![]() ![]() ![]() This was my first foray into the Balenciaga universe. The invitation announced that the show would be held at a convention center in the suburbs of Paris, a very you-come-to-us venue that did nothing to discourage a caravan of livery cars. The banality of the items offered an amusing counterpoint to luxury fashion’s ever-escalating swag wars. The change purse was even filled with fake coins. They included her gym membership card, her government I.D., receipts from a vegan supermarket. The invitation came in the form of a battered wallet, stuffed with the personal effects of an Everywoman character named Natalia Antunes. His “mud show,” in October, 2022, will probably go down in fashion history as the apogee of the spectacular style of fashiontainment that he was now swearing off. Demna had been willing to take us there, to the juncture of a violent world and the clothes that might make us feel better while hastening its collapse. “I can’t disconnect from reality and just, you know, live inside my office space.” Other designers take us to the Qing dynasty or the Belle Époque, to Djuna Barnes’s Left Bank flat or Talitha Getty’s Marrakesh villa. If brands like Dolce & Gabbana evoked an endless summer, Balenciaga was eternal winter, maybe nuclear. (He dropped his last name, Gvasalia, in 2021, because he wanted to separate his personal life from his professional life and because people kept mispronouncing it.) The show featured a band of stoic, lonely figures in a dystopian arena of howling wind and driving snow. Two years later, days after the start of the war in Ukraine, Demna, who was born in Georgia in 1981, draped each chair in a blue-and-yellow T-shirt. In his Winter 2020 show, floodwaters rose over the runway as starlings murmurated on a screen overhead, braving fire, thunder, and crashing waves. of the fashion search engine Tagwalk, told me. “Demna’s the only one who talks about the things we’re all thinking about,” Alexandra Van Houtte, the founder and C.E.O. You have been dressed by Demna, at least indirectly, if you’ve recently worn a clunky sneaker or a humongous coat. ![]() “He essentially knocked the craft into a new orbit,” Cathy Horyn wrote in the Cut last year, when he brought haute couture back to the house after a half-century hiatus. His work impressed critics as much as it delighted the masses. Demna joined the company in 2015 and, with Cédric Charbit, the C.E.O., grew an estimated three-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar business into a two-billion-dollar megabrand, with witty hit products such as a “Bern-lenciaga” sweatshirt, with the Balenciaga name in the style of a political-campaign logo, and platform clogs produced in collaboration with Crocs and known affectionately as “the ugliest shoe ever made.” In 2022, Time named Demna one of the hundred most influential people. The house of Balenciaga was founded by Cristóbal Balenciaga in 1937. Barnum and its Walter Benjamin, possessing a simultaneous talent for leading the spectacle and subjecting it to critique. If fashion was entertainment, he was its P. Until now, Demna had been the industry’s greatest impresario. He concluded, “This is why fashion to me can no longer be seen as an entertainment, but rather as the art of making clothes.” “In the last couple of months, I needed to seek shelter for my love affair with fashion,” he wrote, explaining that he’d found solace in darts and notches, shoulder lines and armholes. On each seat sat a white card bearing a message from Demna, the brand’s artistic director. The Business of Fashion was calling it Balenciaga’s “make-or-break” moment the Times, “the single most fraught show of the season.” The brand was trying to recover from a pair of botched ad campaigns that, in December, had led to a wild farrago of accusations, including that it had sexualized children and condoned child abuse. It was eleven-thirty on a Sunday morning in March-the Mass hour, Balenciaga’s traditional slot on the Paris Fashion Week calendar-and editors, buyers, clients, and the odd quidnunc had gathered at the Carrousel du Louvre, a cavernous mall under the museum, to attend the presentation of the house’s Fall 2023 collection. Nervous coughs going around like the wave. ![]()
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