One of the hottest Paris Fashion Week runway debuts belonged to Marie Adam-Leenaerdt. Although considered a newcomer by the industry, she in fact was a ready-to-wear designer at Demna’s Balenciaga for a couple of seasons. The Belgian designer presented her collection in what she called a “soulless” conference room. This arguably male domain was a foil for her sophisticated women’s designs, which might have read as bougie if there weren’t something so “off” about them – like jackets with small shoulders that slanted toward the chest, strange geometric silhouettes, and the collection’s hero pieces – oats with standing lapels. Adam-Leenaerdt style is all about hints of playful derision. But there’s nothing gimmick-y about it: her garments are trendless, and appeal with the strength of the cut, the precision of the construction, and the luxury of the materials. There’s been a lot of discussion about the female gaze as it applies to “sexy” dressing; Adam-Leenaerdt seemed to be turning hers to ideas around femininity and propriety. This is a very covered-up collection that reconstructs a woman’s curves into geometries of enveloping drapes, with proportions either blown-up or shrunken. A dress that seems to have a box inside of it is tied with a couture bow, other dresses seem to have three arms. There’s a deliberate domestic aspect to Adam-Leenaerdt’s work. Women have often been relegated to the home, but she wants to transform and celebrate ordinary aspects of life – “to reveal the beauty in the ‘has-been’ elements of the daily world, to divert them, to have fun with them.” To that end Adam-Leenaerdt reimagined a folded table napkin as a white dress, and she fashioned dresses out of tablecloths. Her aim, it seems, is to make us engage with what is immediately around us, by taking something known, a code or a silhouette, and giving it a subtle strangeness that makes you stop and adjust your vision.
After THE controversy – which became an unprecedented case study that polarized the fashion industry – that escalated in the second half of December and continued to be dynamically scrutinized in the beginning of 2023, Balenciaga and Demna are back. Cautiously. The autumn-winter 2023 fashion show was provocation-free: just a white-cube venue and models in clothes, with no sociopolitical context playing in the background or a performative, highly-viral shock value. Stripping back to the fundamentals of design has been a thrust of this latest round of shows, but nowhere was the extreme tension between those two poles felt more sharply than at this show. Demna’s 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 was published by Vogue in 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 was to ditch his mega-set methodology and showcase his personal bid for reputational integrity as a designer. “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. In the next part of the collection, Demna refocused on Cristóbal Balenciaga’s legacy. “Evolving it is the number one reason why I am here,” as he’d commented to Vogue earlier. Shorn of distractions, critically, the collection could be seen as a hybrid of Demna-isms – cyber-avatar menswear, his familiar flower-printed knife-pleated dresses – segueing into more of a distinct homage to the founder’s archival evening gowns. These were long, slim, covered-up dresses, minutely embellished, and with a new signature rounded-bump of a shoulderline. Aside from the styling, there is one far more radical change on the way for Balenciaga. It was heralded only by its absence – the fact that the clothes and accessories were wiped clean of logos. The attraction of highly visible branding has been part and parcel of the cult of Balenciaga that Demna has brought to popular street culture everywhere. “It’s a big thing,” he admitted. “But I think we’re going to enter the stage in my work where it doesn’t need to be justified by the brand on it. To be honest, it’s necessary, and I use this opportunity now to convince that this is the right thing to do. And of course, you know, doing that means not doing it only once. You have to persist to be able to change.”
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
When Balenciaga invited its guests to a “mud show“, they meant it literally. There were tons of mud on the spring-summer 2023 runway, 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 Sissel Tolaas, blasted in the face. Demna did it yet again: he shook up the fashion industry like no one else, reminding about rising inequality, the return of fascism, wars happening all over the globe, and the very real threat of nuclear war. 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 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.” 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.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
To be honest with you, this haute couture season didn’t really start for me until Balenciaga happened. The 51st Balenciaga haute couture collection. And the second coming from Demna. Nobody knew what to expect, the anticipation had the fashion insiders on an ecstatic high on a mid-week morning, and in the end, he didn’t dissapoint. 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. 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. This was Demna’s dystopian introduction to his latest 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 kinky hyper-molded second-skin scuba dresses and tailored jackets – was engineered with a new kind of neoprene, made in collaboration with a sustainably-oriented Japanese manufacturer.
In the second half of the show, where faces were revealed, Demna’s friends, muses, and brand ambassadors walked. Kim Kardashian in a deep-plunge corset and draped skirt. Demna’s musician husband BFRND in opera gloves and a couture tank-top. Nicole Kidman in a silver gown. Dua Lipa and Bella Hadid in draped pops of colour. Eliza Douglas in the most perfect hourglass coat. Renata Litvinova in an all-black feather-mad cocktail dress. Naomi Campbell was the ultimate Balenciaga Maleficent. 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. The commercial conundrum he faces is finding a way to connect couture with the following that is his main, democratically-based youth constituency – represented by all the outside spectators whose cheers poured in through the salon windows as the sidewalk turned into a celebrity-spotting event.
To square that circle, a new Balenciaga couture shop had opened on the Avenue Georges V, where certain limited edition items, like the upcycled pieces, Balenciaga souvenir porcelain figurines, and the ‘Speaker’ bag toted in the show can be bought. “There are items that will be ready to buy already. After the last show, people started to ask me, ‘how do we buy it?’ People, especially from the younger generation of maybe up-and-coming couture customers, don’t know, and we want to establish the dialogue. Create some kind of an entry to the salon.” But in a sense, Demna was also meeting Cristobal coming back. The arc of the show, he said, “was going from future into the past.” Thus the hyper-extravagance and drama of the vast crinolines and slinky, draped, train-trailing of his celebrity-walked finale. It’s still a debate whether the bride who couldn’t walk through the doors and struggled a lot to move in her heavily embellished dress was an art performance or an actual runway casualty. I’m fine with both versions of the story.
If it was more personal this season, there was a touching reason behind it. Explaining the AI-voiced poem at the opening of the show, Demna said they were the words of a love poem he’d written to his husband. “Because je t’aime is the most beautiful word in the language to me. I realized that couture, what I do, is the only thing I love doing and I want to be doing. And somehow this was a love letter to the person I love most in my life, and to the work, the art that I do. Both.”
Design & Culture by Ed 