Mothering. Balenciaga SS24

October 4, 2023October 4, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.
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Slavic Chic. Magda Butrym SS24

October 3, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

For spring-summer 2024, Magda Butrym emphasizes her vocabulary of signature Slavic chic. Roses are the Polish label’s key signifier, and this season the designer offers a range of iterations of this motif. Silk-petal roses appear on shoes and arm-bracelets; floral shapes are draped around the bustiers, come hand-crotcheted or materialize in form of meticulous lace. The most intriguing version of Butrym’s favorite flowers was created in collaboration with Heven, Breana Box and Peter Dupont’s artisan brand. The gorgeous, blooming necklace made entirely from glass is fit for a goddess. Just like all the sheer, slinky dresses that look light as a feather.

Vivacious Farewell. Alexander McQueen SS24

October 3, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

For her final collection for Alexander McQueen, Sarah Burton was inspired by female anatomy, Queen Elizabeth I, the blood red rose and Magdalena Abakanowicz, a transgressive and powerfully creative Polish artist who refused ever to compromise her vision. Abakanowicz’s tactile artworks served as the show’s venue elements as well as reference point for all of Burton’s magnificent knitwear. That was a vivacious farewell, not only to her loyal fans, but the 26 years the designer spent at the brand, of which 13 years were without Lee. Poignantly, the collection served as a sequel to last season’s show, a proposal Burton – at the time – said was founded in the origins of the house: observing the virtues of Savile Row tailoring before tearing it apart and turning it on its head. For spring-summer 2024, the effect was heart-wrenching. Burton cut her tailoring like it was skin, flaying it open in slices along the ribs, shoulders and busts. With her reference to Elizabeth I lingering at the back of the mind, and her era’s taste for torture, there was something fierce and vicious about Burton’s incisions, aggressive and agonising all at once. After long-time house model Naomi Campbell closed the show, David Bowie’s “Heroes” filled the space in preparation for Burton’s final bow. She came out in her modest jeans-and-shirt uniform, embracing the industry figures who have been by her side since her early years with Lee McQueen – starting with fashion journalists par excellence Susannah Frankel and Sarah Mower – before blowing kisses at an audience that will soon be back to welcome her next chapter. Leaving Le Carreau du Temple, the atmosphere was one of gratefulness rather than sadness. Now the big question: who will replace her at McQueen? I’m rooting for Dilara Findikonglu, a fearless London-based talent who would be the perfect match for the brand.

Cacophony of Joy. Comme Des Garçons SS24

October 2, 2023October 2, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Rei Kawakubo, the visionary designer who is known for responding to global unrests and deep, existential dilemmas through her Comme Des Garçons garments, this season seemed to simply say “fuck it, let me have some fun” with the cacophony of electric colours, hysterically clashing patterns and a range of fantastically irrational, bulbous shapes. Finding happiness and emanating with joy are some of the biggest forces of resistance.

Personal. Andreas Kronthaler Vivienne Westwood SS24

October 2, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

As Andreas Kronthaler put it pre-show, his spring-summer 2024 Vivienne Westwood collection was a synthesis derived from his contemplation of his late wife’s own clothes. Some months ago, he faced the emotional task of packing up her personal wardrobe. “There were maybe 250 looks’ worth, something like that, and as I did it I knew this was going to be the collection,” he said. He decided to go for around 40 looks, which he says he chose from the 250 and arbitrarily ordered for this show by picking the numbers of those he’d archived out of a hat. Whether it was via serendipity or the magical emotional personal lay lines that most-loved and lived-in garments sometimes acquire, his first pick was the number of a brown micro-corduroy suit from 2004 that Westwood had worn day to day for nearly two decades, sometimes patching along the way. Here it was reimagined in a pale berry tone and looked easily the most interesting piece of womenswear tailoring of this Paris season so far: its harmonically incongruous “mistakes” were as wonderful to watch as it looked comfortable to wear. Kronthaler’s loving but also clear-eyed curation of these looks generated a collection that appeared not fleetingly radical, but timelessly so. The linen cape in look six was a reworked version of one Westwood wore when riding in a tank to the house of a disastrous British prime minister to park it on his lawn in protest back in 2015. The penultimate dress, based originally on a Velázquez painting she adored, was worn to an opera in Salzburg: “Some of the things she had worn only once, you know,” said Kronthaler. Westwood’s erudite, curious, and activist intellectual identity added up to a mindset no big bucks creative agency could ever fashion. She was also a woman designing for women (although there was a smattering of men’s looks here). This was a wonderful survey of a design dialect unlike any other.