorcycle delivery person, a bourgeois dog walker, a skateboarder, or the retinues of black-clad hoodie-up fashion people going about their business—this is how the whole monde would look if everyone dressed in Balenciaga.It’s entertaining. We watch as the insider members of the perma-shaded Balenciaga gang deal with the unwonted indignity of being caught in a sudden Parisian downpour. A character, clad in a long beige mackintosh with a tartan lining, saunters from the house looking all cool, until they suddenly panic, pat themselves down, and have to turn back in, realizing they’ve forgotten their keys, or more likely, their phone. Someone else desperately tries to find their Uber, or flag down a cab. Finally, the rain proves a terrible inconvenience to the glamorous personages—are they there for a couture fitting?—who are forced to scuttle into the doorway wearing their silver-sequined floor-length evening dresses, right in the middle of the day.Underlining the fact that Demna is steering the brand narrative back to Paris, and to the house, he punningly named the collection Capital B. His second take on the collection is by way of a lookbook, apparently shot in grand rooms that variously overlook the Place Vendome and the Arc de Triomphe. Here, his perma-silhouettes are clearly in view: the oversized suiting, enveloping trapezoid coats and puffed-up trenches, the hoodies, and the bug-eyed ‘Dynamo round’ shades with almost everything. As a pre-collection it encompasses every Balenciaga category, womenswear and menswear, formal black tailoring to denim, motorcycle leathers and sweatpants. Interspersed are also pieces from the high-luxe ‘Garde-Robe’ collection, which are an annual release, such as the silver-fringed embroidered dress at the end.But it’s the accessories in Demna’s Balenciaga world that teeter on that inimitable line he enjoys walking between the reappropriated common object and the absurd. His ‘towel’ wrap skirts are indistinguishable from actual towels.
The Rodeo boot bag is a tote that really does look like the person is solemnly carrying a ginormous pair of brown leather boots. The 24/7 bags are string market bags, but tricked out in rhinestones.Some of these are pre-existing Demna-isms. The hyper-elongated turned-up square-toed “Romeo mules,” however, are a fresh introduction. They’re almost a caricature of swagger—possibly transferred directly from a cartoon or computer game (we don’t know, because Demna wasn’t quoting this time). Still, his chuckle can be distinctly detected behind this work, forever asking: Is this cool, or is it silly? Is it coolbecauseit’s silly? And at what point does it all become normalized again, because that’s just the way everyone dresses on the street?
30 May 2023
December is typically the month that Balenciaga has released this pre-collection in the past. No one reading this needs reminding—last December was anything but typical for this brand. But with the ad campaign imbroglio faded, the lookbook is being released today, ahead of the delivery of these clothes and accessories to stores.In that light, these dressing room selfies are cleverly staged: an invitation to customers to come back to the shops, and a reminder, much like Demna’s fall runway show in Paris, that the Balenciaga creative director remains one of the key architects of the look of contemporary fashion. Of the 11 trends Vogue Runway identified back in January, when we were cataloging the pre-fall collections, nearly half of them seem traceable to Demna, the emphasis on exaggerated suiting, the embrace of couture-ish shapes, and the return of rave jeans included.This collection touches on all of those categories, paying special attention to tailoring. Double-breasted black blazers were alternately puffed up with a layer of padding, or cropped at the hips, with the hems tucked under in almost makeshift fashion. A third was worn like a wrap, its buttons askew. He cut similar styles in glen plaids and checks.More so than the runways, Balenciaga’s pre-season collections are devoted to daily wear. And so there were oversize parkas, peacoats and trenches with more of those folded under hems, fluid velvet sweatsuit separates in surprising pastels, and denim in both raver proportions and a newer skinny cut lopped off at the knees. Standing in for the dramatic evening dresses in the March show were a couple of full-length looks in a quotidian key, one dress in a body-conscious knit and a shrunken logo hoodie and matching ankle-length skirt in what looked like stretch velvet. He’s likely to lean more in Cristobal’s direction at the couture show in July.Demna attended the Met Gala, hosting a Balenciaga table where he was joined by a quartet of emerging designers and their dates. In some pics, he appears to be holding a Balenciaga sneaker. As for the accessories in this collection, the story was evolution, with new, sportier shapes of Le Cagole, and Pantashoes with sexy fishnet overlays.
4 May 2023
Stripping back to the fundamentals of design—as against the performative, the ‘experiential,’ and meme-generating multi-platform communication harnessed by brands—has been a thrust of this latest round of shows. Nowhere was the extreme tension between those two poles felt more sharply than at the Balenciaga show for fall 2023. It was the first that Demna, formerly known as Demna Gvasalia, one of the master-architects of meta-ironics, has held in Paris since the global scandal that was detonated by two Balenciaga online advertising campaigns posted last November.His explanation and apology, with information about the brand’s plans for internal reform and its offer of reparation through a three-year partnership with the National Children’s Alliance waspublishedbyVoguein early February. “I needed to have a show because I need to move on. I need to liberate myself—through my work, and what I do, and put it out there,” he’d said in a one-on-one conversation held at Balenciaga headquarters in the days before the show. “Because it has been a hell three months, and I really don’t know how I had the strength in me, mentally, to go through it.”The choice he made—out of force of circumstance or not—was to ditch his mega-set methodology and showcase his personal bid for reputational integrity as a designer in a white canvas-draped auditorium. “It had overshadowed the collections—most people didn’t see the clothes even when it was packed with great clothes. You know, I just felt almost like [I was] betraying that by doing those kinds of set designs, because the most important thing for me in my work was being overshadowed by 15 minutes of buzzy concept. I was like, I was like, ‘Okay, I need to change that anyway,’” he said. “And this whole situation really just confirmed to me that it cannot be about that anymore. I love doing that. But I don’t love doing that more than making clothes and I felt like I needed to put this in focus. It came together with something that truly represents me as a designer. I feel like this is the message I want to give: This is who I am.”Who he is, and where he is now: It was hard not to read the imagery of a world turned upside down in the makings of the long, somber sequence of 17 black oversized tailoring looks that opened the show. Black is a Balenciaga core non-shade; it syncs with the mood of fashion at large, and it was a reminder that Demna was, after all, the progenitor of the super-sizing that’s swept fashion in the last decade.
Nothing new there. What was different: all these pieces were constructed from reverse-tailored trousers. There were coats and jackets with pant-loops and pockets in the hems. And below them hung doubled pairs of trousers, giving, from the side, the surreal illusion that the people were walking on four legs.
5 March 2023
Optimism is a word we’ve heard over and over again this season. With rare exceptions designers have put on their blinders and decided it’s their job to help us shrug off the world’s sorrows and shop our despair away. Not Balenciaga’s Demna. Rising inequality, the return of fascism, the very real threat of nuclear war. He laid it all out at his post-apocalyptic show today, trying, I think, to shake us awake.Backstage he called the show a companion piece to last season. When snow melts it turns to mud, and there were literally tons of mud today, piled up at the sides of the stadium space, and dug out like bomb craters in the center, staged by the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra. The raw odeur of decomposition, a custom-made scent by Demna’s frequent collaborator Sissel Tolaas, blasted us in the face.Kanye West opened the show in a tactical jacket and leather pants with reinforced knees, military garb topped off with a baseball cap and a logo mouthguard. The ragtag band that followed was rough around the edges to say the least, their faces beat-up (hours in the makeup chair) and their clothes treated to look old and beat-up too (requiring a “couple of days” more than making pristine luxury, Demna said). Some carried bags made from stuffed animals that looked like they’d been through a war. When the 75 models made their circuit on the wet track, dirt splashed their bare ankles and soaked their hems, the 3-D printed Dutch clogs being no match for the mud.Demna has had his own experience of war—he fled Georgia with his family when he was a young boy of 10. Being gay compounded his struggles. “I’ve felt like I’ve been punched in my face for being who I am,” he said, but “you have to stand up and continue walking, kind of like this crusade of discovering who you are and defending that.” He called this a “very me show.”It was heavy on grafitti’d hoodies and ravaged jeans, but there was also evening wear, in clingy T-shirt jersey or glamorous pleats. These were survivors against the odds, a point Demna made by sending out men clutching baby carriers propped with eerily lifelike dolls. “Naturally I’m an optimist, but I cannot be very optimistic right now,” he said. “I think this show actually expresses that very much—the music, the set, it spoke about the moment in which we live.” The soundtrack by BFRND was actually quite terrifying.
To finish, Demna sent out a dress made from cut-up parts of black Balenciaga Lariat bags, a make-do-and-mend masterpiece that also pointed up our nasty overconsumption habits. Remember, he sent every last piece through the mud, a “sacrilege” by luxury standards. Using fashion to comment on the crises that plague us is a tricky business. Of course Demna wants us to shop, and of course his bosses do, too. But when it comes time to spend, my money's on the guy who looks around and is terrified, not the sleepwalkers.This slideshow has been edited.
2 October 2022
To the sound of a love poem voiced by AI, a breed of haute couture humanoids encased in black neoprene, their faces uniformly erased in high-tech reflective face shields, stalked the Balenciaga haute couture salon at the opening of its 51st show. It looked like an invasion by a sinister breed marching on their spiked, chiseled ‘space boots,’ ready to take over the earth once humanity has wiped itself out. Welcome again to the dystopian thrills of the Demna fashion multiverse.It was his intro to his second couture collection for the house, which he shows annually. “This year I decided that I needed to put more of myself into it, and kind of find a new future, you know?” he said afterwards. “This is why the lineup started with very otherworldly, almost futuristic neoprene looks, which was my idea of interpreting gazar in 2022.” Invention, and taking time over it, is central to moving the art of couture forward. Famously, gazar was the sculptural silk which Cristobal Balenciaga invented with the fabric manufacturer Abrahams in 1958, in order to create the magnificently voluminous gowns he became known for. Demna’s equivalent—shaped into these wickedly fetishistic hyper-molded second-skin scuba dresses and tailored jackets—was engineered with a new kind of neoprene, made in collaboration with a Japanese manufacturer using, he noted, a “limestone” technique “which is more sustainable.”The totally encased body is, of course, a highly recognizable Demna Balenciaga signature. Everyone, including the crowds of screaming fans who gathered outside the show, knows very well what Balenciaga pantaboots are, and how the famous body of his friend Kim Kardashian has been the silhouette vehicle of the house. They weren’t disappointed. In the second half of the show, where faces were revealed, she walked in a deep-plunge corset and draped skirt, along with friends and family of the house: Demna’s musician husband BFRND, Nicole Kidman, Dua Lipa, Naomi Campbell, and all the fierce character models who’ve been involved in his shows from the beginning.But back to his motivation for a minute. Last season, Demna caused a sensation by dealing with the stark, tailored elegance of the Balenciaga couture aesthetic. Now, he was putting himself first—owning an haute couture version of the streetwear that he has been responsible for elevating to designer fashion status.
Hoodies, sweatshirts, worn-out denim, and parkas— some made of upcycled originals, others shot with aluminium to create crinkled couture-like volumes—followed the dystopian Balenciaga neoprene tribe.
6 July 2022
The Balenciaga show began with the ringing of the opening bell. It was Sunday morning at the New York Stock Exchange, and floor traders had been replaced by Pharrell Williams, Ye, Chloe Sevigny, Megan Thee Stallion, Frank Ocean, and the city’s Mayor Eric Adams. Wall Street has taken quite a hit these past few weeks; headlines about a looming recession abound. But that suits the Balenciaga creative director just fine. Demna has never shied away from darkness or menace, and this show was no exception. Latex bodysuits fully obscured his models’ faces; they were corporate raiders of a different kind.“We have to trigger emotion,” he said backstage, wearing a face-obscuring mask of his own. “We live in a terrifying world, and I think fashion is a reflection of that… I think it was quite urgent, a quite urgent show.” The invitation was a fat stack of fake 100s. It’s a mistake, though, to consider the collection or its presentation as a critique of capitalism. “The most important kind of challenge for any kind of creative is to make a product that is desirable, to create desire. That’s what fashion should do,” Demna said.To keep desire thrumming for its diverse audience, which is the point of these mid-season collections, the show was divided into three parts. It started with the introduction of a new “Garde-Robe,” or wardrobe, of what Demna described as “upscale classic garments.” The offering, he said, was inspired by the relaunch of the house’s couture collection last year, which was built on a foundation of tailoring. “I realized we were missing this segment of the classic wardrobe,” he explained. Classic here meant suits and overcoats, cut in the oversized, drop-shoulder shape Demna favors, and which have become hugely influential at all levels of fashion in the wake of that couture debut. Voluptuous silk jacquard pussybow blouses à la Melanie Griffith inWorking Girlacted as accompaniments. Adding to the ’80s-ness of that impression—and the day’s real-life menace—a man was fatally shot on the subway not far from the Stock Exchange shortly before the show got underway.The second element of the collection was eveningwear in the form of second-skin sequined gowns and silk trench dresses with trains whose supreme elegance wasn’t undercut by the pneumatic padded pumps they were worn with. In contrast, the super-sized lace-up boots that were paired with many of the show’s other looks and modeled by Ye in the front row were memeably outlandish in their proportions.
Part three showcased Demna’s collaboration with adidas. If he was trying to shake off the image of Balenciaga as a maker of high-class hoodies with Garde-Robe—and doing a bang up job of it—this section drove home the continued dominance of the sportswear category. There were tracksuits, scaled up t-shirts, boxer’s robes, and track dresses, all bearing adidas’s iconic stripes, a modified trefoil logo, or the Balenciaga name spelled in its partner’s lowercase typeface. Much of it was available to buy or pre-order on Balenciaga.com directly after the show.Set against the background of a glitchy stock market and an imminent system crash, this Balenciaga show was confident, versatile, and a bit dangerous. That’s Demna all over.
22 May 2022
“Personally, I have sacrificed too much to war. This past week is bringing back all the memories that my mother and I put away in a box, and never looked at. We never got over it.”Raw resolve was in Demna’s voice as he spoke on the phone about why he’d decided to go ahead with the Balenciaga show. The horrors being inflicted on civilians in Ukraine are re-traumatizing for a man who was a child refugee at the age of 10, fleeing war in Abkhazia, Georgia in 1993. He understands only too accurately, from experience, what the world is seeing as women struggle to take their children to safety in the harshest conditions. “It’s the same," he said. "The same aggressor, maybe even the same planes that did it to us. Who knows? And seeing this, I was thinking for a while, ‘What are we doing here, with fashion? Should I cancel?’ But no: I decided we must resist.”Demna’s connection with Ukraine’s plight is all the more wrenching for the fact that one of his displaced family’s first refuges was in Odessa, the beautiful city in the south of the country which is currently under threat of being occupied by Russian forces. “I went to school in Ukraine. It was always my nightmare of embarrassment to have to stand up and speak poetry in front of people—but now I realized I wanted to do it.”To preface the show, blue and yellow Ukrainian-flag T-shirts were laid on every chair, with a printed statement from Demna, ending on the note that love must win. Then his voice filled the auditorium, reading the encouragement to believe in Ukraine by Oleksandr Oles, one of the nation’s great cultural poet-heroes. No doubt about it, Demna wanted that to be heard solely in the Ukrainian language. No translation was provided. It would be understood by that those need to hear it, he said.East-West territorial, ideological and military power struggles in Europe go back very far. But always, amongst all the dual-lingual yet culturally distinct communities co-inhabiting borderlands between power blocks, it’s defenseless peoples who become victims. Ask Kim Kardashian about the history of her Armenian heritage. There she was, all wrapped up in Balenciaga tape, a friend of Demna and the house. A huge fuss, on globally-radiating celeb levels, ensued before the show had begun.
6 March 2022
Forget Y2K, friends. The Balenciaga news is that Demna (as he now wishes to be called) is rewinding the clock to the mid-to-late ’90s. That was the pre-internet, post-grunge time when the only permitted fashion color was black, the only goal was being cool, and when illegal warehouse raves—and deconstruction and minimalism and underground and guerrilla fashion shows—were so good.Mostly black and bristling with attitude, this pre-collection looks a bit like what Demna imagines that analog era felt like, while simultaneously being 100% recognizable as 2022 Balenciaga, of course. “The ’90s are the decade in which I realized I loved fashion,” he declared on the phone from Paris. “People have forgotten that era because you can’t really search it. Fashion was dirtier, nastier, and fun then, not filtered and behaved and polished and proper and seen on every single platform as it is now.”Obviously, Demna can’t really remember all the ins and outs of fashion in those days either. He was 14 in 1995. Not too young to form a whole-life commitment to thinking about clothes, though—or to set out on the route where he can end up at 40, having a great time playing around with the full ’90s-retro treatment: a look book of Polaroids, a film by the quintessential director Harmony Korine, and a faked-up video cassette marked “Balenciaga: The Lost Tape.” “It’s like discovering a show that never happened—it was a blurry period for Balenciaga, before Nicolas Ghesquière arrived.”The videotape he sent out is unplayable, obviously—an obsolete object for a new generation to puzzle over. “It’s like a useless, archeological artifact. I like nostalgia. I think it gains new value when everything is metaverse and cyber,” he said with a laugh. “I mean, I do embrace those projects too, with the games, clones, cyber-fiction, and everything.” Well, he can say that again. After two years of smashing through into digital entertainment with shows on VR headsets and the triumph of the Balenciaga x Simpsons and the red carpet movie-premiere collection in October, what could be more typically novel of him than doing a 180 with a concept that pretends to unearth a bygone time?He chose Korine, the cult director ofGummo(1997) andJulien Donkey Boy(1999), to work up a grit-and-grunge online presentation because “he always cast nonprofessional people on the street. He knew people in fashion, went backstage; he was part of ’90s bohemian fashion.
It was so interesting to watch how he worked, so unrehearsed.”
8 December 2021
“Well,” remarked Demna Gvasalia, with a considerable amount of laconic understatement, “we needed something fun to happen.” With an epic stroke of his genius for messing with fashion conventions and absurdist social commentary, he staged a Balenciaga return to Paris that was both a fake red carpet celebrity-studded, movie-style premiere event and a real one. “I’ve wanted to do a premiere concept where the guests would be the show for many seasons,” he said. “It was nice to have a social occasion again. I hoped it would make people smile.” Smile? It was hysterical.The regular fashion show audience was seated inside the Théâtre du Châtelet at 8 p.m., watching a big-screen livestream of the red carpet arrivals going on in a tent outside. Soon, it was clear that everyone was in on the joke: The familiar Balenciaga tribe of Demna’s house models, lining up to pose in character as celebrities; actual celebrities lining up to pose as models; celebrity models posing as celebrity models. Cardi B and Offset! Lewis Hamilton! Dev Hynes! Naomi! Amber! Ella Emhoff! Mark Tuan! Elliot Page! Isabelle Huppert!Live TV camera feeds zoomed in on faces, raked outfits, shoes, spiky boots, jewelry, and bags. Paparazzi bayed orders. Handlers moved people on in a perfectly performed real-not-real control of lens-hoggers.Inside, hilarity broke out. Numbered looks popped up on-screen. And everyone—truthfully—looked drop-dead glamorously amazing, each to their own, working gigantic gowns, severe-chic sequin columns, outsize black tailoring, skinny bodysuits, fan-pleated dresses, boas, oversized jeans, track pants, evil shades, angular printed-out loafers, monstrous cyber-goth platforms. The lot.Eventually, Demna himself—in a full black face veil, hoodie, and jeans, brought up the rear. As the red carpet contingent moved into the theater, kids in the street were still screaming, 10 deep behind the crash barriers.Not for them any distinction between fashion, celebrity, and spectacle. Demna gets how they’re thinking—and where he can go with it. Balenciaga has such a vast digital following, that, as he sees it, the whole brand is transitioning into something akin to entertainment. “It’s more like a music or movie business, in the way you can convey things,” he said. “I like exploring these borders.
”What the fashion audience didn’t know: The red carpet performance of the spring 2022 collection was the buildup to an actual film premiere ofThe Simpsons/Balenciaga, in which Marge and Bart (not to spoil the plot) end up modelling in Paris. “Because I’ve always lovedThe Simpsons, for its whole tongue-in-cheek nature and the slightly romantic-naive side to it” he approached the producers without much hope that they would ever want to collaborate. “But in fact they did. They saw the blue show—the Parliament one—and liked it. Matt Groening’s been amazing,” he said. The fame of Demna and Balenciaga has spread all the way to Springfield. After this, who knows what worlds he’ll conquer next.
2 October 2021
A fierce and noble elegance for our new age stalked through the haute couture salons of Balenciaga at 10 Avenue Georges V today. The sound of the suppressed gasps of fashion journalists and clients was heard again—albeit through masks—for the first time in the 53 years since Cristóbal Balenciaga closed his hallowed couture house. Monsieur Balenciaga showed in silence to focus the audience on the line, cut, and presence of his clothes. So did Demna Gvasalia.Facing the biggest test of his career, Gvasalia brought a heightened dignity to his own revolutionary vision of 21st-century people while simultaneously honoring the greatest couturier of the 20th century. Hence, the audible gasps. This was recognizable Demna and recognizable Cristóbal in one. “It was my minute of silence to the heritage of Cristóbal Balenciaga but also a moment of silence to just shut up for a minute,” he said. “The pandemic made me take that minute of silence—or few months of silence—and really understand what I like in this ‘metier,’ as Cristóbal used to call it,” he said. “And I realized it’s not about fashion—actually, I love clothes. I’ve been talking about clothes, clothes, clothes rather than fashion.”Demnaologists will know that’s why he originally started Vetements in 2014, on a mission to produce a wardrobe with a sense of generic authenticity yet crucially coded with the sociological irony that was instantly read, loved, and bought by the then marginalized generation of millennials. The power of that talent is what took him to the creative directorship of Balenciaga in the first place.His couture debut had rigorous black tailoring, sober and austere; expansively extravagant gestures of taffeta; swathed stoles; gorgeous flowered embroideries; and the offhand drama of set-back collars. And haute couture jeans—hand-made on original American looms bought by Japanese manufacturers and commissioned there. To the point: The feat he managed with this ultra-aspirational collection was not to turn his back on the aesthetics of the street and underground but to give the inclusive values of a generation a sensational elevation. Confidence, grandeur, ease: His focus was on how to imbue these clothes with “couture allure, posture, and attitude,” he said. How to give equal value to a black turtleneck, pair of jeans, utility jacket, or T-shirt as to a grand ball gown or skirt suit? “People put me in the box of someone who designs hoodies and sneakers—and that’s not really who I am.
I really wanted to show who I am as a designer, considering the legacy [of the house] that I’m lucky enough to have here,” he explained. “It was a challenge to find a balance between the fusion of the architectural legacy, the history, and what I stand for.”
7 July 2021
“It’s a deep fake of a fashion show,” declared Demna Gvasalia, on the phone from his home in Switzerland ahead of the launch of the ultra-high-tech video for his spring 2022 “Balenciaga Clones” collection today. “What we see online is not what it is. What’s real and what’s fake?”Ostensibly, one model—the artist Eliza Douglas, who has opened or closed Balenciaga shows since Gvasalia’s first collection for the house in fall 2016—appears wearing both women’s and menswear on a white runway in front of a black-clad audience. But no one was “there” and no one is “real.” “It’s a show that never happened,” Gvasalia laughed. “But the clothes are real; they were made.”Accompanying information came in a deluge of language detailing the techniques the video producer Quentin Deronzier deployed to fake up Douglas’s appearance: photogrammetry, C.G. grafting of her scanned face, planar tracking, rotoscoping, machine learning, and 3D modeling. Phew, whatever happened to fashion press releases speaking about bias cutting, draping, arcane fabric weaves, embroidery, and inspiration? We’re in a new world now, in large part because all designers have had to grapple with 15 months of the pandemic preventing real-life show gatherings. What’s the alternative onscreen? Gvasalia, for one, has delighted in grabbing the opportunity to shift the medium of brand Balenciaga ever further into the realms of multilevel, conversation-and-meme-generating entertainment. He started consulting with tech people well before the virus got out.There’s the Hacker Project, for one thing—this season’s return match with Gucci, in which Balenciaga has “stolen” classic Gucci bag shapes and reprinted them withBBs instead ofGGs, just as Alessandro Michele reproduced Demna Balenciaga patterns and diagonal branding in his last collection. There’s a Gucci best sellerGGbuckle belt redone withBBs too. “Alessandro and I are very different,” Gvaslia remarked. “But we both like to question this whole question around branding and appropriation…because everyone does it, whether they say it or not.” Surely a mischief-making dig at the social media court of who’s copied whom there—coals over which both Gvasalia and Michele have been hauled time and again.One of the totes comes knowingly scrawled with the graffiti legend “This is not a Gucci bag”—a reference to René Magritte’s 1929 paintingThe Treachery of Images. Questioning the authenticity of what we’re looking at has been going on in art since Surrealist times.
The result here: a perfectly oxymoronic range of “genuine counterfeits” for our mind-twisted times. Whether it actually matters who produces whatever in fashion anymore seems to be the big contention being raised. Up to a point. Sales receipts of these cobranded souvenirs will of course go safely back to the Balenciaga and Gucci parent company, Kering.
6 June 2021
You can see what you can see about Demna Gvasalia’s pre-fall collection. You can tune into today’s simultaneously-posted “Feel Good” Balenciaga video and not see any fashion at all—just a stock compilation of running horses, kittens, children, andahh-inducing landscapes. Enjoy!But the most radical content in this Sunday morning’s Balenciaga brand-blitz is invisible. “When I started this collection,” Gvasalia said, “I said only show me sustainable fabrics. I don’t want to look at anything else.” So everything here, beginning with the pink hoodie, emblazoned varsity-style with the wordsGAY Prideand swathed with a matching stole, to the black drama of the puffed-sleeve gown-like silhouette at the end, is made from recycled and otherwise certifiably okay materials. Almost wholly, that is, except for outstanding issues such as the the use of glue to stick sneakers together.That’s big from a brand as powerful and as influential as Balenciaga, one of the major fashion actors of the universe which calls on suppliers who do significant volumes business with them—and which is centered by Gvasalia on selling to the millennial–to–Gen Z fashion public worldwide. “As creative directors, [asking for this] causes a chain reaction, and we have to use it,” he said over the phone from Paris. He added that even luxury fabric suppliers who’ve been hesitant about investing in research and development of more sustainable materials are now seeing it “as a bit of an obligation.”Well, they would, wouldn’t they, when that means the difference between competing in business and not? Taking action on absolving shoppers’ anxieties about the damaging consequences of how their clothes are made ought to be the norm. Gvasalia promises that what’s gone into this collection isn’t a one-off gesture—because who isn’t suspicious of the greenwashing promo tricks of fashion these days? He started asking for better, more sustainable alternatives a while back, he attests, and began putting some of them into the collection in September. “And I must say, the situation has changed drastically in three years.”Now to the clothes: a photoshopped look book, posed against a wish-we-were-there travelogue of the famous backdrops of the world. Design-wise, there are just as many familiar Balenciaga-universe destinations here: the oversize hoodies, sweatshirts, tailoring; tweaked takes on signature floral-print dresses; recycled leather and denim things; magnified utility-worker jackets.
A lot of the garments, Gvasalia said, are constructed as joined-together all-in-one pieces “trompe l’oeil, so what you see isn’t what you get. A lot of dresses which are actually coats.” Convenience-wear for fashion-lovers to parade in outdoors during these tedious times when social occasion-wear might be banned, perhaps.
18 April 2021
At the final count of what’s happened in fashion communication in this mind-exploding year of 2020, here comes Balenciaga. Absent physical shows, Demna Gvasalia has turned game designer.Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow, an allegorical adventure, a collection, and a break into the lived world of millions of players, is launching today. “I hate the idea of fashion film. I find it very dated,” he says. “We started working on this in April, since we knew that fashion shows would be out of the question.”Quantum leap. There are levels and levels to explore in what Gvasalia is engaging with now, and only one of them is the fact that on the tech side he teamed up with Unreal Engine, the games engine of Epic Games. He says it took a hundred people to pull off what is boasted of as a record-breaking “volumetric” video project escapade—meaning (I think) the hours of expertise and advanced technology that it took to digitally scan the Balenciaga models and their movements in a studio in Paris, and then transform them into avatars. “I asked them to imitate couture poses, which actually turned out to look like how gaming characters stand at the beginning of a game.” So that’s the start—and how the basic look book content was shot IRL.The “hero’s journey” narrative (spoiler alert) he related to me in a long-distance conversation—he on the phone at home in Switzerland, me in London, as things go these days. He also sent over an Oculus V.R. headset to view a separately recorded Balenciaga fashion show experience for clothes-y professionals to get our heads around. But before plunging into the main journey—the free game which can be accessed on every device—there’s one much bigger point to compute as we take all this in. Balenciaga has now transitioned to a leadership position as a multi-platform media entity, agilely flipping between digital and physical platforms to sell tangible clothes up to the haute, and down to the street, with Gvasalia at the controls.And that’s what a successful modern fashion powerhouse looks like today—if there’s someone with a knife-like socially insightful intelligence like Gvasalia’s, and a big budget in play. Being able to get game design in his sights has been an opportunity in waiting, not some theoretical future. “Today’s customer does gaming. It’s an important luxury customer base. They project so much onto their character. It’s a parallel world.”
6 December 2020
At the final count of what’s happened in fashion communication in this mind-exploding year of 2020, here comes Balenciaga. Absent physical shows, Demna Gvasalia has turned game designer.Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow, an allegorical adventure, a collection, and a break into the lived world of millions of players, is launching today. “I hate the idea of fashion film. I find it very dated,” he says. “We started working on this in April, since we knew that fashion shows would be out of the question.”Quantum leap. There are levels and levels to explore in what Gvasalia is engaging with now, and only one of them is the fact that on the tech side he teamed up with Unreal Engine, the games engine of Epic Games. He says it took a hundred people to pull off what is boasted of as a record-breaking “volumetric” video project escapade—meaning (I think) the hours of expertise and advanced technology that it took to digitally scan the Balenciaga models and their movements in a studio in Paris, and then transform them into avatars. “I asked them to imitate couture poses, which actually turned out to look like how gaming characters stand at the beginning of a game.” So that’s the start—and how the basic look book content was shot IRL.The “hero’s journey” narrative (spoiler alert) he related to me in a long-distance conversation—he on the phone at home in Switzerland, me in London, as things go these days. He also sent over an Oculus V.R. headset to view a separately recorded Balenciaga fashion show experience for clothes-y professionals to get our heads around. But before plunging into the main journey—the free game which can be accessed on every device—there’s one much bigger point to compute as we take all this in. Balenciaga has now transitioned to a leadership position as a multi-platform media entity, agilely flipping between digital and physical platforms to sell tangible clothes up to the haute, and down to the street, with Gvasalia at the controls.And that’s what a successful modern fashion powerhouse looks like today—if there’s someone with a knife-like socially insightful intelligence like Gvasalia’s, and a big budget in play. Being able to get game design in his sights has been an opportunity in waiting, not some theoretical future. “Today’s customer does gaming. It’s an important luxury customer base. They project so much onto their character. It’s a parallel world.”
6 December 2020
“Hope is the last thing to die. That’s the Russian saying.” That’s the smasheroo of a remark that Demna Gvasalia threw into a long debrief about how he got himself into the making of the Balenciaga collection and video, which aired on the Paris Fashion Week schedule today. “You know, I couldn’t wait not to do a show. It didn’t feel right with the way things are. So we’ve made a music video,” he said on the phone from his home in Switzerland. “My husband recorded that ’80s track by Corey Hart, ‘I wear my sunglasses at night’—because you know, is there anything more absurdlyfashionthan that? It’s also allegorical. You know, where is fashion going? It’s out there, searching in the dark at the moment, not seeing…”But wait—there is nothing dystopian about this video. Au contraire: Gvasalia’s tribe of Balenciaga nighttime people are each captured as if heading somewhere with a purposeful step. We see them as they walk along the Rue de Rivoli, past the Tuileries gardens, embodying exactly the inimitable cool of the type of people who turn heads after dark on the streets of Paris. We clock them, we check out their clothes, how they’ve put them together, each to their own. They feel real—a visceral, vicarious vision of modern glamour, playing out against the backdrop of a Paris we’d all love to be part of again.Something happened to Gvasalia during lockdown. The very man who plunged his fashion show audience into a terrifyingly apocalyptic show experience last season has come back with his head in a far more optimistic place. “Because some day wewillbe out of this.” He imagined a man who leaves the house near the site of Cristóbal’s Maison—a Black guy, setting out in an oversized navy suit, wraparound shades, and what looks to be a sweater draped over his head (but is a ready-made Balenciaga accessory). “So,” Gvasalia related, “he walks through the night, going through lots of changes, morphing into her, him, them. And they end up meeting as friends, going to a party or a club maybe—and everyone is without masks. That’s the hope!” Pandemic-end pending, however, the film credits meticulously set out every detail of the COVID-secure measures taken to safeguard models and crew.
4 October 2020
“Hope is the last thing to die. That’s the Russian saying.” That’s the smasheroo of a remark that Demna Gvasalia threw into a long debrief about how he got himself into the making of the Balenciaga collection and video, which aired on the Paris Fashion Week schedule today. “You know, I couldn’t wait not to do a show. It didn’t feel right with the way things are. So we’ve made a music video,” he said on the phone from his home in Switzerland. “My husband recorded that ’80s track by Corey Hart, ‘I wear my sunglasses at night’—because you know, is there anything more absurdlyfashionthan that? It’s also allegorical. You know, where is fashion going? It’s out there, searching in the dark at the moment, not seeing…”But wait—there is nothing dystopian about this video. Au contraire: Gvasalia’s tribe of Balenciaga nighttime people are each captured as if heading somewhere with a purposeful step. We see them as they walk along the Rue de Rivoli, past the Tuileries gardens, embodying exactly the inimitable cool of the type of people who turn heads after dark on the streets of Paris. We clock them, we check out their clothes, how they’ve put them together, each to their own. They feel real—a visceral, vicarious vision of modern glamour, playing out against the backdrop of a Paris we’d all love to be part of again.Something happened to Gvasalia during lockdown. The very man who plunged his fashion show audience into a terrifyingly apocalyptic show experience last season has come back with his head in a far more optimistic place. “Because some day wewillbe out of this.” He imagined a man who leaves the house near the site of Cristóbal’s Maison—a Black guy, setting out in an oversized navy suit, wraparound shades, and what looks to be a sweater draped over his head (but is a ready-made Balenciaga accessory). “So,” Gvasalia related, “he walks through the night, going through lots of changes, morphing into her, him, them. And they end up meeting as friends, going to a party or a club maybe—and everyone is without masks. That’s the hope!” Pandemic-end pending, however, the film credits meticulously set out every detail of the COVID-secure measures taken to safeguard models and crew.
4 October 2020
Is it too early to say that online fashion weeks have been a fail—short on substanceandsignificance? Balenciaga is in the enviable position of showing women’s and men’s together in the fall. If anyone can deliver the “mixed reality” experience of fashion’s future we’ve all been talking about during this crisis but have yet to see, it’s Demna Gvasalia, who has been innovating around immersive runway shows for a couple of years now. The latest was unforgettable, with the first two rows of seats in the amphitheater submerged underwater and scenes of climate apocalypse on the screens above. All eyes will be on him in October.In the meantime, team Balenciaga came up with a clever, low-concept way to showcase the brand’s pre-spring collection, playing up the lack of IRL appointments by including in these photos all of the line sheet information an e-commerce buyer might glean in a showroom, virtual, or otherwise—all the way down to the garments’ and accessories’ material compositions and product IDs.Gvasalia is quick to admit that Balenciaga’s pre-collections aren’t really about newness. The off-seasons are chances to elaborate on what he calls the house’s “archetypes,” pieces like oversized car coats and parkas; the swingy Vareuse dress; logo denim; tracksuits, hoodies, and tees, of course; and the funnily named pantashoes. This time around, the styling was done completely on-screen. “It was an experiment in showing you don’t always need the new,” Gvasalia says. “Fashion has become a race, running after novelty, and more and more. And here we did the opposite. We looked at what we have and asked what we can do with it so it looks different for the customer.” Sharp observers may notice what the designer calls the collection’s “humor” and glean the sense that it’s about “taking things easier and just chilling out a bit.” There are house slipper-style mules and thong sandals worn with matching socks.“The theme,” he continues, “was dress for yourself. In this lockdown we understood what’s important for people who like fashion and like to dress up: You do it for yourself first and foremost. Working from home started with me wearing boxer shorts and pajama pants: very lazy. I thought, I don’t have to make an effort to make my look every morning, but then I started getting depressed. When I started to dress up every morning, it changed my whole mood, I started to feel good about myself.
This is the task that fashion has,” Gvasalia concludes, “to bring this excitement or goodness to the person wearing it. That’s the least we can do.”So back to October: After the fire and brimstone of his last show and its mostly black almost monastic clothes, Gvasalia says, “I can tell you one thing, my upcoming seasons are full of light, even though we’re still in this deep hole of horrible things. I believe through the work we do we can talk about this hope, the light at the end of the tunnel.”
9 July 2020
Fashion conversations frequently eddy around how much people enjoy ‘immersive’ experiences, but when the audience groped its way into the darkened Balenciaga stadium and suddenly realized that the first two rows were inundated with water—well, that gave ‘immersion’ a hellishly ominous new twist. It was just the beginning of Demna Gvasalia’s procession of sinister characters, walking on a vast stretch of water beneath an apocalyptic sky rent with fire, lightning and churning seas. “It’s the blackest show I ever did,” he said.Black: its resurgence, the cutting of new silhouettes, its links to minimalism and classicism, is playing throughout fashion this season. To each their own, though. Gvasalia’s route is always freighted with social observation on the state of the world, power politics, dress codes, fetishism. His intense parade of priests and priestesses in long black robes, with their “religious purity, minimalism, austerity” arose from memories of the Orthodox church in Georgia, and looking at the Spanish Catholic origins of Cristóbal Balenciaga. “He made his first dresses from black velvet, for a Marquesa to wear to church,” said Gvasalia.“I had a lot of clerical wear in my research. I come from a country where the Orthodox religion has been so predominant,” he said. “I went to church to confess every Saturday. Back then, I remember looking at all these young priests and monks, wearing these long robes and thinking, ‘How beautiful.’ You see them around Europe with their beards, hair knotted back and backpacks. I don’t know, I find it quite hot—but that’s my fetish.”More than anything, though, Gvasalia said he wanted to shift the parameters of menswear, so he could finally get to don some Balenciaga priestly maxi-skirts himself: “How come it is acceptable for clerics to wear that, but if I put on a long jacket and a skirt I will be looked at? I can’t, even in 2020!” But there were no two ways about it—on the runway, these men looked menacing.On closer inspection, they were wearing demonic red or black contact lenses; their faces brutally augmented with protheses. “Religious dress codes are all about hiding the body, about being ashamed—body and sex is the taboo. Whereas when you look into it, some of these people are the nastiest perverts,” said Gvasalia.
Holding that thought—about constraint, rules and belonging to sects—set him off, designing neoprene suits with tiny compressed waists for women and black leather “Pantaboots” with padlocked “chastity belts” and a whole series of leather biker suits.It’s telling that Gvasalia has been spending so much time researching Cristóbal Balenciga’s archive—no doubt in preparation for his first Haute Couture collection in July. Maybe some of what he called “our gala girls” in draped dresses with gloved sleeves and built-in leggings are a foretaste?As for hope, despite the biblical apocalyptic scenario Gvasalia created for fall: “In spite of all that’s going on in fashion and the world, I still love this. I suppose until the day I die, this is what I am passionate about. I love making clothes.”
1 March 2020
Fashion conversations frequently eddy around how much people enjoy ‘immersive’ experiences, but when the audience groped its way into the darkened Balenciaga stadium and suddenly realized that the first two rows were inundated with water—well, that gave ‘immersion’ a hellishly ominous new twist. It was just the beginning of Demna Gvasalia’s procession of sinister characters, walking on a vast stretch of water beneath an apocalyptic sky rent with fire, lightning and churning seas. “It’s the blackest show I ever did,” he said.Black: its resurgence, the cutting of new silhouettes, its links to minimalism and classicism, is playing throughout fashion this season. To each their own, though. Gvasalia’s route is always freighted with social observation on the state of the world, power politics, dress codes, fetishism. His intense parade of priests and priestesses in long black robes, with their “religious purity, minimalism, austerity” arose from memories of the Orthodox church in Georgia, and looking at the Spanish Catholic origins of Cristóbal Balenciaga. “He made his first dresses from black velvet, for a Marquesa to wear to church,” said Gvasalia.“I had a lot of clerical wear in my research. I come from a country where the Orthodox religion has been so predominant,” he said. “I went to church to confess every Saturday. Back then, I remember looking at all these young priests and monks, wearing these long robes and thinking, ‘How beautiful.’ You see them around Europe with their beards, hair knotted back and backpacks. I don’t know, I find it quite hot—but that’s my fetish.”More than anything, though, Gvasalia said he wanted to shift the parameters of menswear, so he could finally get to don some Balenciaga priestly maxi-skirts himself: “How come it is acceptable for clerics to wear that, but if I put on a long jacket and a skirt I will be looked at? I can’t, even in 2020!” But there were no two ways about it—on the runway, these men looked menacing.On closer inspection, they were wearing demonic red or black contact lenses; their faces brutally augmented with protheses. “Religious dress codes are all about hiding the body, about being ashamed—body and sex is the taboo. Whereas when you look into it, some of these people are the nastiest perverts,” said Gvasalia.
Holding that thought—about constraint, rules and belonging to sects—set him off, designing neoprene suits with tiny compressed waists for women and black leather “Pantaboots” with padlocked “chastity belts” and a whole series of leather biker suits.It’s telling that Gvasalia has been spending so much time researching Cristóbal Balenciga’s archive—no doubt in preparation for his first Haute Couture collection in July. Maybe some of what he called “our gala girls” in draped dresses with gloved sleeves and built-in leggings are a foretaste?As for hope, despite the biblical apocalyptic scenario Gvasalia created for fall: “In spite of all that’s going on in fashion and the world, I still love this. I suppose until the day I die, this is what I am passionate about. I love making clothes.”
3 March 2020
The true extent of the Balenciaga ambition to be all things to all classes of people materialized this week with the news that Demna Gvasalia will be reaching the haute echelon with the return of couture for the house in July. Meanwhile, down at street level, where he’s always gathered his sociologically inspired studies, here’s pre-fall, which oddly enough will begin to be delivered almost simultaneously with the couture show.The signs here—perhaps tongue-in-cheek—are that the brand is also looking to stretch laterally into so-called lifestyle clothing. The new GW logo stands for gym wear, and the new flat vegan trainers, Drive and Zen, look as if they might even be fit for running in—or at least contenders to replace the super-soled Balenciaga ugly trainer in the sneaker races.The Balenciaga Insta-meme factory that produces its joke branding is working faster than ever. Some people in this look book are taking selfies. One woman has a bell-sleeve Cristobal-style 1950s coat and printed leggings that are covered with the souvenir Balenciaga logotypes that Gvasalia and his team have tweaked since the time he took over here.There are others who belong to the tribe that likes to take its fashion sans logo. If you’re interested in Balenciaga, though, you will not be looking to it for bland, unnoticeable classics. The trouser suits in looks 49 and 53 service them, all right. The minimal cuts and off proportions of the boxy jackets and outward-curving trousers will call to fashion insiders as loudly as logos and slogans do to other Balenciaga shoppers.
21 January 2020
A month later, Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga Spring 2020 show is still resonating, its apparent indictment of power and corruption made all the more chilling for being wrapped up in a come-on to commerce. Gvasalia is the rare designer today engaging with sociopolitical issues and moving serious amounts of merch.This Resort collection was presented in the Balenciaga showroom during the July couture shows. It lacked the imposing set, haunting soundtrack, and facial prosthetics that made the recent show so potent, but it bears all the hallmarks of Gvasalia’s clever renovation of this historical house, among them: outsize parkas with their cheekbone-grazing collars; easy-wearing printed tea dresses; a surfeit of souvenir prints, not just on those tea dresses but also on shell suits, pajama sets, and stirrup leggings; and inventive, essentially unisex tailoring, this time double-breasted and often lapel-less. The look-book-opening coat is stamped with the Balenciaga logo in the familiar block print, but even without it fashion people could identify the sloping shoulders, buttoned collar, and boxy, exaggerated fit as signature Gvasalia. It’s big enough to wear a Balenciaga suit underneath it, and that’s a real-world application of so-called power dressing if ever there were one.Gvasalia uses these preseason collections as an opportunity to pump up Balenciaga’s accessories; his runways are refreshingly light on handbags compared to those of other labels. Here he showed the label’s popular phone-holder bags with reusable water bottles, which is arguably a better use for them now that we’ve hit peak plastic. And could he do for bedroom slippers what he did for dad sneakers? Just possibly, yes.The look book concludes on a V-neck dress, simple save its silver foil fabric, the same silver foil fabric that Gvasalia used for a showstopper of a Spring 2020 gown that nods back at the house’s couture past. This iteration was for the girl—or guy—whose lifestyle doesn’t accommodate crinolines.
5 November 2019
Fashion people are constantly racking their brains about what makes fashion relevant, but there’s no one like Demna Gvasalia for ushering an audience into a situation where the state of world affairs can bite so viscerally. He set his Balenciaga Spring collection in a political arena—a faux “Balenciaga parliament or assembly,” which he’d convened to investigate the subject of “power dressing and fashion uniforms.”So there we sat, in an auditorium Gvasalia had pointedly smothered wall-to-wall in a color not far off the blue of the EU flag, to view his socio-design study of the structure of today’s dress codes. Senior delegates—women and men in tailoring, a severe, anonymous, identically suited corporate presence—opened the show. Who were they? On their breast pockets were embroidered badges, two discs bisected with a Balenciaga logo—a construct not dissimilar to the Mastercard design.Then came what Gvasalia called the campaign dresses. “We looked at pictures of women politicians, of what they wear campaigning. We took this type of tailored daywear dress and tried to make it cool—not an easy challenge, to be honest,” he said. His solution was to “make them more boxy and cocoon-y, which is quite Balenciaga. So many body types can wear it. Democratic and easy-to-wear volumes.”All the while a bombastic, pounding, semi-militaristic, horror-movie soundtrack insistently filled the space, mixed by Loïk Gomez, Gvasalia’s partner. The cast of characters—they were named in the show notes as doctors, lawyers, gallerists, and engineers as well as professional models—kept on coming. The closer you looked, the more you saw the prosthetically augmented jutting cheekbones, the blown-up lips. It was subtly terrifying.Relevance, in Gvasalia’s mind, is equal parts sharp observation of what people wear and a focus on creating something that somehow relates back to the heritage of Cristóbal Balenciaga. That takes us to the crinoline dresses right at the end—almost a child’s cartoon fantasy in their bouncy silhouettes. “Ballroom dresses go back to the beginning of Balenciaga, when [Cristóbal] started in Spain. It was mostly this type of silhouette he did, from Spanish painting,” Gvasalia observed. “But we wanted to make sure they were wearable. If you take out the crinoline, you have a sort of goth dress.”In the middle, there was aDynasty-era section, with huge shoulders and the fashion glitz that went with oil-rich couture patrons all those years back.
What were their 2020 avatars doing, stalking the corridors of power today? No need to answer that.We felt the fear, we saw the clothes. Some of it—the jersey sport pants, motocross pants, and tailored jackets—looked as if it will jibe with that young generation of male shoppers who are looking for a style upgrade from hoodies. Gvasalia senses the social shifts there too.Asked if he considered this collection to be a paring back of shape and a honing in on reality, he came right back with an answer that resonated beyond his pragmatic design issues (easy clothes to feel powerful in) or the diverse personality casting: “Reality? I don’t think it gets more real than this.”
29 September 2019
Fashion people are constantly racking their brains about what makes fashion relevant, but there’s no one like Demna Gvasalia for ushering an audience into a situation where the state of world affairs can bite so viscerally. He set his Balenciaga Spring collection in a political arena—a faux “Balenciaga parliament or assembly,” which he’d convened to investigate the subject of “power dressing and fashion uniforms.”So there we sat, in an auditorium Gvasalia had pointedly smothered wall-to-wall in a color not far off the blue of the EU flag, to view his socio-design study of the structure of today’s dress codes. Senior delegates—women and men in tailoring, a severe, anonymous, identically suited corporate presence—opened the show. Who were they? On their breast pockets were embroidered badges, two discs bisected with a Balenciaga logo—a construct not dissimilar to the Mastercard design.Then came what Gvasalia called the campaign dresses. “We looked at pictures of women politicians, of what they wear campaigning. We took this type of tailored daywear dress and tried to make it cool—not an easy challenge, to be honest,” he said. His solution was to “make them more boxy and cocoon-y, which is quite Balenciaga. So many body types can wear it. Democratic and easy-to-wear volumes.”All the while a bombastic, pounding, semi-militaristic, horror-movie soundtrack insistently filled the space, mixed by Loïk Gomez, Gvasalia’s partner. The cast of characters—they were named in the show notes as doctors, lawyers, gallerists, and engineers as well as professional models—kept on coming. The closer you looked, the more you saw the prosthetically augmented jutting cheekbones, the blown-up lips. It was subtly terrifying.Relevance, in Gvasalia’s mind, is equal parts sharp observation of what people wear and a focus on creating something that somehow relates back to the heritage of Cristóbal Balenciaga. That takes us to the crinoline dresses right at the end—almost a child’s cartoon fantasy in their bouncy silhouettes. “Ballroom dresses go back to the beginning of Balenciaga, when [Cristóbal] started in Spain. It was mostly this type of silhouette he did, from Spanish painting,” Gvasalia observed. “But we wanted to make sure they were wearable. If you take out the crinoline, you have a sort of goth dress.”In the middle, there was aDynasty-era section, with huge shoulders and the fashion glitz that went with oil-rich couture patrons all those years back.
What were their 2020 avatars doing, stalking the corridors of power today? No need to answer that.We felt the fear, we saw the clothes. Some of it—the jersey sport pants, motocross pants, and tailored jackets—looked as if it will jibe with that young generation of male shoppers who are looking for a style upgrade from hoodies. Gvasalia senses the social shifts there too.Asked if he considered this collection to be a paring back of shape and a honing in on reality, he came right back with an answer that resonated beyond his pragmatic design issues (easy clothes to feel powerful in) or the diverse personality casting: “Reality? I don’t think it gets more real than this.”
29 September 2019
Presented in the Balenciaga showroom during Couture Week back in January, this combined men’s and women’s Pre-Fall lineup was so outsized that it warranted two visits (before and after a show) to view every look. In the center of the vast space were monolithic screens depicting larger-than-life people in the clothes—and this, combined with the near-total absence of actual people, Demna Gvasalia included, made for a feeling that was at once serene and sterile.With no distractions, but also little context, the mind arrived at certain empirical observations. Texture, for starters: remarkably smooth and yielding padded leather wrap-front coats in yellow and burgundy (worthy of whatever splurge); the return of draped, crushed velvet ensembles that were tickly to the touch; a crunchy surface of dimensional lacquered flowers covering every inch of rounded tops; and wildly plush fake fur alongside colorful spongy knits and cool polka-dot silks. An overly descriptive summary, perhaps, but the satisfaction derived from getting to wear these whenever one wants should count for something.If this was a collection that advanced ideas from Spring, it iterated on earlier seasons, too. Moulded tailored jackets and cinched-waist outerwear; all-over print dresses and sharply tailored pants; BB boots and sling-backs with both squared-off and pointy toes—what might have felt déjà-vu came across as reigniting desire. But by the same token, newness felt incremental: an all-over Balenciaga logo print in a woozy typography couldn’t help but stand out, as did a heavy silk treated with indigo so that it was a dead-ringer for washed, crinkled denim. Judo uniform detailing was transposed to collars of dresses and trenches alike as a sober, understated flourish. The kitten-heel thong sandals will be everywhere, even once the temperature drops.Back when Gvasalia made his Balenciaga debut, he explained to Sarah Mower that he started by “making a list of garments.” Three years on, he seems committed to this approach. That the models are wearing headphones and staring down or speaking on their phones—one is even holding a Paris-size coffee cup—suggests that any of us should be able to project ourselves onto the looks in a very real, non-idealized way. And this will translate as soon as the clothes hit stores (which, given Balenciaga’s deliberate release of images, is today). In fact, for most of us, the only idealized aspect is imagining that this entire wardrobe could be ours.
4 June 2019
Between the acrid smell of newly paved asphalt and a low ceiling of strobe lights, the Balenciaga Fall show framed Demna Gvasalia’s view of the Paris street. He called it “my ode to the customer, to people who actually go shopping for fashion. Because of course—this is the reason I do it!”Like several shows this season, it felt like a clearing away of background distractions so you could see silhouettes—the minimal, cool tailoring with an upstanding, rounded shoulder head; the buttonless wrap-over cocoon coats and jackets; and the run of solemn, minimalistic-chic pantsuits (with no-joke trousers, how rare!) calculated to please both men and women. Gvasalia knows he is dealing with the kind of fussy people who care about integrity and drop-dead fit—potential swing voters in the suddenly rapid competition between houses.Gvasalia said he’s continued to apply and refine the molded, computer-manipulated techniques he’s brought into the house for the past year, “but now they’re more subtle, I would say. They are the tailoring tricks we apply to making a shoulder structure.”The fact that he’d cut away the background spectacle—the digital-art tunnel of last season, the ski mountain of the one before—meant that all the attention was focused on the clothes. Up to a point. You can still deliberately grate on an audience’s senses through the smell of the street, the brutally repetitive march of techno music, and exposure to flashing lights for an extended period. Gvasalia is far from alone in wanting to stage a metaphorical reflection of the state of the world in his show—it’s almost a responsibility and a badge of belonging to the intellectually-attuned set of designers which includes Rei Kawakubo, Miuccia Prada, and Rick Owens.Gvasalia did all that in a long, long 109-look coed show of womenswear and menswear. He said he’s not showing pre-collections anymore, so the entire brand’s stall for the next six months was laid out here in all its varieties of gender, age, and accessory appeal.Here are one or two things that stood out: his retooling of Cristóbal Balenciaga monastic silhouettes as “incognito” high collars and hoods that obscured the wearer’s face from side view—an extreme, intellectually witty extension of Gvasalia’s reputation as a maker of hoodies. The erasure of trainers, Dad-like or otherwise, in favor of square-toed black leather shoes and new high boots for men. The young men carrying fistfuls of B-branded shopping bags. “It’s real,” said Gvasalia.
“When I’m on the streets of Paris, that’s what I see.”
3 January 2020
Between the acrid smell of newly paved asphalt and a low ceiling of strobe lights, the Balenciaga Fall show framed Demna Gvasalia’s view of the Paris street. He called it “my ode to the customer, to people who actually go shopping for fashion. Because of course—this is the reason I do it!”Like several shows this season, it felt like a clearing away of background distractions so you could see silhouettes—the minimal, cool tailoring with an upstanding, rounded shoulder head; the buttonless wrap-over cocoon coats and jackets; and the run of solemn, minimalistic-chic pantsuits (with no-joke trousers, how rare!) calculated to please both men and women. Gvasalia knows he is dealing with the kind of fussy people who care about integrity and drop-dead fit—potential swing voters in the suddenly rapid competition between houses.Gvasalia said he’s continued to apply and refine the molded, computer-manipulated techniques he’s brought into the house for the past year, “but now they’re more subtle, I would say. They are the tailoring tricks we apply to making a shoulder structure.”The fact that he’d cut away the background spectacle—the digital-art tunnel of last season, the ski mountain of the one before—meant that all the attention was focused on the clothes. Up to a point. You can still deliberately grate on an audience’s senses through the smell of the street, the brutally repetitive march of techno music, and exposure to flashing lights for an extended period. Gvasalia is far from alone in wanting to stage a metaphorical reflection of the state of the world in his show—it’s almost a responsibility and a badge of belonging to the intellectually-attuned set of designers which includes Rei Kawakubo, Miuccia Prada, and Rick Owens.Gvasalia did all that in a long, long 109-look coed show of womenswear and menswear. He said he’s not showing pre-collections anymore, so the entire brand’s stall for the next six months was laid out here in all its varieties of gender, age, and accessory appeal.Here are one or two things that stood out: his retooling of Cristóbal Balenciaga monastic silhouettes as “incognito” high collars and hoods that obscured the wearer’s face from side view—an extreme, intellectually witty extension of Gvasalia’s reputation as a maker of hoodies. The erasure of trainers, Dad-like or otherwise, in favor of square-toed black leather shoes and new high boots for men. The young men carrying fistfuls of B-branded shopping bags. “It’s real,” said Gvasalia.
“When I’m on the streets of Paris, that’s what I see.”
3 March 2019
“The symbol on the bags is the one for transgender.” Demna Gvasalia designed the Balenciaga Resort collection six months ago, but the arrival of the pink and the blue leather shopping bags printed with the black circle, arrow, and cross couldn’t be better timed. They’re chic, they’re cute, and they defy President Trump’s intention to define transgender out of existence. Voilà! The perfect item for a holiday gift this year. “I often try to include some messages that are important to be spread,” Gvasalia says. “It’s almost like advertising an idea, this very strong symbol.”Gvasalia’s stand against the encroachment of right-wing conservatism might also be read into the flag-print shirt that comes some way into the men’s collection. He shrugged off a suggestion that it might be a plea for unity in a darkening era of nationalism (see French President Emmanuel Macron’s definition of patriotism versus nationalism in his Armistice Day speech), but you can read what you like into the selection of flags used: France, Italy, Germany, Austria, England, Switzerland, two Balenciaga logo flags, “and one that we made up.”The world citizens of Balenciaga-land have plenty of signs and symbols to play with should they choose. Also, if you look close, there is a seismic piece of fashion news for men snuck in here at ground level. Of all the footwear in this lookbook, there are only two pairs of Balenciaga’s famous monster-sole dad sneakers. In a move guaranteed to shake the sneakerhead world from top to toe, all the rest are dark leather shoes with elongated square toes, name of Rim. Why? Well, Gvasalia has taken this gasp-making step into once-reviled footwear recently. Such are the winds of fashion: The man who helped plunk gigantic fashion sneakers on the map becomes one of the first to dare step onward from their orthodoxy.Certainly, in this interim-collection setting, they’re being broken in gently, shown in the context of demi-casual street looks: the slightly flared boot-leg jeans, utilitarian quilted coats, plaid jackets, pullover sweater hybrids. But in the timeline of trend, these shoes are the precursors of the bigger step Gvasalia took with his Spring collection toward tailoring and formality.Are trainers and hoodies about to be made obsolete? Of course not; they’ll continue on their way at Balenciaga as per usual. Only a fool would stamp out a line that commands a large income stream, and Gvasalia is no one’s fool.
On the contrary, he is one of the smartest fashion designers of our times. One who is both building onto the Balenciaga wardrobe—all the signatures of silhouette and Parisian chic are visible here, for women—while knowing how to advance fashion incrementally into new territory.
13 November 2018
“Presence is the key. Now is the answer.” These fragments of speech were intoned somewhere midway during the overwhelming onslaught of computer-generated imagery that bombarded the audience seated in a tunnel at the Balenciaga show. “I always had this idea of a video tunnel, like being inside someone’s digital mind,” said Demna Gvasalia. “Fashion shows are for transporting people, otherwise there’s no point. It was like working on a movie, getting people into another reality, so it stays as a memory.”The project came together when he met digital artist Jon Rafman at Art Basel. Rafman was on hand to talk about the creation of the immersive experience. It had the audience so stunned that people were transfixed in their seats for a good few seconds after it ended, trying to process what they’d just seen. “My work explores new technologies and how our society, our consciousness, our interrelationships have changed,” Rafman said. He and Gvasalia collaborated at a distance, with full creative freedom given to the artist. “It was a marriage of kindred spirits,” Rafman added.Well, being in that tunnel, you couldn’t help but feel you were present. Dealing with focusing on the present, with all the roiling complexities, dissonances, and noise and distractions of the world around us provided the backdrop for the collection. This time, Gvasalia was intent on tackling what modern clothing might be and how it can rationally make sense to a new generation. “I wanted to take a lot of things that are in our vocabulary, but give it this new dimension of elegance,” he said.The first looks out were a continuation and refinement of the 3-D molding technique Gvasalia introduced last season: a series of femme-fatale replicants in strong-shoulder, nipped-waist coats. Given the visual drama of the digital magma erupting all around, it could have strayed into a dystopian sci-fi zone, but Gvasalia had other ideas. “We challenged ourselves to make tailoring for today’s generation. How can they wear a suit—which they never do?” he explained. The solution he called “neo-tailoring”—fluid shirt-jackets with matching trousers, for men and women alike. “It’s like a jogging suit, but it looks super-elegant in shape. There’s no obligation to wear a shirt and tie, because the jacket has become the shirt. Somehow,” he said, laughing, “this is what I want to wear myself.”
30 September 2018
It’s hard to spot milestones in fashion when we’re all speeding along so fast (while looking down at our screens) that we barely bother to glance out the window anymore. Well, just a thought, but are the boring tweed pantsuits the most interesting thing in this Balenciaga collection? This is not intended as a slap to Demna Gvasalia, backhanded or otherwise. Nor is it a belittling of the effort put into a pre-collection, where commercial clothes reside. But you know? After Miuccia Prada went back to the simplicity of her ’90s roots for a refresh in her much-applauded pre-collection in New York, there’s a distinct emotional gravitational pull toward non-messy design going on. Uncomplicated, well-cut stuff looks good again.In this case, the eye is drawn to the long-line, single-breasted jackets with narrow pants—used to be called cigarette—in menswear checks or pinstripes, worn with, say, a tartan pair of low, pointed, stiletto ankle boots. Cristóbal Balenciaga used tweeds, for sure, but these have nothing more than that to do with him. They’re just a very nice case of It Is What It Is.Well, as we know, people don’t herd in the same direction in fashion anymore, so who will be afraid to be boring and who will leap at it as a massive relief is going to be a purely subjective matter. Possibly Gvasalia wasn’t as focused on being boring as he was on designing this collection, because the lineup bears some of the hallmarks of his main show, a lot of which was more along the lines of It Is What It Isn’t, otherwise known as trompe l’oeil. Here we see, perhaps, the beginnings of when he started fusing garments, turning a pile of things into one piece. They became gigantic coats in the Fall collection; here you see a plaid shirt being sewn onto a silk dress; men’s short-sleeved shirts with printed waterfall sleeves fused onto them; a black jean jacket and a quilted country jacket mated with a black-and-white plaid blanket, complete with fringe. And so on.Other Balenciaga/Gvasalia interventions and transportations continue, like the curved, reflective piping on the tweed coat at the beginning (an idea borrowed from wet-weather motorcycle-riding kits) and the by-now highly recognizable floral “pantaboots.”Nevertheless, isn’t it the case that it’s the things you haven’t seen recently that always stand out the most? Perhaps it’s time for boring to be interesting again. Maybe this is actually a milestone of the year, or at least one that’s coming up around the next bend.
In which case, we’ll have to think of some new terminology for it. Let’s see . . . not minimalism, not normcore, hmm . . .
16 May 2018
“After two years at Balenciaga, I wanted to take all the codes of the house and filter them so they can be one aesthetic and one ethic,” said Demna Gvasalia. It was the first time women and men walked together in a unified show, and for Gvasalia, it represented a conceptual and personal leap forward. Instead of merely imitating the heritage looks of Cristóbal Balenciaga, he’d dedicated R&D time to working on a high-tech computer-enabled process for molding tailoring for women and men alike. Bodies had been 3-D scanned, the “fittings” were done in a computer file, and then molds were printed out. Traditional fabrics—tweeds, wool, velvet—were then bonded to a lightweight foam.We saw the results: people walking in their identically shaped razor-sharp, sleek, basque-waisted jackets and coats, looking almost like a cast of post-humans in some futuristic Bond-movie ski scene.There were Bond girls in dangerously draped body-con minis, Miss Moneypenny replicants in tweeds, and 007 clones dressed in knife-sharp ski trousers tucked into their shoes.Behind them was a fake snow mountain, its crags and crevasses graffitied with Balenciaga’s logos, smileys, a peace sign, and a big “Be Aware” slogan. Gvasalia described it as “kind of a snowboarder paradise from the beginning of the ’90s. We tagged it with all the things we were talking about in the studio at the time.” The theme of snow brought on the idea of layering against the cold. Coats upon jackets upon fleeces upon flannel shirts were progressively piled up until, by the end, there were people covered in up to seven pieces of fused-together outerwear. There was a phase where it began to look very similar to the mounds of clothing Gvasalia presented at Vetements in January. But then came the correction: At the end, a huge turquoise nylon parka and two fake furs seemed to reconnect with the volume and glamor of ’50s Balenciaga bubble gowns. Back to Cristóbal again.Progressive ideas are much needed in fashion today, on all kinds of levels. Gvasalia’s mission to recode Balenciaga tailoring in the cyber age might not be a future solution—it still involves the use of synthetics, and you could argue that it negates the skills of the human hand. Nevertheless, the thinking behind this collection marks Gvasalia as a designer who wants to be an agent of change in the fashion industry, and who goes for social change, too.
The show included World Food Program–branded merchandise that will be sold to benefit the United Nations charity which acts to relieve food poverty. A simultaneous donation of $250,000 was made by Balenciaga to the fund. “You see, I don’t want to be just a T-shirt-and-hoodie man. We sell them, of course—but I feel I have a responsibility to do it in a way which brings a message.” Ethics x aesthetics. Sounds like a timely way forward.
4 March 2018
Introducing the Balenciaga scrunchie. And why not? This end-of-year collection is an apposite juncture at which to appreciate the workings of Demna Gvasalia’s sense of humor. At a preview in Paris last June, it was laid out for inspection in trays as this Resort lookbook was being shot. Would you like to wear a couple of bunches of plastic grapes as earrings, with another, perhaps, as a dangly ring? Maybe the exaggerated button earrings will appeal—literally, a pair of magnified vintage Balenciaga double-B logo buttons, that is? Or possibly, some of the office supply elastic bands or fridge magnet letters that have become involved in the jewelry?At times like this, when we’d all cry unless we laughed, Balenciaga’s absurdist accessories are perfectly timed. The jokes gleefully spark up the otherwise straight-faced continuity of the clothes, in which Gvasalia and his team have gone back to build on some of the foundations he’s laid down since placing an outsize Balenciaga logo on a stole in the first collection for Pre-Fall 2016. Designers need to normalize their own innovations and make them available to be bought over time. Thus, the reiterations of the pantaboots—fused leggings and stilettos—that have been a surprise runaway seller since they first appeared in the Fetish collection of Spring 2017, the car mat–inspired pencil skirt of Fall 2017, the Helly Hansen–inspired padded coats of Fall 2016, and the flower-print blouses and dresses he’s revived all along.But back to the beginning, and that Balenciaga stole—the perfectly calculated Insta-influencer viral billboard-teaser Gvasalia put out before his first runway show at the house. In effect, it was a preview of one of the things Gvasalia has pursued intently: his interest in logos and how they can be manipulated, retrieved from a brand-licensing past that was once regarded as beyond the pale of sophisticated taste, and then doused in the gasoline of ridiculous desirability again.On a deeper level, there’s a slyly intelligent debate about fake-versus-real implicit in his scheming. (E.g.: The airport shop souvenir–inspired New York, London, Tokyo, and Hong Kong bags can be bought as, well, souvenirs only in those cities). There are Balenciaga logos all over the place now.
One of them is a diagonal print lifted from vintage linings that is now stamped on quilted, chain-handled lady bags, which in themselves might be copies of the faked-up branded merchandise that was churned out in the name of the house in the ’70s and ’80s. That same reappropriated print now appears on Balenciaga carpets in shows and in stores—part of the corporate sub-theme Gvasalia is also manipulating. Contemporary fashion relishes irony when it sees it. And if it doesn’t, well, it’s arrived at a state where it jumps at logos willy-nilly, anyway.Gvasalia is a top expert at re-chic-ing the mundane. There’s a difference between catching a trend and playing to the crowd of mass popularity for fun and profit (the logomania revival is of course endemic, now) and being able to put the stamp of a total look on a time. Gvasalia has done the latter thing: His silhouettes, even the slope-shouldered stance and the “real” look of the models, are much imitated high and low throughout fashion. The copier, copied. It’s one of the funniest things about fashion today.
8 November 2017
Demna Gvasalia stood backstage wearing a hoodie printedFBI. When somebody eventually pointed at it, he quipped: “I’m investigating!” As a designer and creative director, Demna Gvasalia is the CCTV of fashion, or perhaps its all-seeing drone: observing, zooming in on what people wear, their uniforms and social habitats. His current report on the “real” was uploaded onto the Balenciaga high-fashion platform today. It made for some ominous reading.“I wanted it to be more Demna, less Cristóbal this time,” he explained. “After the past few seasons, I could feel myself getting restrained by homages.” So, can he define what “Demna” is? “Something more vicious. Gothic, in a way,” he replied. “Fashion is a reflection of the way we live. I wanted this feeling [that] something dangerous is going to happen.” And he pointed at the heavily spiked, ankle-strapped pointy stilettos which captured his mood. “I’m pleased with them,” he said.Recognizably, it was a Balenciaga collection much nearer to the practice he brought to the world with his own brand, Vetements. Showing in a cavernously dark place, he reconfigured archetypal clothes, segueing through men’s striped shirts, punk tartans, ladylike pencil skirts, T-shirts, utility jackets, and negligees. Soon, it became apparent that the pileups of garments weren’t just a matter of layering. Trench coats were attached to denim jackets, lingerie slips attached to turtlenecks, lace camisoles joined to polka dot chiffon dresses, and so on. “They are joined, so you can wear them one way or the other as you will,” he informed us. Next season, Balenciaga will effectively be throwing a buy-one-get-one-free bonanza.Meanwhile, Gvasalia’s trenchant observational sense of humor was all over the collection; the kind of bad-taste-into-chic provocation that gives him the edge with Balenciaga maniacs. Scans of euro and dollar notes and screen-saver scenes of sunsets and mountain landscapes became prints. Souvenir-shop charms jangled from chain belts and bag straps. Chunky gilded earrings were taken from old “duty-free” Balenciaga-branded merch. A plastic molded top-handled motorcycle bag appeared. At one point, trousers and skirts took on the detail of café umbrellas and awnings, complete with fringe. Finally, like Christopher Kane, he went to Crocs—the ultimate ugly comfort shoe producers—to make a line of giant platforms.It begs questions, of course.
Gvasalia cut his teeth at Maison Martin Margiela, and his appropriations of ordinary things are fully in that tradition. It kind of posits the notion that nothing new can be created in fashion, except for the way in which things are chosen and placed together. In Gvasalia’s case, the context is very different. His blurring of the lines between the real and the fake is self-evidently a running commentary on the state we’re all living in. Some will doubtless find something morally outrageous in this happening within a luxury brand. Then again, since when should creative people have to toe a conservative line? Gvasalia, with his sharp eye for socio-political commentary, is never going to do that. And for a smart and knowing generation, that looks chic.
1 October 2017
On the first day of summer, some men took their children to the Bois de Boulogne to play in the woods, where they happened to walk along a path upon which the Balenciaga menswear show was underway. Demna Gvasalia professed to wanting his latest collection to seem almost as if the family involvement was sheer happenstance, hardly fashion at all. "There is nothing more beautiful than seeing young dads with their kids," he said. "This collection began with looking at a lot of pictures of them." The casting wasn't difficult, he added. "We just asked our usual models whether they had kids." The call netted three homemade Balenciaga families. A tall blond guy, Christoffer, impressively topped the paternity league, strolling with his two daughters, Lucy and Alma, and son, Severin. Christoffer was wearing an outfit of the Dad-est clothes Gvasalia could contrive to seem to un-contrived: a white shirt, a drapey teal jacket, a pair of bleached jeans. On his feet, a pair of brown leather shoes were quite regular-looking until you spotted the gilt fifties-script Balenciaga logo on the strap.The walk in the forest was Part II of Gvasalia's ongoing sociological investigation into of the condition of Corporate Man. Part I was the survey of the dress codes of the Executive Suits and Tech Nerds he conducted for Fall. "This is the same man, on casual Friday and the weekend," Gvasalia explained, adding that his intention was "back to basics" and taking his off-duty fictional character "into his comfort zone."Comfort zone? Gvasalia was talking about at least a few things there, not just the pleasant leafy surroundings and the simple, happy escape into nature possible even in the midst of a modern city as stressed as Paris. The "comfort" was also in the the way so many of the clothes—washed-out jeans, schlumpy linen jackets, generic Hawaiian-print shirts, nasty, big old anoraks—were constructed to look as if they'd been dug from the archaeological layers of a man-horded wardrobe going back to the late '80s or early '90s.Part of Gvasalia's agenda here was the re-cooling of the absolutely uncool—the polo and rugby shirt; the excruciating visuals of the hoiked-up and the tucked-in. A central item in that re-presentation was the rumpled-up, lopsided linen-look '80s tailored 'granddad' jacket. Relics of the kind can be found in charity shops everywhere.
At Balenciaga, they come deliberately weighted in the pockets and linings to reproduce that specific attitude of lived-in droopiness.
21 June 2017
Demna Gvasalia’s building of an identity for Balenciaga has happened at such a speed that there’s already a whole inventory of recognizable things the house “owns.” Seeing a pair of skintight pointy stiletto boots, a forward-sloping tailored jacket or coat, a cheesy retro floral dress, or one of his giant striped Bazaar market bags will provoke instant Pavlovian brand recognition. The ultimate art, however, is the teasing out of ideas over time, varying and adding. With Pre-Fall 2017, Gvasalia has all that fully down, too.Fashion geeks with an eye for provenance will know that the tailoring, with its basque hip and forward-thrust shoulders, comes from Gvasalia’s first collection for the house, Fall 2016; and that the spandex-encased legs, ’70s swimwear-inspired florals, and strangulated necklines hail from the Fetish show of Spring 2017. What comes more to the fore here is Gvasalia’s knack for applying social observation and the inspiration of ordinary everyday objects to his design. In one clever instance, it’s the mere idea of a knotted headscarf, which gets deployed as tied necklines—minor to major—on everything from frilly baby bonnet hoods to jean jackets to vast padded ski jackets. In another, the wraparound cut of the satin dresses—some short, one a red evening column—originated in the cotton dressing gowns Balenciaga in-house models are given to wear between fittings.While there’s the frisson of serious chic in these clothes—there has to be, they’re substantial purchases—there’s also a sophisticated eye for the marginally ridiculous appropriated object. Thus, there’s a new square striped bag in the shape of a padded café cushion, while the triangular one started life as a ski-shoe carrier. Both those are bound to be picked up by avant-garde trophy hunters, not to mention the jewelry: on the one hand, grand repro-Cristóbal brooches, and on the other, dangly earrings and pendants in the shape of Christmas tree baubles.
27 April 2017
“At Balenciaga, wearing the clothes inspires new clothes. That’s the way we work here,” Demna Gvasalia was explaining the provenance of the swept-to-one-shoulder frontages of the tailoring at the beginning of the show. “I went through almost 30 years of photographs of Cristóbal’s lookbooks, and in many of them the models were clutching their coats like this.” So he made the design follow the gesture, and that accounted for the off-kilter buttoning of the coats, jackets, duffels, and puffers. (Somehow, that equals elegance and cool—that’s the Demna part!)As distinct from his street-based Vetements collection, Gvasalia says he has set himself the goal of capturing “modern sophistication” for the couture house founded by Cristóbal Balenciaga a century ago. “I like ease and wearability. These wordsnonchalanceandattitude—I don’t know what the new synonyms are for them, but that’s it.”Truth be told, the asymmetric fastening at the beginning came over as a bit awkward and over-fashion-y (though, as he pointed out, unbuttoned, they’re just normal coats with some extra volume on one side). He made a clearer case for a redefinition of pulled-together chic with the pencil skirt looks—the trick being that they’re re-appropriated car mats. Gvasalia has just bought himself a car. One of his design methods is the repurposing of things, whether they’re objects from the daily environment of modern life or triggered by looking into the archive. Wing mirror clutch bags, key-laden chain necklaces, and diamante belt-buckle earrings flashed by.That all adds to the proliferating attraction of Balenciaga accessories. Last season’s spandex stocking-boots, brilliantly colored, continued apace. When it got to the floral print section, though, the idea of draping fabric spilled over into the draping of the “Knife” stilettoes. There were flower-print and polka-dot versions, and then—surprise—a preview of possibly the world’s first protest shoes, draped in look-alike Bernie Sanders Balenciaga T-shirt material.Still, what came next stole the show: Nine spectacular Balenciaga couture dresses, issued in honor of the 100th anniversary. Gvasalia said he’d gone about making them by reinterpreting what he saw in the archive photos of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s incredible landmark designs of the 1950s. “At first, we tried to do things with them, but I thought it was too much,” he shrugged. “So I wanted to keep it pure.” Good call. Some preexisting things just can’t be improved on.
The only tweak Gvasalia made amongst the bubbles, the flounces, and the feathers was the addition of pockets and giant matching Bazaar bags. The result: elegance and cool. He nailed it.
5 March 2017
Demna Gvasalia’s method at Vetements is to look at the street, at what people his age and younger are wearing, and to enlarge on (often literally) what he sees, while running a satisfying seam of subversive commentary through archetypal garments. In evolving his raison d’être for Balenciaga’s menswear, it’s just the same, only the street view is more upmarket and the archetypes more elevated. This season, he only needed to glance across the cobbled courtyard of Balenciaga’s headquarters to take his social reading. There, going to work daily, is a cross section of the constituency Gvasalia wants to persuade to spend their heftier paychecks on luxury clothes: the corporate employees of the brand’s parent company, Kering, the international fashion business powerhouse whose offices are in the opposite wing of the same vast, elegant 17th-century former hospital building on Paris’s Rue de Sèvres. “My work is always about reality,” Gvasalia said. “It’s just honest. That is what’s happening around us.”At a juncture when the dominance of corporate power seems to have overtaken politics, that remark could be taken in a couple of ways—as could the red, white, and blue reworking of the Balenciaga logo, which appeared on padded scarves and was embroidered onto hoodies. As an American journalist said, pumping Gvasalia’s hand backstage, “Loved the political flags!” There were Kering logos, too, placed on the back of padded coats and prominently emblazoned across a sweatshirt, to interpret as we will.All ironies and in-jokes aside, Gvasalia takes his job of winning brand loyalty for Balenciaga seriously, analytically, and pragmatically. Traditionally, tailoring is at the heart of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s heritage, and that’s where Gvasalia started, with an impressive series of ankle-length overcoats, slightly curved in at the waist (a nod to Cristóbal’s womenswear basques) and with the kind of sloping unpadded shoulder line perhaps last glimpsed at Giorgio Armani in the late ’80s. “I wanted to look at formal attire, take away its rigidity and coldness, and make it comfortable,” Gvasalia said, adding that he cast the show—which included several older men—“to be physically diverse. Not everyone has a model body. I don’t.”More important, with this collection, he’s out to convert every type of man who might be susceptible to fashion expenditures—and he recognizes that it’s a potentially broad demographic. He is commercially gripped about this.
Where last season’s show struck a dramatic introductory stance with extreme contrasts of flat and boxy or tight silhouettes, with this one he set out to embrace all manner of men, from the CEOs who might be driven into underground company parking garages by limo, to midlife motorcyclists (the biker boots), to the rising ranks of employees who’ve never had to wear a suit or a formal pair of shoes to work. Since trainers are ubiquitously acceptable these days (footwear that makes the old feel young), the new offering is the Triple-S sneaker, so named because it appears to have three stacked layers of recycled soles. Underfoot comfort, indeed.Making tailoring sexy again (or, rather, for the first time for anyone born after 1987) was a Gvasalia side mission. He cut the jacket roomy, stripped off the shirt, and lowered the narrow trousers to fractionally above pubic level. (Possibly about as believable a corporate-rep image as Iggy Pop at Davos, but then again, at retail, the easy proportions of the jacket will work well for the non-emaciated.)Still, it was Gvasalia’s transitioning of the show into sportswear via full-length padded coats—a sublimation of the generic attire of rugby and soccer managers (another super-wealthy, competitive fraternity)—that was really smart. The point about Balenciaga as a brand with a past is that it legitimately includes the extremely haute (via Cristóbal), the proudly experimental (via Nicolas Ghesquière), and modern sportswear (via Alexander Wang). Gvasalia’s talent is that he reads all this and understands how every aspect of it may be pragmatically reactivated and orchestrated for the company right now.
18 January 2017
The fact that a sense of humor can be wrapped up in the “hit” of a seriously chic fashion idea is often overlooked. Bring forth exhibit A inDemna Gvasalia’s first Balenciaga Resort collection: a candy-striped bathrobe coat with a matching fringed stole-cum-towel thrown over one shoulder, contradictorily worn with a pair of pointy low-heeled ankle-strap shoes, and a baseball cap jammed on low over the face. What could this be, but a witty take on “resort” in its literal sense as luxury winter retreatwear yet transformed into something urban and street-clever, too?It’s not hard to read the geographical signposts for the Balenciaga holiday destination, what with all the shirting-stripe caftans, surely somewhere in North Africa, or thereabouts? But then again, maybe not. The clever thing about Gvasalia is that he can simultaneously signal sights and accessories (his now-famous striped market bag) you would see around the poorer, immigrant areas of Paris, while making a pair of summer slides that are unmistakably based on the kind of slippers provided in luxury hotels.Down to earth yet elevated would be the way to put it about striped cotton aprons that are recast as halter-neck sundresses, or indeed the texture of generic Parisian café chairs, which are worked into the newest bags. Perhaps he was sitting at one of those same cafés watching skateboarders one day? Surely, that’s where the supersize pants came from, a piece that will keep stylists clamoring for months.Still, Gvasalia is a realist with an eye to modernizing non-resort types of tailoring for more of a grown-up existence, too. That’s expertly dealt with in jackets and coats with forward-thrust Balenciaga-line shoulders, updated, if you will, with Bermuda shorts.
24 October 2016
There’s no faking it when a label turns women on—all you had to do was visit theBalenciagastore on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré this week to witness the instant conversion of fashion editors toDemna Gvasalia’s first collection. The place was practically a convention of industry insiders, each fixated on homing in on a floral printed dress, an oversize trenchcoat, a striped Market bag, or a pair of bejeweled pumps. In his second show, it may have been no coincidence that Gvasalia was turned to think about the motivations behind that fashion fetishism, the drive to possess a particular object and the thrill of stalking out in it. When you’re playing at this level, the stakes are high—the premiere league of designers belongs to those who can show women something they’ve never quite seen before, but leaves them panting for it.Well, Gvasalia joined that league today, by risking the use of spandex, the synthetic stretch fabric that was invented by DuPont in 1958. Spandex takes intense color and print brilliantly, shrink-wraps the body, and, as he proved, can drape in a kinkily slinky, glamorous way. For many a year, stretch has been shunned in high fashion, except in the case of the dreaded athleisure trend. Safe to say, Balenciaga’s use of spandex had nothing to do with sport.In a thought process that led on from last season’s stirrup pants, he encased the entire lower body, pointy stilettos to hip, in single colors and bright, Lilly Pulitzer–type retro florals. In a passing reference toCristóbal Balenciaga’s swathed couture gowns, he swathed the upper body in glam evening tops—part ’80s Krystle Carrington à laDynasty, but wholly contemporary-looking.There were shoulders, too. Needless to say, Gvasalia’s reinvention of the oversize silhouette has been powerful enough to set a trend running. This time, he went further, inserting a whalebone rod across the shoulders of trenchcoats and boxy jackets. To own a look, you need to innovate. It might be a long step too far for normal people, but that’s surely the point. There are extremists who will gladly follow anything he does.Interestingly though, the Gvasalia knack is that his avant-garde instincts are grounded in street practicality. Last season, he did that with off-the-shoulder ski jackets. The Spring updates were a couple of witty inflatable gilets. But then? Enter a useful red nylon rainproof parka, with a hood tied, head-scarf-wise, under the chin.
The latex and patent leather capes that ended the show were the final “fetish” punchline guaranteed to stimulate hundreds of requests for editorial shoots. But more important yet is the fact that he is also a designer who is contributing clothes that will really be worn on the street.
2 October 2016
Demna Gvasaliahas spent much time poring through theBalenciagaarchives since he joined the house last October. Under his direction, the Pre-Fall lookbook was apparently shot there, while his first womenswear collection reinterpreted the attitudes found inCristóbal Balenciaga’s haute couture for everyday clothes of today. While pawing through the shrouded racks of gazar, cocoon-backs, and three-quarter sleeves for her, Gvasalia found a coat. It was Cristóbal’s own, made by his own hands. He never finished it. So his latest heir decided it was his job to complete it—and it opened this show.That coat was not only the basis for the tailoring of the unfitted jackets that made up half of this show; it was also a fitting metaphor for its entirety. No pun onfitting, although fit was what the collection was all about. In every breast pocket sat a small piece of card you’d be forgiven for thinking was a pocket square. Gvasalia asserted they were the fitting cards used to record the measurements of clients in bespoke tailoring. That’s the closest menswear ever gets to haute couture, and Gvasalia chose to use it as his jumping-off point for this, the house of Balenciaga’s first-ever men’s runway show.What Gvasalia tailored, forcefully, was a pair of silhouettes, either expanded to gargantuan, David Byrne’s Talking Heads proportions, or shrunken so close to the body that each jacket rever appeared to cross under the arm. Trousers were voluminous and necessarily cinched with belts, or tourniquet-tight. Essentially, nothing looked like itfitin the true sense of the word, which was absolutely intentional.Like Cristóbal himself, Gvasalia is fascinated with the architecture of clothes. His garments this season were all about shoulders—either expanded a foot sideways to dwarf the models’ own or tugged so tight the swell of the human shoulder distorted the sleeve head. Hench versus wench. If the henchmen had the most immediate impact, pairs of models shoulder-barging each other as their American football–size pads clashed like Claude Montana models of old, the latter was quietly ingenious. Look at the back of any of those bandage-tight Balenciaga coats and they’re perfectly fitted to the body, a tailoring master class. “I wanted to push it,” said Gvasalia.
22 June 2016
TheBalenciagaPre-Fall collection was the work of the internal team, designed between the departure ofAlexander Wangand the first runway show by Demna Gvasalia, or so the brand’s press release has it. Vogue Runway sleuths, behind the scenes at the Paris showroom we were invited to for a viewing of the collection during the couture shows in January, emerged slightly skeptical on that point. Even if Gvasalia hadn’t had a chance to design the whole, there was a detectable Vetements-related flavor in the styling of this lookbook and in one or two pieces, to boot. Especially in the thigh-high stiletto heeled boots, as it happens—as seen here, printed in the Balenciaga windowpane grid pattern, the archival Vichy check, or in tiny florals on black. Then there’s the hoodie, shot in profile to emulate the Balenciaga concave-front, sway-back silhouette, and, to clinch the case, the flowing lines of a long, voluminous, undeniablyVetements-like flower-printed dress.That said, the imagery has a different feeling from that of Vetements; it’s more sophisticated in its use of oversize proportions, and in the choice ofStella Tennantand Julia Nobis, modeling among racks of garment-bagged clothes meant to suggest the Balenciaga archive. If the team delved into that historical resource and then projected forward, guessing what the new creative director might want, then they did a respectable job. Still, though, was it really without guidance? One of the references, picked from the time ofNicolas Ghesquière, was an oversize shearling aviator jacket, refurbished with a printed collar spelling out the brand name, a neat trick Gvasalia reprised with the large Balenciaga labels he put on the puffer jacket and anorak in his debut Fall show. It gives that flying jacket, not to mention the Balenciaga logo stoles-cum-banners, the stamp of early trophies for Gvasalia fans who want to be first in on his new act.
24 May 2016
“How do you persuade a woman to wear a two-piece suit who is not the German Chancellor?” askedDemna Gvasalia, who has spent the last six months looking into theBalenciagaarchive and methodically thinking through how the essence ofCristóbal Balenciagacan be relevant for a modern woman. Result One, the first look: a gray flannel two-button jacket and a slit pencil skirt, in which the shoulders are slightly curved and set fractionally forward, and the hips minimally padded. “It was the posture and the attitude, and Cristóbal’s way of working with the body I found interesting,” said Gvasalia, while admitting to nerves in the buildup to his debut. “Cristóbal was about the tailoring. I wanted a new way of finding that elegance for today, in a 360-degree way.”Gvasalia wasn’t just talking about the profile created by the forward-leaning technical cut of the coats and jackets, the whoosh of volume in the fronts of skirts, and the inward-angled stiletto heels. This was a “profiling” in a much bigger sense—a pragmatic, intelligent, sweeping analysis of whole categories of what women might want to wear on a daily basis, if they care about fashion—or, rather, about dressing well. The effect was a surging visual high for women of many ages who saw, among the glittering earrings, taut ski pants, jeweled stilettos, oversize puffers, padded scarves, soberly chic checked sheaths and multi-floral dresses, an inspiringly whole and succinct set of wardrobe desires answered.“I started by making a list of garments, which is what we do at Vetements. Like the shirt, the coat, the trench coat, the aviator, the floral dress, the sweater. Then we drape—I never do sketches,” said Gvasalia. “And then we ask ourselves: Friends would like to wear it? We asked Eliza, the girl with the glasses, who closed the Vetements show, to open Balenciaga. And she said, ‘Oh, a business suit! I like this!’The influential Vetements collective, which is led by Demna and his CEO-brother Guram, has swept fashion over the past 18 months with a reputation based on upgrading streetwear to boiling-point desirability. Gvasalia’s ability to look at a generic garment with new eyes was at work here, too, filtered through the Balenciaga lens. “We saw his amazing opera coats, and then I thought we could do these open, pushed-back necklines with these, like big Helly Hansen jackets—or with the trench coats,” he said. Realistic, useful bad-weather outerwear, with a fashion punch, done and dusted.
6 March 2016
Alexander Wang’s three-year stint atBalenciagais over. He went out dancing, snapping selfies and twirling down the runway. His swan song was the freest of any of the collections he did for the house, and the most tender. All in shades of ivory. All paraded softly out on lace slippers. All in soft, natural fabrics like linen, cotton, and voile with gentle, furling edges. It looked effortless, where the ones that preceded it felt effortful.Work began on this collection after the announcement was made that Wang and Balenciaga’s parent company Kering would not be renewing his contract. At the time Wang said he’d be refocusing his attentions on his signature label. Maybe that awareness loosened him up. Maybe he really hunkered down, determined to go out on a high note. Whichever, it’s no small irony that his last and best collection for the brand was the one that was truest to his own bred-in-California sensibilities. A remix of The Notorious B.I.G.’s iconic “Going Back to Cali” played on the soundtrack. Bella Heathcote, Riley Keough,Zoë Kravitz, and other Hollywood friends of his with “normal”-sized, not overly thin bodies grounded the show in reality. Loungewear was at its soul, with boxer shorts peeking above waistlines and bra tops exposed under quilted jackets.As relaxed as its vibes were, a good deal of work went into the collection’s smocking, ruching, and ladder stitching, and yet it remained light. “When you know it’s your last anything, you say, ‘Let’s take a risk,’ what do you have to lose?” Wang said backstage. “At a house that’s known for innovation, I thought, ‘Let’s think about it the opposite way, let’s think about fabrics and shapes that feel supple and simple, but approach them in an artisanal, couture way.’ ”FollowingNicolas Ghesquière, the innovator Wang was referring to, had to be one of the toughest jobs in fashion. As Wang sped back down the runway tonight he nearly tripped over one of the show’s reflecting pools before catching himself and continuing backstage. It was a pointed image. His own show was bigger than ever and one of the highlights of the New York calendar. The question isn’t how Wang will fare now, but how Balenciaga will pick up the momentum again.
2 October 2015
All week long, the question on everybody's mind was: What would Nicolas Ghesquière, the man who has been dubbed “fashion's new messiah,” do to top himself at Balenciaga?Ghesquière's success has everything to do with his ability to subtly evoke a variety of references, altogether avoiding clichés and creating clothes that are richly layered in meaning and almost impossible to categorize. The early 1900s were a point of departure for his black-and-gray collection, but Ghesquière's architectural and impeccably executed designs soon took on a life all their own. Tight vests created hourglass silhouettes, some with exaggerated hips; front plackets on tops were tightly wound and crisscrossed like lace-up corsets. His fitted trousers, which have a devout cult following, were studded to match buckle jackets; miniskirts came with layer upon layer of ruffles, pleats, tassels, and appliqués that never looked redundant or heavy-handed.Given his ongoing success, will Ghesquière launch his own label anytime soon? “I'm very happy at Balenciaga,” said the designer after the show. “But I also want to work on my own line. The ideal would be to do both things simultaneously.”
8 August 2015
Just throw a runway show already. It's not that the Balenciaga showroom isn't amenably equipped for gawping at lookbook images and riffling through the rails. It is. And it's not that the house's spokesperson isn't comprehensively briefed, passionately engaged, or immune to disconcertion should a critic choose to sniff a buffalo-hide biker or stick his hand up the leg of the brand's inaugural male swimwear to check if it has an inside brief. It happily does, and she sincerely isn't—disconcerted, that is.Balenciaga's chief mission may be in the crafting of luxurious derivations and century-appropriate upgrades of house-canonic silhouettes for women, but its menswear under Alexander Wang is toughly considered and highly conceptual, too. This collection, right down to the sweating concrete backdrop of these images or the zipper on swimmers than concealed a hidden small-change pocket, was meant to evoke the titanically crumbled grandeur of Niemeyer's Brasília and the Constructivist sharpness of Lygia Clark. That agenda—plus the fact that this is Balenciaga by Wang, for heck's sake—totally merits a show.In the absence of one, that rail truffle threw up lots of sometimes portentous but always forensically conceived menswear whose ascetic severity belied its richness of fabrication. A multi-pocket, leather-trimmed Japanese cotton parka, in fact, featured precisely 18 receptacles, some overt and some hidden: According to its imperturbably charming leather-clad curator, their jumbled-ness was meant to evoke an urban landscape. Fair enough, that parka gave great functionality-as-expression. The "nubby" cotton-nylon tank top provided texture; the paper-thin leather track pants and jacket offered lightness; and the palm-frond shadow print—rather lovely—pointed to place. The python hinted at dangers that lurked beyond the tree line. A topcoat was a big deal because it included an internal vest-cut waistcoat—the hidden (yet functional) layer beneath. The accessories rocked, most of all a sterling silver backstage-pass wristband that was luxe-witty—how rare is that? A brushed brass neck-bornenécessairewas less playful, but gleamingly want-able in its hand-tooled tactility. It just seems a pity that Balenciaga does not present a ceremony at which its followers can adore while the rest consider.
25 June 2015
Alexander Wang has been situated at Balenciaga for almost two and a half years. As posts go, it's as prestigious as it gets, but he's managed to retain his sly sense of humor. It came out on a logo scarf made from what looked like terry cloth. It's Resort, after all, he could've been saying—have a beach towel with your white coat and trousers. A few looks later there was an actual beach towel, wound sarong-style around the hips of a black swimsuit, but it's not the kind of thing you'd want to get sandy or wet.Elsewhere, the evening dresses with corsetry boning, silk and cotton jacquard peplum jackets, and a synthetic lace skirt peeking from the hem of a double-breasted sleeveless coat looked every inch as precious as they really were. The idea Wang was working with this season was couture from the inside out. It read as a warmer-weather, lighter-in-spirit extension of his Fall show, which explored the mid-century shapes of Cristóbal. The lightness factor made it easier to like. It was just easier to imagine slipping into these pieces and going about your cocktail party or gala event business than it was last season. Real-world ease is something he's excelled at with his signature brand. Balenciaga is a different business entirely, but it was good to see some of Wang's old self rubbing off here.
5 June 2015
"The society women, the aristocrats, the regal women." Alexander Wang said he started working on his new Balenciaga collection by thinking about Cristóbal's original clientele. Not only them, but also the customers today, and how they want their opulence served up with a little subversion. To set the tone, the show began with a performance by Lady Gaga, who stalked down the runway, hands on waist and hips a-swinging, a pair of photographers catching the whole thing on tape.Wang's shapes were straight out of the archives: a cocoon coat, rounded jackets with stand-up collars, bubble skirts—all of it decorated to the hilt with paste jewelry, like the ladies would've done back in the day, only with the real stuff. In most cases, the fabrics remained quite couture, like nubby tweeds, windowpane checks. It was the details that gave the clothes the edge Wang was talking about: Metal staples lined the diagonal seams of skirts, black leather belts stood in for proper collars, and tiny razor blades were sutured together to create the fitted shirt of the finale dress. For every fur collar there was another one made from wire rings linked together. Many of the looks, cocktail dresses included, were paired with flat boots.Nicolas Ghesquière did his own archival collection at Balenciaga almost a decade ago. It's not fair to endlessly compare Wang to Ghesquière, but coming second in this revival story, it's not a fate he'll soon escape. Anyway, choosing to go in this direction for Fall indicates it's a fate he's accepted. But tonight Wang's version of the story fell short. The risk of choosing stuffy old icons as a jumping-off point is that you may not manage to knock all the stuffing out. The hobble skirts proved pretty tricky for a few of the models, and a sense of heaviness pervaded. Mary Blume, a Balenciaga biographer, remarked that Balenciaga's silhouettes were "made for a living, moving, avid body." The one here that fit that bill best was a strapless peplum bustier, its neckline trimmed in mink, accompanied by cigarette pants with staples up the sides.For Tim Blanks' take on Balenciaga, watch this video.
6 March 2015
Alexander Wang built his aesthetic on the street; Balenciaga is a European couture house. Wang's first couple of years at the French label have been a dialogue, sometimes difficult, between his natural instincts and those of the atelier, but he's in the groove now. Chalk it up to the commercial imperative of the Pre-Fall season or the simple fact that he's been at the brand for two full fashion cycles, but there was an appealing forthrightness to the clothes presented at the company's Left Bank offices today. They looked polished without sacrificing much of their hip factor, and they weren't trying too hard. They were, in a word, wearable, starting with a five-piece capsule—bomber, trench, Perfecto, etc.—in sheared mink.That said, the clothes weren't without special details, either. Jackets and other tailored separates featured "spray paint" jacquards, as if they'd been tagged by a graffiti star (that's one way to give a suit some streetwise edge), and a pair of sleeveless bias-cut dresses came with unexpected embellishments: squiggle flocking in one case, and a row of brass buttons marching up the side seam in another. Those brass buttons were a recurring motif, and their military connotation gave pieces on which they appeared the zing of essentials. Creating desire, of course, doesn't all come down to need. A rhinestone brooch in the shape of a cursive B was superfluous in the most fabulous way.
25 January 2015
Alexander Wang is proceeding with the integration of his aesthetic into the Balenciaga canon with respect, exactitude, and purpose. This fourth Wang-helmed menswear collection dutifully began with a reading of the founder's cocoon coat, its seams reduced by envelope construction, its placket neutralized, and its ovoid embrace ensured by a robust wool blend. Below were the narrow, springy wool/nylon foam trousers and protectively high, rugged-soled leather boots that featured throughout the show. The aesthetic was monkishly ascetic. High-cut double-face jackets came with a frontispiece that was applied via magnet at the collarbone; cashmere mock turtlenecks in black or white nodded to the clerical.These were clothes that treated decoration with almost puritan suspicion, with the exception of one tri-textured lambskin. A cowled long coat was double knit to achieve the suggestion of scattered stones; a two-piece gray knit jacquard resembled a snowy mountainside under moonlight. A wool, nylon-armed sweatshirt with a body made of hand-cut meshed astrakhan was a sermon on the potential for artisanal techniques to uplift sportswear. And yet a technical nylon jacket cut by ultrasonics defied the orthodoxy that technology and luxury are mutually exclusive. Those who live in this industry often overlook the pejorative potential of the "L" word. At Balenciaga Wang is refining an iteration of luxury that treats the superfluous as sacrilege in pursuit of the pure. For some people that strictness will be off-putting, but for others it will be the key draw.
21 January 2015
Up until this point at Balenciaga, Alexander Wang has been fairly reverent, not just of Cristóbal Balenciaga and his couture codes, but also of Nicolas Ghesquière, Wang's immediate predecessor. Tonight, the designer began to break free. New 8 p.m. time slot, new Palais de Tokyo location, and a state-of-the-art glass and grid-work runway under which dry ice machines pumped smoke.The first model stormed out to the soundtrack's thumping beats in a sweeping duster coat that peeled back to reveal a snug, partially sheer tee and cutaway shorts. At a glance, it was tempting to see signs of Wang's early work in New York—the way he blended sport and the street. But that's only part of the story. Wang was in Paris this summer during the Tour de France, and it was the world of cycling—the competitors' second-skin kits, the shoes that clamp into pedals—that influenced the built-for-speed feeling of this collection. Silhouettes were lean and athletic: the pants leggings-tight, shirts clingy, and dresses cut like a glove.Embroideries elevated it. Balenciaga, Wang pointed out at a preview, wasn't only about pure, austere lines. "There was a long chapter of decorative embellishments," he said. This is more complicated territory for Wang; couture-type handwork has proven tricky for him to master in his two years at the Paris house. His approach here was to stick with tonal embroideries and think along geometric lines, and it paid off. A black jersey with jet beading and burned ribbon stitched in a lattice pattern looked like a keepsake, but it had the cool factor of a T-shirt. A net dress strung with black seed and bugle beads gave off sporty vibes despite its lofty provenance (it was inspired by the diamond tile floor of Cristóbal's atelier). Not everything connected like those two pieces, but this was nonetheless the right track for Wang at Balenciaga.
24 September 2014
Alexander Wang's boyish bonhomie has gone a long way in buttering up whatever naysayers there may have been following his Balenciaga appointment, but more than anything it's the designer's appetite for innovation that's getting noticed. It can't be overlooked the degree of subtle ingenuity Wang has been able to pull off—both in his eponymous New York line and for Balenciaga. His new men's Spring collection for the French house continues in this vein with its bold array of materials, shapes, silhouettes, and reinventions—the kind he's been working on in women's, many of them clever updates of the founder's signature works from nearly a century ago.Resurrecting the Cocoon look and rendering its rounded shoulders in silk is no easy feat. Even something as (deceptively) simple as Wang's suede tee for Balenciaga, with its snap buttons, is a small marvel of engineering, as are several waterproof Mackintoshes (made so by way of internal taping up of seams), sculptural double-knit cotton tops with grosgrain trim, and jackets with laser-cut gussets in back. Same goes for paper-thin bonded lambskin shorts, a tuxedo jacket with a coated taffeta lapel, and trousers ergonomically cut from a patchwork of skins—they don't shout their artistry from the mountaintops. Colors were kept to a strict palette of naval shades, and prints were all but eschewed, a decision many major houses prefer so as to better focus on a more impressive technical prowess. Essentially, what Wang is doing is creating a men's legacy at Balenciaga where none existed before.
24 June 2014
A year ago, for his first Resort collection at Balenciaga, Alexander Wang took his lead from Cristobal Balenciaga's coastal town in Spain. Today, he returned to the sea, looking at modern sailboats. "At the beginning, it was about the idea of architectural forms and symmetry, the 360-degree view," Wang explained backstage. "Here, I wanted to work with asymmetry, cutting more fluidly."His sailboat starting point came through in any number of ways. A canvas miniskirt was stamped the way sailcloth is with the house's Paris address. The collection's utilitarian outerwear was influenced by the sturdy shape of foul-weather gear. And on the accessories front, Wang couched clear Perspex clutches in corded silk fishnet sacks, and sent the models out in honest-to-goodness galoshes with python insoles. Silver necklaces and bracelets were cast from real shells. If the bareness of the look jibed with the sailing metaphor, there was a surprising number of exposed midriffs and uncovered thighs. It's a Resort collection, yes, but you want to see Wang stretch a bit more. His most sophisticated variation on the theme came toward the end of the show, in a series of draped tops and jackets with trailing asymmetric hems modeled directly from the triangular shape of sails. We can picture those becoming a thing on dry land.
3 June 2014
Now in his third runway season at Balenciaga, Alexander Wang is settling in and feeling more confident. You could see it in the all-American sportswear, with its references to utility and speed. And it was there in his emphasis on knits, too. As a design student, Wang began his own business with a line of knits. Having noticed their absence in the archives, he was eager to bring some of that vocabulary to the house.We're not talking about run-of-the-mill sweaters, of course. Wang's Balenciaga is a laboratory and the clothes this season were experiments in hybridization. At a preview, he explained, "I go back to pieces that feel familiar—it's a sweater, it's a wrap dress, it's a raincoat—and ask myself, 'How do I make it feel special?'" Cabled knits were laminated with latex or bonded with leather. Rugby-stripe dresses were knit from thin strips of Japanese polyester jersey, and ribbed pullovers were reimagined with thick fur ribs. Wang also gave the evening sweater idea a go, adding gray wool shrugs with dense "sea urchin" beading around the necklines to draped and wrapped duchesse satin tops.As it goes with experiments, many worked, but some didn't. The opening coats with their beaver fur panels, knitted leather kangaroo pockets, decorative zipper details, and belts looked belabored. His belted wrap coats in marled brights, by comparison, were unfussy and uncomplicated, and they were better for it. Moving forward, Wang should learn to trust in simplicity. Other elements in the show suggested he's absorbed that lesson. His slim, slightly flaring pants were exemplarily cut; they were sexy and leg-elongating, a fact that was put into sharp relief by an understated turtleneck with an asymmetric hem. Meanwhile, "shopping bag" bags, which the models carried in multiples, pointed to Wang's sense of humor. The seriousness of his responsibilities at Balenciaga had seemed to sap him of his signature playfulness in the past. To see him having some fun here was a positive development.
26 February 2014
Alexander Wang's tenure at Balenciaga has so far been marked by his interest in the lesser-known corners of Cristobal Balenciaga's archive. Yes, the very nameBalenciagaconjures up couture shapes and volume, and that heritage is name-checked, as it were, in the rounded shape of a roll-neck sweater or a drop-shouldered coat. But it's the more curious bits of vintage B that seem to tickle Wang. First there was the metalmaillonclasp that he has made his signature at the house (it appeared here as part of the closures on a toggled duffel). Now there is Cracknyl, a synthetic imitation leather Balenciaga developed at the house in the late forties. Wang cut it into a two-button blazer, shown beneath a puffer jacket, and used it for a duffel coat.The world may or may not have been waiting for the return of Cracknyl, with its plastic feel and Hefty bag sheen. But its inclusion is at least testament to a disposition that says "why not" before "why." Why not make that puffer coat in parachute silk? Why not suggest a sporty popover in heavy satin as the new evening jacket? (From a distance, the satin looked more leatherlike than the Cracknyl). Why not include a zipper snaking around the lapels and neckline of a double-breasted jacket, which opens wide enough for a scarf to snake through?As usual, the collection was rounded out by evergreens that raise no questions at all: Leather jackets, including an especially streamlined version in elephant gray; sharp-shouldered suiting; and a cool double-breasted formal coat tweaked every so slightly by the outsize addition of grosgrain on its lapels.
18 January 2014
Alexander Wang has been at Balenciaga for just over a year now. Pre-Fall is his most confident collection to date. The reason: It married the Cristobal Balenciaga codes with 21st-century performancewear, a language Wang knows intimately from his years at his own label. "Techno couture," he's calling it.At its most obvious, the mash-up produced a gabardine cocoon coat accented with waterproof aquazips at the cuffs borrowed from scuba diving and polyurethane patches at the shoulders lifted from uniforms. It had a sporty urgency that felt modern. Elsewhere, Wang captured the high-low attitude he was going for by cutting a "jean" jacket and mini from needle-punched wool and mohair or by pairing a real astrakhan pullover with a skirt in an astrakhan print. A black-and-white intarsia sweater that was pixelated like a computer screen looked arresting accompanied by deep green snowboarding trousers with Cristobal volumes.The more classic part of the collection didn't gel quite as well. Since arriving at the French house, Wang has made a point of emphasizing the 360-degree nature of his designs. This season, he used simple squares, rectangles, circles, and triangles to create more complex draped shapes. With their circular construction, the winged jackets looked a bit overthought. But his experiments did yield a beauty of an evening dress. The liquid black Japanese silk satin column gown that closed the show was very nearly backless. As sexy as it was, it's hard to believe it was built on a rectangle.
7 January 2014
With his generally well-received Balenciaga debut in the rearview mirror, Alexander Wang felt encouraged to go beyond the homage phase today. Where that first show had a certain purity of form with its direct lines to Cristóbal Balenciaga, his new effort had a sense of experiment and play. If the result was more uneven, it also pointed to potentially fruitful avenues of development. And it's fair to say you saw clearer glimpses of Wang in it, especially with the opening pieces—a muscle tee, a tank, glorified running shorts, and Perfecto jackets. This was sporty streetwear, in other words, albeit executed in densely handwoven leather braid."The idea was to start strong and austere, and let that unravel," Wang said earlier. "I want to bring ease into the DNA and codes of the house that I'm working with." He presented the new collection at the Observatoire de Paris, a lofty space that has apparently never been used for a fashion show before. Wang knows the value in being first, and that appreciation informed the materials he developed. Molded leather that was embroidered with thread and then printed with a swirling floral motif, along with those hand-braided pieces, are prime examples of innovation, where couture and twenty-first-century technology meet. But they looked somewhat stiff. A trio of dresses—meringues of ruffles suspended from corset bodies—erred on the overwrought side, too.The clothes got better as the show went on, and rigidity gave way to the ease that Wang was talking about. He cut an excellent new pant, high-waisted and with a tulip-shaped peplum that curved over the hips, and he showed this item with crop tops made from a crushed, pressed, and laser-cut printed fabric that came off as quite effortless despite the crazy amount of work that must have gone into them. Paired with elegant silk cape-back tops in white or black, for a more dressed-up evening look, those trousers were handily the hits of the show. Elsewhere, caped jackets just long enough to legitimately be called dresses, as well as their barely more demure sisters with sheer organza veils, emanated a cool confidence.Wang is learning as he goes at Balenciaga. No one said it was going to be straightforward; quite the opposite, in fact. But his idea of injecting ease into the house codes is a good one, and those chic evening pieces point to a viable way forward.
25 September 2013
A new creative director—Monsieur Alexander Wang,américain—may be in the house, but Balenciaga menswear's ongoing quest to be seen and not heard continues apace. The label promises that, as before, there will be no show, and Wang offered no comment on the first collection for men he has overseen since his appointment in 2012. The Balenciaga offering for men continues to be less fashion thangarde-robe: a working set, in other words, of untrendy essentials.That's not to say Wang didn't put his mark on the Spring collection. One of his first moves in womenswear was to establish themaillon,a metal connector similar to a carabiner, as the sign and seal. It works as a visual pun—a literal link to a previous era of Balenciaga, tacitly Cristobal's and not Nicolas'—but it has a functional power, too. Here, it fastened wool blazers and pants. In his namesake line, Wang has shown a peculiar genius for accessories, so while many of the existing successful bags and sneakers for men continue in slightly tweaked form, new lines have been introduced as well: the Phileas collection of travel bags, named for the globe-trotting hero of Jules Verne'sAround the World in Eighty Days,appropriately Wangian in their streamline; and the plimsoll range called, with justice, Young.Some innovations are entirely new—if not always entirely successful. A series of poplin shirts have high-closing, ornamental chest coverings called plastron. It's tempting to read into this the sort of chic, chilly stricture that Balenciaga under Ghesquière could be counted on to kick against. But it's only one style of many. Another Wang invention, a sleeveless shirt, has only a single button at the collar. The rest flies free—or would, if Wang didn't show it with one tail tucked.
25 June 2013
Cristóbal Balenciaga hailed from a small coastal town in Spain called Getaria. It was in the archives there that Alexander Wang found inspiration for his new collection. As he established back in February, Wang has a deep respect for the house's codes. Resort has the signature Balenciaga volumes, the ovoid shapes, and the petal hems we saw on the Fall runway, only this time layered on top of fluid underskirts. The squiggle prints, all traceable to Cristóbal, felt like a continuation of the marbleized designs Wang did last season. And the restricted color palette, too—just white, black, and shades of gray—was in keeping with his debut. Continuity can't hurt during this time of transition for the brand.Where it felt like Wang was putting his sporty imprint on things was with pieces like the short shorts, which came draped across the front or with wings down the side seams, the bolero-cum-bra-tops, and the petal bustiers sliced into midriff-baring bandeaux. As a rule, these were a tad clunky, even if all of fashion has embraced exposed abs.The dresses were more assured. A white number with a band draped across the shoulder and a bodice that was as fitted as the back was loose looked both of-the-moment and elegant in a timeless way. Same went for a black style that we were told riffed on an archival bustier dress. In Wang's hands, it was much softer, not really a bustier at all with its open back.Bucket hats covered in shredded plastic and sandals embroidered in the same stuff were unexpected, and they may be too quirky to inspire widespread lust. In some ways, it feels like Wang is still feeling himself into his role here, which is only to be expected. Overall, though, this collection—and those dresses in particular—represented another step forward.
4 June 2013
Drumroll, please. The moment everyone's been waiting for all season finally arrived this morning. Alexander Wang made his Balenciaga debut in the house's intimate salons on the Avenue George V. The TV crews weren't quite as thick as they were at Raf Simons' first couture show for Dior last July, but they were a significant presence nonetheless—a reminder that fashion is a story of national consequence in France. Inside, the atmosphere was more subdued, but that seemed quite intentional. At a preview yesterday, Wang confirmed what the show venue suggested: "I'm going back to the roots, identifying the codes of the house, and translating them into a functioning, full wardrobe," he said.A modest plan, perhaps, but no simple task. Plenty have wondered if Wang was up to the challenge of Balenciaga, asking what a twenty-nine-year-old New York-based maker of elevated street wear could bring to the table at one of fashion's most vaunted couture houses. Dior, remember, called Balenciaga "the master of us all." Wang didn't come unprepared. Despite a tight time frame—according to the press office, he began working on this collection in January—the designer has clearly made a study of the brand's archives. The show felt true to Cristóbal's lines. Cocoon coats, jackets with rounded volumes, petal skirts, molded peplums, bracelet sleeves—they all made respectful appearances here.Wang's runway was faux marble, and it became one of the show's ongoing tropes—a paean, apparently, to the sculptural quality of Cristóbal Balenciaga's clothes, not to mention the monolithic legacy. A marble print first showed up as the lining of elegant tops that spilled open at the back, then as a motif on a bullion-embroidered dress andtailleursas elaborately embellished as couture, and finally as intarsias on looks that felt the most evocative of Wang's own house style: tiny shaved fox jackets worn with high-waisted velvet lace pants. Shoes with deep toe cleavage and skinny T-straps also reproduced the pattern. Those heels looked a little clumsy, but his first bag, a box clutch with a silver frame handle, was more promising.Some in the audience said Wang's collection didn't have the shock of the new that even Nicolas Ghesquière's earliest shows for the label did. That may well be true. But if the silhouettes hewed closely to the house's rigorous lines, Wang fused technology and technique to come up with compelling new textiles.
The cracked, paint-spackled mohair knits were some of the best things on the catwalk; they made for a nice metaphor, too, about the promise of a young designer ready to break with the past when the time's right.At the end, Wang came out for his bow in a brisk walk rather than the headlong rush that's become a feature of his New York shows. It seemed an acknowledgment of sorts that the task of helming this historic house is more of a marathon than a sprint. It would be good to see some more of his own personality in the mix next time, but all in all, this was a sure-footed start.
27 February 2013
It's a moment of reset for Balenciaga. Ghesquière's gone, Wang hasn't yet shown his hand. But stores demand clothes, so the design studio stepped in to create the Fall men's collection. As such, it was more a commercial stopgap than a fully realized entity unto itself. The natural fabrics and the relatively simple silhouettes (save a new, wider-leg trouser that's the news of the season here) played into the idea of a palate cleanser. The collection worked, though, because of the wealth of past hits—both Nicolas' and Cristobal's—any Balenciaga designer has to draw on. The rounded, lacquered wool tweed coat adapted Monsieur Balenciaga's cocoon shapes for menswear. The many great jackets, from Saharienne to perfecto to military parka, were new versions of Ghesquière standards, though the tech aspect he harped on had been reduced to quiet details, like interior seams cut and sealed by an ultrasonic machine with the slightly sinister name of the Nucleus. (There's a very Balenciaga bit of twenty-first-century creepiness in the retelling, but the actual takeaway was merely, hey, nice seams.) The name of Rimbaud was invoked, and maybe you could see his raffish romanticism in pieces like a full black velvet suit or a velvet-tipped chesterfield. Or maybe not. The overriding sense here was of the calm before the coming storm. What Balenciaga looks like next is to be seen. What it has looked like in stores these past few years was on clear and desirable display.
18 January 2013
Alexander Wang is in the wings, but today's Balenciaga collection was the work of the design studio. Without Nicolas Ghesquière to guide them, the team must've known that its efforts would be best spent making commercially viable versions of their former leader's signatures. On that point, they mostly succeeded. There was at least one outfit (a vest, printed blouse, and cropped seventies pants) that was too retro; it shouldn't have made the cut. But other pieces had Ghesquière's handwriting on them—the so-uncool-it's-cool tailoring, the sports references, the anachronistic, vaguely bohemian prints. The big difference: Rather than using the technical materials Ghesquière always tended to favor, the studio opted to use only natural fabrics. It meant that there was little of the sci-fi feeling that we've become accustomed to here. In fact, the collection's strongest piece was a reinterpretation of a bejeweled shift dress from Cristobal Balenciaga's Fall 1966 collection, modernized with a pair of slim black trousers. The hallmark of this house under Ghesquière was its consistent drive forward. Hopefully, that's what Wang is working on at this very moment.
7 January 2013
All the talk this season is about the rivalry heating up between the new guys at Dior and YSL, Raf Simons and Hedi Slimane. But don't count Nicolas Ghesquière out. This is a man who, if he didn't invent the heritage brand reinvention, has certainly mastered the art. And his fantastic new Balenciaga collection was a case study in how he's done it season in and season out for the last decade, by putting an utterly modern gloss on intense study of the house's archives.Skin was the big news here, and with it more than a whiff of sex. Sometimes a Balenciaga show can be head-scratchingly tough to parse; this one was thrilling in the way it just left you hot. Beforehand, Ghesquière said, "It's the most sensual collection I've ever done," then proceeded to rattle off a string of references that prove it was every inch as thoroughly researched as his more conceptual outings: the mythology of antiquity, stiff ruffles from a Cristobal dress circa 1968, a nymph and faun window display Janine Janet made for the store's windows in '57. The fabrics were as bleeding edge as ever, too: tweeds that weren't tweeds but dense embroideries, delicate lace fused to molded synthetics, and T-shirt knits dipped in glue for stiffness.Still, what gripped you was the cut—the way Ghesquière merged things that were quite graphic with movement. He set the provocative tone with the first model's midriff-baring molded bra and high-waisted pants. And from there, he came out swinging, slitting long black skirts almost to the hipbone and edging them with deep ruffles, the undersides of which were white. The ruffles nearly pulsed as the models strutted down the narrow aisles, in sharp contrast to the crisp cropped cape tops and T-shirts. Asymmetric, almost togalike skirts, so abbreviated they required shorts underneath, pushed the leggy theme further, and even Ghesquière's sensible pantsuits (more office-appropriate than anything in last season's office collection, ironically) were paired with those daring bra tops.As the show continued, Ghesquiere's preoccupations shifted from the macro to the micro. To close, he sent out a series of little dresses in coated guipure lace that coded sweet as much as sexy. They had his front-row guest Kristen Stewart's name written all over them.Simons debuts his Dior ready-to-wear tomorrow and Slimane his for Saint Laurent next week. What Ghesquière did today was a reminder to us all that Paris fashion isn't a two-man game.
26 September 2012
It seems half the designers currently working in menswear are experimenting with proportions they're calling "couture." They mean the exaggerated roundness and cocooning volumes pioneered by Cristóbal Balenciaga half a century ago. Roundness in clothing is basically in the public domain, but it's hard not to feel the house Balenciaga built has some claim on its own creation. It, too, showed voluminous, egg-shaped menswear for Spring 2013, citing house codes as always, but mentioning postwar Japan as well, at the nexus of East and West. The guiding spirit is Ryuichi Sakamoto, the avant-garde Japanese composer who has, at times, stood literally at the intersection of the two. (He costarred inMerry Christmas Mr. Lawrencewith a middle-period David Bowie.)The collection is Japanese in key fabrics (like a textured cotton/silk seersucker) and Japanese in key shapes (as in the robe-like oversize kimono coats). It's also, thanks to exaggerated proportions, like those of an extra-long, single-button suit jacket, the house's most challenging menswear proposition in several seasons. Contrasting the larger volumes is a new austerity. Here the new-classic leather jackets brought back season after season get their sparest treatment yet: all clean lines and no lapels, just a banded detail that looks like nothing so much as a car grille.A pixelated floral cried loudest for attention among the prints, but it was actually two others—a moiré, borrowed from the archive, on silk taffeta, and a kind of electric stripe—that hit on the heart of things. They fairly vibrated. Push and pull. You couldn't ask for a better capsule description of the collection.
26 June 2012
A surprise discovery of costumes that Cristobal Balenciaga made for a ballet performance of Ravel'sBoléroin the 1930's inspired Nicolas Ghesquière's new pre-collection. Not just the fluidity but also the color palette: baby blue, baby pink, and a barely-there shade of yellow he called bergamot. If you're thinking that sounds almost too straightforward for a Balenciaga collection in 2012, you're right. Ghesquière doesn't "do" just pretty, and so there was more to these clothes than the backstory might suggest.The flou of a long ivory dress, for example, was juxtaposed by a rigid molded leather harness that brought to mindGame of Thrones' dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen more than it did Ida Rubinstein, the Russian ballerina who commissioned Ravel's piece. In fact, the look is a riff on Ghesquière's own oeuvre; the Art Nouveau-ish cutouts on the harness refer back to a Jules Verne collection from his early days at the house.Elsewhere, the hard/soft motif played out on a great-looking sleeveless sheath that married a scubalike material with draped pinstriped wool, and also on flowy pastel dresses and skirts bonded with a stiffer neoprene that created sculptural, three-dimensional ruffles. The new pant silhouette is high-waisted, with a wide belt bisecting the torso, while jackets, both single- and double-breasted, have a boxy, mannish mien. Ghesquière undercut that too, though, with dainty bras peeking out beneath.There's no Balenciaga lingerie collection on the horizon, but if there were, we imagine it'd do better than well at the new Paris flagship set to open in a former parking garage on Rue Saint-Honoré later this month.
4 June 2012
The Balenciaga show took place 27 floors up a Paris skyscraper in a space that the house's longtime artist, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, spent months tweaking to designer Nicolas Ghesquière's specifications. It would've provided panoramic views of Paris had it not been so cloudy. Alas, Ghesquière can't control the weather, but he marshaled no small number of professionals to produce this fashion event, and the setting was nothing short of transporting.This season, Ghesquière was the chairman of the board and the models his employees—both literally and metaphorically. There were VPs and a legal department and interns and IT girls (as in information technology, not "It"). He even put corporate spies on his fluorescent-lit runway. Balenciaga Inc. is unlike any office you've ever seen; it'll have fashion types debating fiercely at the water cooler for months. Why? Because this was the designer in experimental mode, advancing our collective eye forward, even as he seemed to glance back at the same era he revisited for pre-fall, the one when "France decided to be modern" in the late seventies and early eighties.The designer moved the fashion conversation along today in a few different ways: by proposing new silhouettes with exaggerated, even challenging proportions (bonded leather coats with shoulders out to there, sculptural padded sweaters over stiff A-line skirts with doubled front panels); by deliberately trafficking in items of questionable taste (those black satin sweatshirts with spacey slogans like "JOIN A WEIRD TRIP" and "OUT OF THE BLUE" are instant collector's items); and by continuing to emphasize fabric research.The IT girls wore jumpsuits made from a hi-tech parachute material, and his animal prints came two ways—as a jacquard snake on the wool bodices of the office rebels' strapless dresses and as leopard spots that looked like liquid mercury on the executives' jackets (they were actually padded appliqués of lamé jersey). Employees at every rung on the corporate ladder will be happy to note that the new Balenciaga heel is lower—the easier to get around in—than previous incarnations.Not all of it was as pleasing. As in any office, there are people you love and others who leave you cold. All in all, though, a remarkable company.
29 February 2012
Suits are growing into an important part of the Balenciaga oeuvre. The collection had been sporty as shin guards for seasons, but the reintroduction of traditional suiting to its racks last Spring seems to have set Nicolas Ghesquière and his design team on a new course. Now they've got tailoring in mind, though not necessarily the kind you'd find on an office drone. Picking up where the women's pre-fall collection began, Ghesquière was thinking of the late seventies and early eighties. John Lurie became the guiding spirit. Lurie and his Lounge Lizards loved a suit, and if Balenciaga's are stricter, straighter, and tighter than the sacks they used to favor, most would count that an advantage. They're definitely not drone-ish in colors like brick red and wine stain. Neither are the Chelsea boots, in oxidized silver python and bright white leather.The dialogue between menswear and womenswear at the house has been going on for a few seasons. Here you saw it clearly—literally, too, if you caught the men's looks that Ghesquière previewed when he showed pre-fall in New York earlier this month. But there were correlations in shape and style as well. A padded jacket, modeled in part after a jockey's jacket, picked up the spongy styles seen on the Spring '12 womenswear runway. As extreme as they seemed then, they seemed even more so now. More immediately accessible was the selection of leather moto jackets. They're a first for men, but have been a staple of the women's collection for some time.With the new emphasis on suiting, and possible plans in the works to begin developing men's essentials, fans might fear the label is losing is edge or its art. Not so. A formal trouser had a tux stripe blown up to such maximal thickness it resembled an evening track pant. There's edge. Here's art: What looked like a printed T-shirt with a multicolored Balenciaga B turned out to be a heat-bonded patchwork collage. A gimmick, but a fairly fabulous one—the logo tee as bas-relief.
19 January 2012
For pre-fall, Nicolas Ghesquière went back to "the era when France decided to be modern, the late seventies and the early eighties." Indeed, this collection embraced colors and prints not seen since the heyday of the synthesizer. But thanks to new high-tech fabrics and exaggerated silhouettes, the strongest pieces avoided the retro pitfall. Among the highlights were the cool teddy boy jackets. Patchworks of animal print, silk, and treated cotton, they were shown with a poplin smock top and turquoise track pants or thrown over an A-line minidress, opaque tights, and ankle booties.The time period also saw the advent of a new corporate woman, so tailoring played a key role here. Oversize trenches echoed not only the eighties, but also the experimental volumes and proportions that Ghesquière used on the dresses that closed his fantastic Spring show. A sharp blazer belted at the waist above a waxy silk peplum likewise had a twenty-first-century sense of cool. On the accessories front, Balenciaga is getting behind big earrings in a big way, but the boxy new bags were stripped of all excesses.
4 January 2012
At least five benches collapsed as people took their seats at the Rue Cassette space of the Balenciaga show. Too much soufflé last night, maybe? No one was badly hurt, just startled, but before another one could go crashing to the floor, a voice came on the loudspeaker and asked the audience to stand. It sort of felt like church. Which was fitting; the fashion set has long worshipped at the altar of Nicolas Ghesquière.Even without the bench brouhaha, though, this would've been a memorable Ghesquière collection. He's often gone back to Cristobal's archives, but with other designers looking to midcentury couture this season, what set apart his own dip into history was the way he adapted traditionally haute constructions to the street. On the one hand, he asked himself, what are the elements of a classic urban wardrobe? And on the other, how do I Cristo-fy them with the legendary couturier's floating, almost suspended shapes?Quotidian jean jackets inspired spongy color-blocked numbers with shoulders as exaggerated as the short shorts paired with them were small. Denim made an appearance, too, but these weren't the rear end- and leg-enhancing pants that are Ghesquière's bread and butter. Rather, they were belted high on the waist and pleated for a fuller shape through the thigh. Sailor uniforms got an airing in the form of striped ottoman V-neck oversize tunic dresses. And even white T-shirts got the haute treatment, in a foamy fabric in slouchy, asymmetrical cuts. Some of these shapes were more challenging than others, but they'll resonate with his fashion-mad fans.Ghesquière really pushed the silhouette with the dresses at the end of the show. Patchworked from archival black and white prints or panels of tan and black, they came with Watteau backs that ballooned behind the models. With their large, elliptical brims, their visors (borrowed from a famous Irving Penn photograph) accentuated the bold diagonal lines.If theTwin Peakssoundtrack playing before the show was any clue, unsettling the eye was at least part of Ghesquière's point. (David Lynch, by the way, is having a moment; he designed Paris' most talked-about new nightclub, Silencio.) No one can look backward and come up with propositions we've never seen before like Ghesquière can. Amen to that.
28 September 2011
Nicolas Ghesquière has spent seasons making sportswear sportier and pushing ever farther into menswear's future. For Spring, he threw on the brakes, temporally and conceptually: He reintroduced the Balenciaga suit. It can't surprise any label fans that he can cut a very good one. These were two-button jobs, slim in the waist, through the arm, and down the leg, in wool-mohair blends. They were shown, like almost every look, with white turtlenecks as layering pieces for a slightly sixties spin.Evergreen standards reappeared as is Ghesquière's wont, this time in vivid new colors: bombers in teal neoprene, jewel-tone jeans, and reversible leather-nylon jackets in contrast shades. Color-blocking of a more direct variety appeared on cotton knits, laser-cut for added sharpness. Their topmost panel was angled atilt—a nod, you could believe, to the more off-kilter cool of earlier seasons. You got a hint of that, too, in leather belts that zippered on to (and fully off of, if you like) sweaters and tops. Here they were left dangling half unzipped (an analogue, almost, to the flyaway shirttails from the house's Spring 2011 women's collection). It's a done-undone look no man of the sixties would have considered. A reminder, in other words, that despite a neater, tidier season, you're still at Balenciaga.
23 June 2011
That Balenciaga's Nicolas Ghesquière can cut a lean, mean pair of trousers is indisputable; girls go into a frenzy over his leg-extending, rear-end-enhancing narrow pants. Lately, though, Ghesquière has been more interested in playing with that hallmark of his progenitor Cristobal's work, volume—see the below-the-knee tropical-print skirts from his Fall collection in Paris.For Resort, the designer has dubbed his substantial A-line numbers "umbrella skirts," and they do have some of the fullness of a brolly. (Just as poufy were shorts inspired by Mona von Bismarck, a top client back in the day who wore hers in the garden.) Shirts resembled inverted triangles with short sleeves tucked into the shoulders. If that silhouette was somewhat challenging, Ghesquière won us over with his prints and fabrics. On many pieces a graphic herringbone pattern merged with an archival brick print dating to one of Cristobal's sixties shows. It was most striking in neon pink and brown on a slightly cocoon-shaped coat. What's more, Ghesquière didn't let his pants lovers down. Among the collection's coolest looks: a pair of trousers with bold but delicate silver Indian embroidery on the front, paired with a bat-sleeve top.
8 June 2011
The last time we saw flowers at Balenciaga was ages ago, but even if you recall Spring 2008's orderly bouquets, they didn't look anything like the mix of exotic, colorful blooms and reptiles we saw on the first looks to hit the runway today. The shape, a below-the-knee skirt with an easy drape in the front (it was more structured in back), was new for Nicolas Ghesquière, too—longer, looser, and less restrained than usual. The jackets he showed them with were dramatic with a capital D, knit as they were from giant ribbons of faux leather, a favorite material of late. In Ghesquière's words, "The season is a game of proportion, zooming in on textures, the way seeing things with a loop [a magnifying glass] can give you different, shifting points of view. It's a bit surrealist."Part of Ghesquière's genius is the way he can transform the outré, even the outlandish, into an object to covet (those Lego shoes come to mind). That said, this wasn't a Balenciaga collection in which couture-level innovation and experimentation trumped wearability, those macro knit jackets notwithstanding. The shoe, a pointy-toed multi-strap Mary Jane with a stiletto heel, was as normal as they come here, although close observers will have noticed that the hand-painting and rococo details extended to the soles.Among the propositions that could've strolled right off the Crillon's white-tiled runway (a reproduction of the one found in Balenciaga's Left Bank atelier): the spongy sweaters with military detailing worn with black versions of those floral skirts; the fluid, asymmetrical color-blocked crepe de chine tunics paired with skinny trousers with zips at the back of the ankles; and the dresses stitched with lengths of copper mesh that sculpted the neckline and created a three-dimensional drape at the hip. Miranda Kerr, back on the runway less than two months after giving birth, looked fantastic modeling hers—something that presumably didn't go unnoticed by her husband, Orlando Bloom, sitting front-row. Ghesquière closed with a pair of coats inspired by an archival Cristobal piece from 1965. Each one was made from a simple, rectangular piece of fabric. Elegant and effortless, this was realism trumping surrealism. That's what will make this collection a resounding success.
2 March 2011
Nicolas Ghesquière's men's collection forBalenciaganever hits the runway like its women's counterpart. It's something of a shame—not to mention a missed opportunity—given that it keeps the men's offerings farther under the radar then they might be. Can't say that about the house's other half.Nevertheless, the men's and women's collections at Balenciaga are inextricably linked, right down to shared prints: Usually, what appears in one will surface, in some tweaked form, in the other. Here, a bird-and-flower pattern that turned up as tights and a blouse for women's pre-fall came back as a bold shirt print. A single-breasted peacoat in red wool had its analogue in a ladies' caban.But more than specific pieces, the two collections share the house's detail-driven, quasi-futuristic spirit. That was evident here in the oily-looking printed jacket, the leather pants, and vinyl jeans. This season, lug-soled, creeper-style lace-ups have a metal grate hinged at the front—the steel-toed boot gone robot sartorial. A fully reversible shearling-and-camel jacket felt just as forward-leaning. Ultra-functionality and mutability was, in fact, the driving theme of this new collection: pockets unbuttoned (via open-faced snaps, no less) to reveal other pockets lurking beneath; a duffel coat's leather-accented hood unzipped into a mini cape.Between said duffel, a teddy jacket that came in several different colors, the shearling bomber, and a boiled-wool collared navy raincoat lined in brilliant gold, Balenciaga had some of the best outerwear in an outerwear-crammed week. No runway required.
20 January 2011
Nicolas Ghesquière made a big impact with his Spring show. The boyish first-time models he cast have quickly become some of the hottest, hardest-to-book catwalkers around. But theBalenciagadesigner is hardly one to stand in place. The masculine silhouettes of his most recent collection have been shaken and stirred; pre-fall still feels "street," but there's a more feminine sensibility overall.That's partly a function of his focus on updating archival Edition pieces in his pre-collections—the standout this season being a black trapeze coat-dress Cristobal designed for Spring 1966. But it also has to do with Ghesquière's embrace of boldly colorful India-influenced prints. He used them for a form-fitting dress that flared into an A-line below the hips as well as an unstructured tank dress with a deep slit up the side of the leg. In addition, many of the looks were accessorized with a leather peplum belt (an integral element, back in the day, of Cristobal's signature volumes). Also in the lineup were simple silk tunic dresses worn over razor-thin pants and needle-heeled pumps, a two-for-one look that's gaining traction this week.If the outfits Ghesquière referred to as "wellness wear"—think alpaca fur jacket, tunic over trousers, plus trainers, as if his woman were heading straight from the gym to work—had a tongue-in-chic feel, there was lots more here that was simply chic. The outerwear in particular, specifically a navy peacoat with a shearling collar and the reversible bombers, had several admirers at our appointment.
10 January 2011
The first thing that you noticed at Nicolas Ghesquière's terrific Balenciaga show was the casting. He opened with a trio of unknown girls with short, spiky hair that his team cast from the street, and he closed with the biggest super of them all, Gisele Bündchen. In between: Amber Valletta, Carolyn Murphy, and Stella Tennant—all of whom were very nearly bare-faced. "It was important not to disguise them. I didn't want clones," the designer said before the show.Ghesquière made references to the house's past—a famous leaf-paneled dress of Cristobal's apparently influenced the cocooning shape of pied de coq coats; an antique clock in the Balenciaga atelier inspired a new range of watches—but this wasn't an "archive" show. Nor was it one of the designer's bold leaps into the future. The through lines here: a teddy boy-meets-punk masculinity (for the first time in his tenure at the house, Ghesquière showed creeper-ish flats); wet-looking, plasticized textures; and, once again, the places where the handmade and the technological meet. The last dress, for instance, was finished with couture techniques near the neckline, but a laser machine made the precision cut that separated the bodice from the skirt."It's a reaction to a certain kind of sexiness," Ghesquière said. "It's about individuality." That's not necessarily so different from his thinking last season, but if Fall was conceptual, this produced some fantastic, utterly wearable (not just once-and-it's-over) clothes. The list is long and ranges from houndstooth outerwear with a graphic punch (the pattern made from plastic-y faux leather) to sleeveless, backless button-down shirts spliced together from mismatched neon lace to the streamlined, comparatively simple tuxedos to quilted leather moto jackets to the closing pair of spare yet technically complex dresses. Who but Ghesquière could make real life look this interesting?
29 September 2010
With a collection that put the sports in sportswear, Balenciaga's Nicolas Ghesquière turned his back on formality in favor of an emphasis on speed, mobility, and all things technical. The fabrics ran a gamut from shiny treated cotton to something whose selling point was its bulletproof-ness—call it Kevlar-lite. The lineup's futuristic tinge meshed more compatibly than previously with Ghesquière's work on the house's womenswear (and the lookbook compounded the compatibility still further). And even minus the chilly android styling, the clothes had plenty to recommend them.Ghesquière loves a trim silhouette, so everything was belted to the body (some belts had an almost corsetlike grip); though unleashed, a pair of mackintoshes with leather revers had an appealing volume. More modernist than futurist were the wind parkas and sleeveless jackets, gray, white, and black being the favored shades, with startling accents of yellow and orange. Given the proclaimed technical nature of the collection, it was interesting that some of the strongest pieces were good old-fashioned leather, albeit in the form of an orange jean jacket or a two-tone motocross/safari hybrid. The mix of alien and familiar was, in fact, the real strength here, graphically illustrated by denim that had been folded, waxed, and then unfolded to produce a zebralike pattern.
26 June 2010
Nicolas Ghesquière invariably shows off a singularly focused vision at his Balenciaga runway shows in Paris. Resort, in contrast, is often a time for him to work through several disparate ideas. This year, the list includes uniforms, utility wear, and something he's calling techno bohème. Among the collection's 29 looks, the uniforms owed the biggest debt to Cristobal Balenciaga, inspired as they were by the outfits the master designed for airlines. Stretch fabrics and magnetic closures aside, there was something distinctly 1960's Pan Am hostess about a fitted and very short blue skirtsuit. Meanwhile, Ghesquière made his country-hippie blouses, long and full skirts, and tiny bolero vests modern, futuristic even, by rendering them in iridescent fabrics and embroidering them with metallic threads. The Edition pieces, reissues of archival Cristobal creations tweaked for the twenty-first century, are the perfect metaphor for the house's backward-forward approach this season. The highlight was a sari-like column gown circa 1961 in a particular shade of grass green. It apparently took Ghesquière several years of research to locate that number, and the effort paid dividends—A-list redhead Nicole Kidman should call dibs stat.
8 June 2010
Cosmonauts and seventies Formica. Packaging and food boxes. Synthetic foam and plywood. Sleeping bags and biscuits. "I was working on something domestic. Casual things mixed with classic. And a kind of rigidity," said Nicolas Ghesquière, listing some of the extraordinary imagery and manipulations of materials and color that went into Balenciaga's computer-age vision of couture.Geometric, collaged, stiff yet rounded, and composed of zones of matte and shine, with cashmere dimpled to look like industrial foam and fur shaved into quilting, the components of the first coats alone were difficult enough to absorb at a glance. Then there were the shoes: block-heeled loafers and brogues with the soles encased in chunks of plastic. The fact that his work defies easy categorization—and there is so much in it that reminds the brain of things it's seen before, but isn't quite like them at all—is the hallmark of Ghesquière's complex methodology. It takes innovation to a place where "knitwear" turns into molded shifts and bunchily belted tops laid out in blocks of oddly bright colors—pale blue, tangerine, brown, and aqua—or is micro-padded in geometric patterns that might have originated in bubble wrap. It makes delicate "lace" dresses out of machine-perforated fabric, trimmed with embroidery ("like French biscuits!" Ghesquière laughed). It pushes silhouettes to do unfamiliar things: creating "wings" in the backs of dresses, or making triangular paper-printed tops that unfurl with a zipper in the front of skinny-legged salopettes.This is fashion by a unique originator who sources all his ideas in the industrial, scientific, computer-generated possibilities of the twenty-first century. In different hands, it could be a predictable route to sci-fi fantasy or clichéd presentiments of a futuristic dystopia—but that is exactly what Balenciaga isn't. The aesthetic Ghesquière has launched with the aid of new machinery and haute traditional needlework techniques is recognizably Parisian, chic, optimistic, and of today. Some might call him out on the issue of wearability in certain areas, but fashion desperately needs experimenting talents like his to push things forward—and he did that with extraordinary skill today.
3 March 2010
Let other designers focus on wardrobe basics; at Balenciaga, it's fashion with a capital F. Working with ideas that could be mundane in other hands—volume, sports, menswear—Nicolas Ghesquière has turned out the boldest pre-fall collection we've seen so far. Jackets and coats, some printed with palm tree or geyser motifs, have Cristobal Balenciaga's signature curving, egg-shaped backs. Sweatshirts are made from jersey fused to high-tech foam and paired with double-layer minis, while smock tops are cut in windbreaker nylon and worn with track pants in wool jacquard. As for the masculine influence, it can be traced in the sloping, oversize shoulders of a jacket laser-cut above the waist.But color, such a strong theme this season, was the first thing you noticed at the label's New York presentation. The models wore towering platforms inspired by the French industrial designer Charlotte Perriand and patchworked together from swatches of bright leather, metal, and wood. On their legs, meanwhile, were yellow, red, or green tights spliced vertically with opaque and sheer sections. Yes, the hosiery will be for sale, and for a very nice, under-$100 price.
11 January 2010
Nicolas Ghesquière has decided the world has quite enough cocktail wear to be getting along with. "I wanted to do something urban. No more history for the moment!" he said backstage at the Hôtel de Crillon, before sending out a collection that reclaimed the beat of street athleticism: the hoodie (done here as a highly structured paneled leather vest); skinny, vertically patchworked jeans; complex tanks; and sporty kilts. Take it as read that we're not looking at generics. Every silhouette, each garment, every extraordinary tubular-ankled, open-toed boot is an uncopyable meld of futuristic technique and art craftsmanship. The quality defines Ghesquière's Balenciaga as unique.Take the "jeans." What looks, at a distance, as if it might be gray-blue denim is actually vegetable-dyed leather. The "hoodie" is engineered from molded leather, woven jersey, and nylon foam. The ankle sections of the boots are either hand-loomed fabric or a meltdown of blue, white, and green strips of leather, laser-compressed into a striated amalgam that looks, as Ghesquière joked, "like Play-Doh." (He likes a toy reference in a shoe.)In the collage of elements, there were recycled fabrics and natural-looking hemp weaves, and a sidelong tribalism in the urban-warrior eye makeup and footwear. The street element had some of the flavor of the hit "student" collection of Fall 2007, and it will certainly give license to young women—and the vendors of fast fashion—to look at sweats and gym skirts in a whole new, highly commercial light.It's a sign of a designer's influence when his work is knocked off as fast as the mass market can run. But Ghesquière's métier is one that can't be simplistically rendered down. His collection also involves infinite subtlety. It segued into chic coat-dresses—patched with streaks of lemon and green—against textured beige spiraled leather togas contrasted with painted suede. The show ended with minute but mind-bending latticework skirts that shivered like porcupine quills, flashing shots of green and maroon in movement. That kind of work can't be replicated anywhere else but in this house, and if there's still an argument for high fashion versus low, this is one of the strongest defenses that exists.
30 September 2009
Resort is a season in which designers tend to scale back their creative vision in favor of surefire sales, but that wasn't Nicolas Ghesquière's approach for his latest Balenciaga effort. His experiments with volume—as on a series of printed and embroidered frocks with super-short tiered lampshade skirts—were more daring than anything else we've seen during the current round of shows and presentations. Ditto his chunkily woven leather sandal boots.Still, there was plenty here that was time-tested. A pearl- and crystal-embroidered Cristobal Balenciaga Edition jacket circa 1965 "still looks right now," Ghesquière said. Remarkably, so did a long black net and velvet dot evening coat that Balenciaga originally made in 1959. Other pieces shown today, like a pantsuit in rustic, nubby linen, have no progenitor, but their very Ghesquière-ness—the slim fit of the jacket, the leg-elongating trouser—should ensure their success.
14 June 2009
"It's Parisian," said Nicolas Ghesquière of the assured melding of drape, print, and tailoring he sent out in the sparkling daylight streaming into the Hôtel de Crillon. The designer had mined the Balenciaga archive, examined the structure of a drape-waisted forties redingote, thought over a later sari-inspired collection, and pulled up three late-sixties scarf prints. He took it from there to design a modern translation in satin, printed silk, and fragile dévoré velvet.It made for a sumptuous collection that played down his sci-fi tendencies in favor of a softer femininity. The Ghesquière codes were in play, too, of course. The draping (which he's explored before) emerged first in swagged charmeuse skirts, suspended from a hip-hugging yoke, and then in a fluid, wrapped relation of the jodhpur shape he brought into fashion two years ago. The shoes could only have come from him: patchworked distillations of everything that was going on in the collection, with jersey print, mesh, suede, scarf ties, and a heavy walking-boot tread on the sole.There was a sense that Ghesquière was walking a fine line between embracing pragmatism and pushing luxurious experimentation. He showed a creamy beige coat and an impeccable black tuxedo jacket with striped menswear pants. There was also a little black dress, along with shaved mink silhouettes appliquéd onto a knit base to wrap smoothly around the body as coat-dresses, all relatively plain. Mostly, though, it's the way Ghesquière worked print that will be pored over by fashion diagnosticians. Anyone on the lookout for eighties influences might see somethingDynasty(though there was nothing ostentatious or literal about it) in the puffed shoulders of the spotted and streaked prints that were wrapped into dresses and fragile blouses. The word, in the end, wassophistication: Ghesquière didn't pull back on the Balenciaga insistence on developing couture-level handwork, but there was also a sense of reality that sent cohorts of pressured buyers out onto the Place de la Concorde with relieved smiles on their faces. "Wearable" and "money in the bank," they were calling it. Not compliments they're throwing around easily in these strained times.
4 March 2009
At Balenciaga, pre-fall is Nicolas Ghesquière's laboratory—a chance to elaborate on ideas proposed in his runway collections and an opportunity to test the waters with new ones. Walking editors through his 28-look lineup—a mix of Edition archival updates, items from the lower-priced Capsule range, and pieces that he said were a good indication of the direction he was taking for Fall—Ghesquière pointed out the "French element" in nude silk blouses. (These he showed with utility-chic windbreakers in a papery Japanese fabric and slouchy, anti-fit combat pants.) Other stops on this economy-be-damned, where's-the-wait-list tour included miniskirt suits with jackets in a "very Cristobal shape" and long 1970's hostess gowns that, like most of the dresses, were looser than anything Ghesquière's done recently. Evening options ranged from a portrait gown with a grand flaring skirt that called to mind Richard Avedon's 1950'sVoguesittings to a super-modern red-carpet number in navy and black that twisted around the body. Holding it all together were chain necklaces and bracelets, fur cuffs and mittens that inched past the elbows, and flat boots or towering platforms. Every look was paired with a bag; a ladylike top-handle style in soft, matte caramel leather received the most nods of approval.
11 January 2009
Backstage at Balenciaga, Nicolas Ghesquière talked about his collection, quite simply, as an exploration of "matte and shine, playing with textures to see how they reflect or absorb light. And playing with our house codes." There's nothing remotely simple, however, about the complex, futuristic synthesis of line, cut, and glinting surfaces that played out on his runway. It involved silvered Lurex streaking over skin to cover legs, feet, and hands; asymmetric combinations of drape and structure; bonded jersey pantsuits with A-line tunic tops; tissue-fine metallic crinkle-pleated jackets; and, somewhere in the middle, pale suede pieces that looked as if they might have been extruded from some high-spec industrial machine. The show built to an amazing finale series of dresses cut in iridescent gold, silver, pewter, green, and pink ribbon. As one of the models stepped onto the runway in a sequined sheath, Ghesquière glanced over and remarked, "She looks like a solar panel, no?"The genius of Balenciaga is Ghesquière's projection of couture techniques into the world of new technology. A crude stab at describing it might be "sci-fi couture," but the truth is his mind-set renders stock fashion vocabulary redundant. Ghesquière works without references or narrative, pushing experimentation with fabric and cut to the nth degree. Cleverer still is the sense of a grounded core: the recognizable, desirable developments of pants (the evolution of his jodhpurs in mackintosh fabric; the sophisticated motocross shapes), and the precious, shiny, chic bags clutched in every hand.
29 September 2008
Instead of a complete change of direction for Resort, Nicolas Ghesquière evolved themes from his Fall runway. But the spotlight mostly swung away from last season's sculpted, über-feminine look—seen here in a stiff, silvery skirtsuit with matching pointy bra as underpinning. Ghesquière developed Fall's small group of highly wearable looks that paired skinny pants with draped and twisted tops. He did so through mix-and-match themes of nineties minimalism (painted jeans, layered tops, a refreshingly simple tomato red cotton suit) and rock 'n' roll (tough-chic tailoring and studs aplenty). What it all added up to was a collection filled with great pieces that will get them shopping come November. A shrunken leather bomber, for one, has wait list written all over it.
22 June 2008
"I wanted something austere," said Nicolas Ghesquière, "but with a bit of Spanish drama. It's quite cinematographic, an idea of film noir, like Simone Signoret inLes Diaboliques—but it's really me exploring the DNA of the house, with my sci-fi things going on with the plastics and latex." The result: an extraordinary synthesis of rigorous line and shiny, high-tech surfaces illuminated at necks and wrists by the sparkling opulence of traditional jewelry. A different parure of necklace and bracelets adorned every outfit—34 uniquely breathtaking configurations of crystal, faux gems, and pearls, some of them archive copies, others new.The genius of Ghesquière's Balenciaga is that he can extrude something so smoothly modern from so many layered references. It hit from the opening looks: molded black dresses with scrolled peplums, slit skirts, and armband sleeves—fifties cocktail catapulted into a fierce kind of twenty-first-century chic. (NB: Cristobal Balenciaga was born in the Basque country, hence the "Spanish" drama.) The clever part is the way Ghesquière melds his own vision—his taste for techno surfaces—with Balenciaga's heritage, often in the same garment—say, the car-shiny dresses cut with a swag back, or the sliced zones of shantung and plastic that are fused into a sack dress. There was much more beyond this, too: on the one hand, crazily elaborate "couture" latex, formed into hand-painted and embossed samurai biker jackets and dresses inspired by chinoiserie screens, and on the other, a few perfectly resolved urban equations for a new kind of evening dressing. The best: the skinny gray pants and Goya-inspired draped velvet and taffeta tops—superb.
25 February 2008
Nicolas Ghesquière took a three-pronged approach to pre-fall, dividing his 24-look collection into "bourgeois," "grunge," and "classic" categories. The first included tweedy skirtsuits and trenches with volume at the back, à la Cristobal Balenciaga's 1950's silhouettes. Hoodlike hats made from quilted silk scarf prints of fish and fowl completed the haute campside look. The second grouping featured long paisley and Japanese-inspired floral dresses lined with black net and topped with black shearling chubbies and vests—veryGold Dust Woman. The third was much more strict and minimal, with religious undertones. White scarves peeked from the necklines of little black dresses, and a Catholic schoolgirl's uniform was updated in luxe silk gazar. Ghesquière finished with a trio of floor-length numbers, the standout being a white gown with hand-stitched metallic embroidery at the bodice and hem. It could've come straight from the boudoir of a 1940's Hollywood starlet.
15 January 2008
"I'm exploring new territory, within the references of the house," said Nicolas Ghesquière before the show. "I've done prints before, but I never went to the flowers." So this was Balenciaga in full bloom: a splashy riot of hypergorgeous hydrangeas, pansies, peonies, daffodils, and anemones—some of them Cristobal's own—but compressed into another of Ghesquière's short-sharp revolutionary essays in couture technique.The shapes, with their standout shoulder lines, hand-span waists, and belled (almost panniered) hip volume, marched in on vertiginous knee-high woven-leather gladiator boots. "Instead of a put-together thing like last season, I wanted total looks—ensembles, as we say in French," Ghesquière explained, "with graphic volumes like car bodywork. Sports cars!" Each look came with its undulating folds sutured together with curvilinear topstitching, the sculptural surfaces backed with sports-derived foam, and the hems sliced short by a high-tech ultrasound machine. There were dresses and matching "ensembles" articulated as jackets over mini-pelmets, over tiny shorts.But would this be wearable? What a silly question. If Ghesquière's extreme embroidered "robot" leggings can sell out for squillions of dollars apiece, and last season's jodhpurs, blazers, scarves, and ikat prints can fuel a global industry of knockoffs, what has he left to prove? By the time you read this, the flower-printing mills of the world will have been activated overnight. Even when Ghesquière turns to intensely rich, rarified "explorations" of detail—check the cloisonné bejeweled heels of those boots—there is something so relevant in the execution that it is capable of turning on the fashion fanatics to whom price is no object, while also sending the mass market into overdrive. In that way, Nicolas Ghesquière is one of the very few who can have his cake, sell it, and sit back and watch the rest of the market scramble for the crumbs.
1 October 2007
Nicolas Ghesquière said goodbye to globalism and futurism for resort and went retro instead. Some of the pieces, including a scarf-print silk strapless wrap dress, were influenced by Cristobal Balenciaga's archives. Others, like the tight, high-waisted trousers shown with a fitted boyish vest or a narrow jacket with peaked shoulders were vintage Ghesquière—but with an exaggerated ankle flare for a seventies touch. A jersey cocktail number with coral embroidery and deep silver fringe (straight off Balenciaga's Fall runway) looked like a collector's item. For grand evenings—and cover shoots, no doubt—he showed a strapless ivory gown with black lace underlayers and dramatic, gravity-defying panniers.
2 July 2007
A typically concise menswear collection from Balenciaga was also typically odd. Though there were distinctly classic elements (a striped shirt that would do any bourse boy proud), the overriding impression was of a design ethos that values wayward escapism. North Africa, for example, has been a longtime mecca for Euro-bohos, and it made its presence felt here in colors of sand and saffron, a leather jacket detailed like a Moroccan pouf, a worn cotton hippie shirt, or shorts that had a jodhpurlike flare. Suede carryalls drew on the color palette of Claudio Bravo, a Chilean artist whose love affair with Morocco was one of the collection's inspirations. An Indiana Jones hat and gladiator sandals (on loan from the women's division) compounded the curiousness. The label's T-shirt range, which is usually a thing of obtuse wonder, this time drew on the patterns of the balls used in team sports—rugby, soccer, and basketball—or jungle and underwater motifs from the women's spring 2003 collection. Evening jackets referenced couture materials, but they were paired with silk boxer shorts, the idea being formality up top, very little down below. Quite why this should present itself as a viable proposal (even accepting that we're being warned to expect ever-hotter summers) was a mystery. Perhaps as a reminder that there are more important things in life than pants?
29 June 2007
"It's a big mix—a street mix, with symbols and colors that are very multicultural," said Nicolas Ghesquière at the Balenciaga rehearsal an hour before the show. Then Led Zeppelin kerranged on the sound track, the girls started loping by, and he grinned, "It's like in your room, on campus. It's about how girls become themselves." In other words, this was Balenciaga brought back to the realm of the casual and young, but still just as layered, complex, and resonant as any Ghesquière projection into sci-fi.Well, what does that mean? Practically speaking, clothes to wear—as simple as a tight little peak-shoulder jacket, a pair of narrow jodhpur-ish pants, a college-girl scarf wound up high, and killer athletic-techno sandals (some colored as brightly as Legos). Or, as the alternative choice, a mixed-print patchwork dress. As a look, it all hung together with a clarity that doesn't take a master's degree to understand. Still, there was enough to study in there to make a complete thesis on Ghesquière's ability to relate what he's doing to his past body of work and then to add to it, bit by bit, without ever saying the same thing twice.Using multiethnic fabric references—Eastern European folk embroideries, ikat, kimono, and African, Peruvian, Mongolian, and Balinese patterns—is a tricky business if you want to articulate something cool that hasn't been done by everyone else. But Ghesquière has his own conceptual compass—it was set when he used a Palestinian scarf in one of his early collections, and it turned up this time in a different print, elaborated with gold fringe, as a takeoff point for the fluttery multipieced dresses, as well as the sculpted peplum jackets at the end of the show. As a counterbalance, there were all the traditional Western roots in the jackets: English men's tailoring in green velvet smoking-jacket tail coats, Tyrolean boiled wool dyed magenta, boating-blazer stripes, and, lastly, bouclé tweeds of the sort associated with Chanel (though Ghesquière notes that Balenciaga was neck and neck with Coco on that).Suffice to say, it is a major achievement to make all of that coherent while also producing a collection that isn't overly prescriptive, locked into a head-to-toe look.
When all's said, the real cleverness of this show wasn't even in its impressive levels of intellect or craft: It's in the fact that so many women will be able to reach in, grab a jacket or a towering pair of Balenciaga heels, and make them work with whatever else they own.
26 February 2007
How do you pin down a collection that pings around in the unbridgeable gulfs between Helmut Berger, Kurt Cobain, Darth Vader, and Roald Amundsen? Why even try? You just surrender. Balenciaga offered a navy pinstripe suit and an elegantly elongated black overcoat that would bring out the Berger in a modern dandy. There were mohair-webbed grungy knits and a twisted preppy subtext ("B" for Balenciaga writ large on a T-shirt stitched over a striped top) that Cobain might have related to. On other T-shirts, Darth's face loomed, while designer Nicolas Ghesquière's taste for sci-fi also made its presence felt in another motif that could have been lifted from period promo material for the space race.The most intriguing theme, however, was polar exploration. Perhaps that was Ghesquière's way of acknowledging global warming, because the polar styles had the slightly retro feel of the kit of the original pioneers, men like Amundsen who would have seen the ice caps in their pristine splendor. A khaki nylon parka was decked with polar insignia, fur tippets attached to jacket collars for added warmth, and a fleece hat with big earflaps made for striking headgear. And silk scarves printed with old maps were so romantic as to compel a re-examination of the rest of the collection. Was there also a kind of romance in the lavaliere ties on evening shirts? Or in the tan leather biker jacket that, paired with the stonewashed chinos, might suit a twenty-first-century Indiana Jones? Even the Rorschach-bleached denims hinted at outré psychological depths.
29 January 2007
"I was thinking of robotic articulation. Car parts. Droids. A boyish silhouette…" said Nicolas Ghesquière before he was dragged off to sort out a last-minute glitch. Moments later, his incredible futuristic vision was out of the gate: elongated black jackets with a double-layered shoulder line; cyber-goddess dresses jigsawed from patent leather; space-crew shirts with high white collars. Within seconds, the message in these refined, precision-judged looks was sending chills through an audience that five minutes earlier had been on the point of meltdown from heat. Was it worth the wait? Without a doubt. Like last season's Balenciaga retrospective triumph, this is a collection that will reset the fashion agenda, but in a different way.Ghesquière said he'd been watchingThe Terminator, and 1982'sTron, the first blockbuster to combine computer animation with real actors, but that's by-the-by. What's special about these clothes is the way the designer brings his distinctively Parisian, perfectionist genius for cut and exceptional fabric into the consciousness of high-tech culture. It's not one monolithic look, easily captured in a comic-strip subtitle. Ghesquière's intense shows work through a half-dozen separate ideas linked in sequence. This time he moved from tailoring to shiny "nylon" silk-swathed dresses, to patent-edged shirtdresses, heavily-hewn sculpted leather and crocodile, metallic pantsuits, and finally to the coup de grâce: astonishing combinations of drapey silk-print tunics and gleaming bronze or gold metal robot-leggings, embroidered with futuristic paillettes.If last season's vastly influential Balenciaga collection looked back, this one projects forward into a new era for the house Ghesquière is fast defining as his own. There is no sense of a lurch, because these ideas of space-age fantasy have always been on a slow burn in his work—along with the attenuated line and his deftness with technique. With this collection, he leapt ahead. It's true that thoughts of space-age robo-women have been circulating already this season, as well as reminders that the likes of Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier went there in the eighties, but it takes a major talent like Nicolas Ghesquière to turn a literal reference into something that is light years from pastiche.
2 October 2006
Inevitably, Nicolas Ghesquière's menswear doesn't have the same silhouette-warping, cliché-zapping impact of his women's clothes for Balenciaga. What mere male customer could possibly absorb such a force? But there was still a game attempt to fuse classicism and rock 'n' roll spirit in this latest collection.The classic references were obvious in a crested seersucker blazer, in the use of madras, and in the printed tie silks used in fluid little shirts. The silk radzimir of a dinner jacket even referred back to Cristobal Balenciaga. But then there was the Mick Jagger-inspired T-shirt rippling with latex flames, the skinny leather pants, and the hippie shirt with its heraldic lion.Small wonder the collection ended up with something of a split personality, though that could be said to dovetail with one of the collection's other underlying themes: the idea of travel. Safari and military influences united with the pop and the trad to equip the Balenciaga traveler for any situation.
11 July 2006
It was Balenciaga at double force: the template of Cristobal Balenciaga's past, rigorously rethought by Nicolas Ghesquière, a young designer gifted with the intellect and technical skill to propel the name to a whole new relevance. Ghesquière's woman, in her amazing wardrobe of short, molded checked tweed suits with stand-away collars, rounded coats and mind-blowingly wrought evening dresses, radiated a powerful modernity.Elevating his models to a towering height with tall hats and vertiginous platform boots, Ghesquière's vision created extraordinary volumes and new proportions using fabrics that are rarely seen outside haute couture. The research he had done in the company's archives resulted in a surge of technical creativity that goes way beyond literal copying. He riffed at high speed through all the changes of silhouette Balenciaga developed in his 30-year career—from stiff peplumed jackets rising slightly above the waist, to simple sheaths, to elaborately surfaced Jacquard evening dresses with skirts that stand out in 3-D bubbles.In a season when so many designers are quoting Balenciaga, Ghesquière pushed his design to a place no one else has reached. Part of it was in the intensity of the decoration involved—like the minutely beaded flowers on a white bodice, the zones of tiny ruffles outlining a shift, or the hand-painted rose-color patterning on a skirt that bloomed like an exotic flower. Equally important, though, was the way he leavened the historical reference with simple, hip pieces that stand in line with his own sensibility, like swing-back coats with the ease of a parka, his signature skinny pants, and a navy jacket that came with a cream bouclé liner—a stroke that referred back to the shearlings he's always loved. Throughout, you sensed the mark of a designer who has hit such a confident stride that, even though he has many more commercial things in the showroom—including the hugely successful Balenciaga bags—he can devote his runway to a pure distillation of ideas.Some of these stellar pieces will appear in theBalenciaga Parisexhibition that opens in July at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, juxtaposed against the original treasures culled from Cristobal Balenciaga's illustrious body of work. It's the biggest compliment to Ghesquière to say that his work will not only stand up to the comparison, but will also prove how he's bounced the history of the house back into a startling relevance for today.
27 February 2006
Great fashion comes from designers who can fuse two apparently contradictory ideas together to create a synthesis that has never occurred to anyone before. That was the order of experiment—and risk—taken on by Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga. He was aiming, he said, to make something new of “architecture and embellishment, sharpness and ornamentalism.”The show condensed Balenciaga past and present, starting with evocations of Cristobal’s cocktail bubbles, creamily rendered in heavy radzimir and embossed silk, and then delivering the surprise—densely elaborated upgrades of Ghesquière’s tailoring and drifty patchwork dresses.It was what he called his “baroque rock star” pantsuits that delivered the biggest jolt of surprise. The strict planes of his familiar lean, nipped-waist, long-leg suits are now etched over in dark Wedgwood-like Jacquard patterns, and worn with high-neck frilled shirts. From there, Ghesquière made his way to light-as-air scarf dresses composed of panels of silk print, inserted with lace and cascading frills; glamorous black gowns, intricately worked in lace and chiffon, suspended from bra straps; and cream organza bell-shape dresses weighted with deeply flounced hems.If all that soundsmolto complicato, there was still more compressed into this brisk presentation. Ironically, those were the things of simple, wearable genius—gray knife-pleated kilts, ingeniously seamed in the back and worn with printed, jeweled rock-tour T-shirts—that made for a brilliantly chic take on this season’s college-girl look.It all ended up, though, with more baroque and froth: a full Louis XIV fantasy version of the Balenciaga jacket, with extravagant peplums and foppish lace cuffs, and boudoir lingerie paired with droopy bloomers. Those last looks were duds. But when a designer is determined to push creativity to the brink of newness, he’s allowed the odd mistake.
3 October 2005
Like so many other shows, Balenciaga opened with a fur-trimmed felted wool coat. But as the narrow, boxy, chrome-buckled shapes marched in, Nicolas Ghesquière pulled his collection leagues ahead of the season's fixations with "sixties" and "military." A collarless black leather coat with flattened epaulets; slender cuffed boot legs; tailored denim pantsuits with beaver collars; a tight-waist military greatcoat with quilted lapels: Within seconds, it was clear these had nothing to do with routine retro."It's a bit sixties, but tough too, with the black leather," the designer said. "A little Françoise Hardy and Mia Farrow; but I never like to say the reference too much." Right. His talent is for cutting straight to the point of what contemporary women want: sharply honed suits and coats that throw off a force field of sexy Parisianfroideur. Ghesquière is beaming that controlled creativity into evening, too, making it less of a testing ground for his works in progress. He's retrieved materials like gazar and organdy from the Balenciaga archive, crafting their springy volumes into trapeze dresses with stiffly belled "flying saucer" hemlines (the Mia Farrow moment).What held it all together was the synthesis of vintage couture and Ghesquière's signature sci-fi obsession. Both elements were embodied in a belted navy jacket with pockets on the sleeves and breast: It turned out to be a reworking of the uniform Cristobal Balenciaga designed for Air France in 1968, but also reflected Ghesquière's personal fascination with the space age. Fusing past and present, he is stamping a unique brand identity on Balenciaga. Not to mention demonstrating the vast distance between a true designer and those who merely hitch their wagons to a trend.
28 February 2005
Which to enthuse over first? The amazing flounced cocktail dresses, inspired by a 1958 Balenciaga original and given a fierce modernist chic by the addition of glossy crocodile cummerbunds and high gladiator sandals? The extraordinary gold-buttoned and braided naval jackets, paired with fluid, gorgeously easy sailor pants? Or the incredible glimmering, body-skimming Lesage-beaded jackets and coats?Whatever the specifics of this superb show, the main point is that Nicolas Ghesquière has turned his hand to making ultra-classy, grown-up clothes. “I wanted it to be more dressy and expensive,” he said. “And I was inspired by volume and making things liquid.” Result: With its skinny gold-buttoned cardigan jackets and sexy spiral-zippered skirts, unlined blazers and the sort of light, flattering coat you can wear indoors, Balenciaga has navigated itself to a place sophisticated women will adore.Any lingering questions about the potential breadth of Balenciaga’s appeal have now been settled. In the past, Ghesquière’s experimental cutting has been at the forefront, sometimes producing extremes that had the air of works in progress—and often overshadowed his equal interest in refining classic Parisian tailoring. Now, with the experiments kept in check, that side of his talent has sailed gloriously into view, producing a consummately balanced collection. The breakthrough seems to have been his decision to delve into the splendors of the Balenciaga archive—and to reabsorb the couture workmanship at his disposal (nimble-fingered lingerie makers for the dresses, Lesage for the beading). “It is true to the patrimony of the house,” Ghesquiere said. “And anyway, now I feel more mature.”
4 October 2004
Practical urban streetwear—a welcome rarity in these polite ladylike days—made a powerful re-entry into fall as Nicolas Ghesquière showed a slew of the aviator jackets he does so well at Balenciaga. He used them to open his collection, bonding generous curly goat-hair shearling lapels onto cavalry twill and pairing them with a pleated drop-waist pant, with a voluminous leg tapered to the ankle. Casual top, mannish bottom: It made for a loosened-up progression of Balenciaga's signature attractions.It got better still when Ghesquière delved, with his usual rigor, into the house archive ("For the first time, I've done it," he said) to retrieve Cristobal Balenciaga's gazar balloon skirt. Paired with yet more tiny, nipped-waist flying jackets or his signature shrunken knits, the contrast was unexpected, contemporary, cool. Handling retro in a modern way? That's a rarity, too.Still, Ghesquière can never keep himself away from an eighties reference—whether that means a Mugler-esque suit or a filmy nylon windbreaker—and this season he went there again with a few sporty motocross-cum-flying-suit assemblages inspired by a book about early eighties New York graffiti artists. His B-Girls, however, were followed by a pair of short, fluted coat-dresses, one in tweed with scrolled lapels, the other double-breasted, in black. For all their complex construction, they were outstanding examples of drop-dead simple French chic, made relevant for a new generation.
2 March 2004
Amazing anatomy: that’s what one needs to acquire before even thinking about Balenciaga for spring. Nicholas Ghesquière’s hourglass suits are all rump-hugging to-the-knee skirt, cinched torso, and assertive shoulder, with raised seams running over every contour. High-collared, multi-buttoned cadet jackets, in glove-smooth putty leather or pristine cream canvas, come nipped at the waist, or with the shoulders shaped on the curve and doubly emphasized by tiny boleros. “I wanted to contrast structure and fluidity,” he said. “Things that give power to femininity.”This sculptured, futuristic/militaristic silhouette marches to a beat not heard since Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana stalked the eighties Paris runways. But there was more: Ghesquière followed his couture—like, neutral tailoring with short, flounced cutaway dresses in vivid colors and flower prints, delicately suspended over neoprene bras. A highly feminine conflation of his previous experiments with patchwork, some of these pieces were collages of powder-pink corsetry and fluted fuchsia chiffon, floating over, say, a lime-green bra. Others, in old-fashioned flower prints, ended in curly ruffles, weighted with zippers in the hems.Whittled down to twenty-six outfits, this was a small but perfectly formed design statement. None of Balenciaga’s beloved pants and T-shirts made the edit, but hopes are high they’re somewhere in the back.
7 October 2003
Nicolas Ghesquière decided to show his fall collection in New York rather than his home base of Paris. And given the terror alerts, bloodless economy, looming war and frigid winter the city is enduring, the timing for his broody, sexy presentation couldn’t have been better. Ghesquière held the show in a severely minimalist art gallery (with an audience that included two of Hollywood’s darker starlets, Chloë Sevigny and Asia Argento), the better to focus attention on the intriguing shapes, fabrics and colors.There aren’t many who play as fearlessly with proportion as Ghesquière, and in this collection he staked out two strong silhouettes: First came slim trapeze looks, like a spare black tunic coat over white leggings and a pretty mint-colored sweater; then he sent out a modern hourglass, made by way of jackets and tops cut with balloon sleeves and often cropped at midtorso. Worn over skintight pants or derrière-hugging minis (including one witty version that looked like a kilt caught in a wind tunnel), it was sleek, tough and cleverly sexy—the kind of uniform a secret agent might wear inMatrix: Reloaded.The designer’s fabrics, substantial and with surface interest, demanded their own attention: chunky shearling, nubby wool felt, ribbed jersey and slick nylon. Chiffon turned up in a few evanescent pink and white tops, sewn with meandering ruffles and brought down to earth by glossy gray thigh boots. Ghesquière excels at pushing his medium to its limit, as shown in the variations he did on his beloved patchwork pieces. But he’s also a master of the classics who can toss off a perfectly cut black blazer to take its wearer through any crisis in style.
12 February 2003
Nicolas Ghesquière’s distillation of sport influences put Balenciaga far out in front of everyone else. Instead of scoring easy points by throwing in the inevitable track pant or tank, the designer used technical wizardry and intense research to transform surfing, diving and baseball references into streamlined city dressing.Everything in his spring collection was body defining—cut short, sculpted to the torso and calculated to outline every curve—without losing sight of what the Balenciaga brand is all about: fantastic pants and jackets and distinctive decoration. Tiny dresses, seamed like scuba suits, had patched-in zones of bright Hawaiian surfer prints on the front or shoulder—a slick advance in Ghesquière’s exploration of collaged fabric. Other dresses were bound about with drapery that was stitched flat to the body. The crucial Balenciaga pant, which Ghesquière cut with a high waist for the past season, was this time done in stretch fabrics, shaped with complex seaming.The standout look, certain to send copy artists into overdrive, was worn by Gisele Bündchen; the striped T-shirt with padded shoulders and ribbed skintight pants was about as un-literal a reference to baseball as you can imagine. When it comes to absorbing and recasting influences, Ghesquière is fashion’s champion left fielder, and that’s what puts him in a different league.
4 October 2002
The 26 looks that Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière showed here today at the Gagosian Gallery will be more scrutinized than Enron’s balance sheet. That’s because Ghesquière has become one of fashion’s magnate designers, able to change the look of a season with one outfit. Moving his fall show to New York from Paris added a significant jolt to fashion week, increased by the fact that getting one of the 200 tickets was well-nigh impossible.But well worth the effort. In front of an audience that included both fashion maven Sarah Jessica Parker and Domenico de Sole, president and CEO of Balenciaga parent Gucci Group, Ghesquière breezed confidently through a collection that was inventive, original—and commercially viable. The all-black opening was tough-girl chic: variations on the motorcycle jacket, with exaggerated knit collars and worn with skintight pants or tight, flippy skirts. He showed soft, oversized sweaters and jackets, and a small group of colorful knee-length collage dresses apparently influenced by Cubist paintings. Ghesquière helped usher in fashion’s current love of artisan craft, and the dramatic, shaggy ivory coats that closed the show could double as soft sculpture.While some designers struggle to express one theme per season, Ghesquière’s dilemma seems to be how to control his bountiful creative flow.
12 February 2002
Nicolas Ghesquière once again defined the mood of the moment, capturing the romantic, ethnic currents of this season with an exquisitely crafted Balenciaga collection.Ghesquière started with his most elaborate pieces, showing beautiful patchwork vests, microdresses and jackets made from a collage of shimmering vintage Indian fabrics. Paired with loose, no-nonsense cargo trousers, they projected casual sophistication of the drop-dead cool variety. Ghesquière’s skimpy, ravaged pink salopettes served as a sweet prelude to his high-impact black-and-silver trousers and skirts; the final all-black, extra-loose vests and tuxedos played out like a clever deconstruction of fall’s Victorian corsets and bodices.Ghesquière’s floating silhouettes are sure to be hugely influential next spring.
10 October 2001
Every few years, a designer comes along who dramatically alters the way we see fashion, defying categorization, eschewing conventional references and barreling ahead with highly individual ideas. Nicolas Ghesquière is proving to be one of those extremely rare talents.As always, Ghesquière's collection for Balenciaga was well edited and to the point: no need for endless repetition here. The show opened with short overall dresses with loose black blazers, no-nonsense shirts with diagonal strip insets, tiny miniskirts and slim, sleek trousers. Blousy off-the-shoulder tops and asymmetrically cut, full skirts were generously ruffled, pleated, embroidered and gathered, and twisted and manipulated every which way. Wide belts with insets, dangling cords and strands of pearls broke the silhouette and provided a corsetlike effect.The initial feeling at Balenciaga was one of blissful, extravagant chaos—but by the end of the show it all fell quietly into place and made perfect sense.
11 October 2000
Nicolas Ghesquière showed one of the most original, refined collections of the season for Balenciaga.At a moment when artless reinterpretations of the past seem to dominate the runways, his clothes stood out for their distinct originality. To be sure, there were strong '80s references, like sharp shoulders, punk-inspired fastenings on jackets and pegged baggy trousers; but the looks were constructed with a freshness that had nothing to do with the past.While straight, narrow black pants were worn with strict jackets and zippered shirts, ragged, tattered dresses were wrapped around the body to look nonchalantly chic. Tailored jeans were the perfect companions for batwing turtlenecks, tapestry tiger-print vests and elaborately ruffled tops. The quiet color scheme—centered on black, navy, rust and tan—added an element of sobriety and elegance to the clothes. In all, it was an extraordinary presentation—one that is sure to put Balenciaga once and for all in the center of the fashion map.
1 March 2000
Nicholas Ghesquière continued his revival of the silhouettes Balenciaga pioneered in the '50s, and brought them up to speed (which, in this season, means going back to the '80s). Loose sack-dresses, sweaters and coats with dolman sleeves, as well as pleated pants tapered at the bottom, predominated; but there were also preppy, slim trousers with matching long-sleeved shirts and blazers. The palette was restrained for the most part: Plum, beige, and navy were the main colors.
6 October 1999
In the wake ofAlexander Wang’sshort three-year stint atBalenciaga,Nicolas Ghesquière’sfifteen years at the house look all the more epic. They began when he was plucked from semi-obscurity designing wedding and funeral dresses for the brand’s Japanese licenses to fill the hole left by Josephus Thimister. Ghesquière’s debut collection was all black and modest in its ambitions compared with what was to come. But it painted a clear picture of his genius not just for silhouette, but also for casting. The star of the show was a baby-facedGisele Bündchen.
1 October 1997