Fashion

Balenciaga‘s Demna Gvasalia wouldn’t be Demna Gvasalia if he didn’t sprinkle a pinch of irony to his fashion. “It’s a deep fake of a fashion show,” declared the designer ahead of the launch of the ultra-high-tech video for his spring-summer 2022 “Clones” collection. “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 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. 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. There’s the Hacker Project – this season’s return match with Gucci, in which Balenciaga has “stolen” classic Gucci bag shapes and reprinted them with BBs instead of GGs, just as Alessandro Michele reproduced Demna Balenciaga patterns and diagonal branding in his last collection. There’s a Gucci best seller GG buckle belt redone with BBs 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.” One of the totes comes knowingly scrawled with the graffiti legend “This is not a Gucci bag” – a reference to René Magritte’s 1929 painting The 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. Other than the Gucci clash, there’s no mistaking Gvasalia’s roster of signatures: the supersized tailoring and coats; the loose printed dresses; the ski jackets, hoodies, and streetwear; the cyber-Gothic denim; the severely elegant eveningwear. With them, a vast range of distinctive Balenciaga accessories, from a reissue of the Crocs collaboration to the diamanté bow jewelry that originated in the house archive. There’s a part of Gvasalia that wanted to illuminate his fake runway with a bit of light and hope, he said. The first look to step out, in black velvet with a heavy veil, refers back to his prophetically apocalyptic show of February 2020. “It’s almost like mourning something, where we’ve all been,” he said. “But I wanted it to go into a bright space. And I ended it with a red ballroom dress.” After the retreat of the Balenciaga clones, he has the exact opposite planned: the showing of his much-anticipated first haute couture show, in real life, in Paris in early July. Handmade, in the works for more than a year, in front of a small audience, it’ll be his next big creative step forward. Can’t wait.

“Live” collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Gabriela Hearst delves deeper into the sustainable achievements of her Chloé residency, and it looks beautiful. Although I was not in love with Gabriela Hearst’s debut collection for Chloé, her next steps at the Parisian maison are promising. First, the direction of the brand’s Instagram, which is all about Zoë Ghertner’s raw, yet sensual photos of nature and female bodies – no aggressive product placement, no logo rebrandings, just idyllic visuals featuring poetic musings in the captions. Second, the resort 2022, which is a far better image of what Hearst vision for the brand really is. “We’re here on a mission,” she told Vogue, listing the impressive measures the house is taking to make its collections sustainable. If you came for the romantic mood boards and the classic tales of trips to the archive, this wasn’t it. “I haven’t gone to the archive,” Hearst said. “I feel like I’ve loved Chloé for so long and I have this idea of what it looks like. It’s not that I don’t respect what’s been done in its history, but I want the representation of what Chloé means to me to come out first.” Instead, the collection was an accelerated exercise in what we might discover to be our post-pandemic fashion mindset: What you wear is only as good as its social and environmental footprint. “We can’t deny what we went through on a global scale. Things are going to be different,” she said, referring to a cataclysmic year that shifted our understanding of environmental impact and made companies like Chloé – already on a sustainable path before her arrival – look to eco-conscious figureheads like Hearst. “Each collection is an opportunity to do it better,” she said. “I already did the least sustainable thing you can do, which is to have three kids.” In spirit, her proposal was geared toward those kids: the next-generation mentality Hearst says can’t come quickly enough. “We need to move out of the way and let them take over. They’re wired in a different way. They have a different perception.” In design, the collection’s Chloé-revering bohemian pragmatism reached out to generations somewhat older. Puritan-ish dresses were constructed in circular deadstock denim – with no metal, laser treatment instead of water, and recycled wood buttons – scalloped leather, and deadstock broderie anglaise. Linen trench coats trimmed with embroidered white edges demonstrated how Hearst might see a classic wardrobe staple through the instinctive Chloé lens she talks about. Blanket coats and fringed hand-spun dresses riffed on the hippie-esque references we historically relate to an eco-friendly wardrobe – not one for a cliché, Hearst likened them to techno dance parties. “Rave against the machine,” she punned, showing off a matching multi-color debut Chloé sneaker defined by its great, big stitches, every component created from recycled material. “I’m really attracted to product that feels handmade. I want to feel like a human worked on it.”