DEMNA
Balenciaga
Photographed by Nigel Shafran
Demna is arguably his generation’s most influential designer. At the helm of Balenciaga since 2015 – where, in 2021, he reintroduced couture after a half-century hiatus – he has recast fashion in his image, mixing flights of sartorial fancy with fun-house-mirror versions of tailoring and streetwear that imply a social commentary. Both the latter were on display at Balenciaga’s recent resort show at the New York Stock Exchange; the tailoring a selection of archetypal Demna silhouettes – vastly proportioned, drop-shoulder suits and overcoats – and the streetwear riffing on Adidas’s iconic three-stripe. Mounted back in March, as Russian tanks crossed the border into Ukraine, the house’s autumn/winter ’22/’23 show had opened with the Georgian Demna reading a poem in Ukrainian; this time, crypto bubbles popped and markets began a precipitous slide. “We live in a terrifying world,” said Demna. “I think fashion ought to reflect the world.” Maya Singer
Balenciaga’s May show at the New York Stock Exchange was fashion served amid a backdrop of late-stage capitalism. All wearing Balenciaga.
There was a moment, mid-way through the Balenciaga show at the New York Stock Exchange in May, when the venue’s countless stock-ticker displays began to freak out, screens flashing and pixelating in time with the techno soundtrack as latex-masked models clad in satirically large business suits stomped by, never breaking stride. Aha, I thought. Yes, truly we are living in the extended-dance-remix era of late capitalism. Everything’s breaking down – global pandemic, culture war, actual war, climate crisis, inflation, what even is crypto, anyway? – but the song keeps playing on its endless loop, and so we keep dancing to its beat.
At its best, this is what fashion does: it shows us the now. Through the lens of a collection, we see a stylised snapshot of our time – its obsessions, its dreams, its anxieties, its strategies for making sense of the world – and, counterintuitively, it is this keen responsiveness to the present that points the way forward, to something new. As Diana Vreeland once famously said, remarking on the mirror fashion holds up to society, one can “see the approaching of a revolution in clothes”. What’s fascinating about this particular fashion moment is that it augurs not a single revolution, but many all at once.
The designers featured in the portfolio accompanying this piece are all trying to “reestablish fashion in a new way”, as Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele says, referring to his own idiosyncratic approach to reinventing a legacy brand for the modern era – an ongoing process, he notes. For Michele, that means embracing the fact that fashion is no longer meant to speak to an insider elite – a perspective shared by Glenn Martens, who heads up both Diesel and the conceptual label Y/Project, and Telfar Clemens of Telfar, two designers
