Elizabeth Douglas

With his spring-summer 2024 Balenciaga fashion show, Demna reminds once again that he’s a contemporary fashion visionary. “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”, the designer said. Demna was coming off a year during which, he said, “I felt very alone.” In reaction, his latest 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 featuring Isabelle Huppert reading out the instructions for tailoring a jacket. 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.”

As for the clothes, it’s all about the quintessence of Demna’s trademark style: humungous tailoring, oversize hoodies and jeans, sinister leather coats and military camouflage were represented. So were plissé evening gowns, floral prints, bathrobes, motorcycle leathers. Vintage trenches and bombers were cobbled together with four sleeves apiece. Multiple evening gowns were made from multiple old evening gowns—black velvet, fuchsia satin, glittery gold. 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. With all his favourite people on the runway – starting from Cathy Horyn and Renata Litvinova and ending on Elizabeth Douglas and Amanda Lepore – it seemed that Demna was truly proud of the collection. “What I showed today was probably my most personal and my most favorite collection, because it was about me; it was about my story.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram! By the way, did you know that I’ve started a newsletter called Ed’s Dispatch? Click here to subscribe!

As far as I didn’t entirely get Riccardo Tisci‘s Burberry, his spring-summer 2021 virtual fashion-show-slash-performance was gripping. As far as humor goes, it doesn’t get much darker than “a love story between a mermaid and a shark.” It was Riccardo Tisci’s loaded reference for his post-lockdown collection. A metaphor for the events of the past seven months, it reflects the loneliness and thirst for freedom we all experienced in quarantine. But in his under-the-sea analogy – a theme that pervaded both garments and graphics – Tisci’s shark (a career trademark we remember from Givenchy) represented something more menacing than mere loneliness. In that sense, it was an accurate depiction of how many of us felt in lockdown: part zen and at one with nature, part terrified out of our minds. For the show, the designer took his models – and muses, like Mariacarla Boscono and Lea T – to a deep, British forest. Under the canopy of nature, every feeling that had washed over the designer during lockdown was released in an ominous performance created by the artist duo Anne Imhof and Elizabeth Douglas, who sang at the live-streamed event. Staged sans audience, the tactile performance that ensued could easily make you forget we were in the middle of a pandemic. Cameras captured models getting dressed inside claustrophobic boxes before they could escape and embrace the freedom of the forest. It all felt very liberating until groups of men in black suits and sunglasses popped up behind them. They followed the models to a clearing where white-clad performers engaged in a ritualistic dance macabre amidst billows of orange smoke that had young commenters on the streaming service Twitch, which hosted the show, rife with quips. Looking at the collection, it was just the right balance of street and fashion. The prints were finally as good as the ones Tisci spoiled as back at the French maison. Summing up, it was a very good collection, edited down (no 150+ looks, thankfully) and desirable. “Being scared made me realize how lucky I am to do this job,” Tisci said. “I want to be more creative. I want to give the best of myself. In the beginning, you want to get to a level you want to get to. When you get there, you’re working towards stabilization. But this was a wake-up call: let’s do our best.”