“My plan is to try not to do anything for two weeks, and to enjoy Mediterranean sunsets with Lana del Rey music in the background,” Demna tells Tatler ahead of his summer holiday, a few weeks after presenting his second couture collection for Balenciaga in July.
If you pay even the slightest attention to fashion business, you’ll know that, while much of the industry has struggled during the pandemic, Balenciaga has gone from strength to strength. In 2019, its parent company Kering revealed that the French label was set to surpass €1 billion (approximately US$1.12 billion) in revenue; according to Bloomberg, it stood at an estimated US$2.3 billion in 2021. This seed of success was planted in 2015 when Kering approached Demna—who no longer uses his family name Gvasalia professionally, to separate his private self from his work persona—to lead the brand. Now, seven years into his tenure at Balenciaga, the Georgian designer has disrupted, if not fashion history, certainly the fashion of this generation.
In the past two years, the house has, as well as its autumn-winter 2021 collection release, which was presented as a game called. The brand also blurred conventionally rigid boundaries through its crossovers and activations, including the Hacker Project with Gucci and the unveiling of its collaboration with Adidas at the New York Stock Exchange, not to mention launching an animated catwalk show, for which characters were cast as models. He also popularised “ugly fashion” with the massive commercial success of his signature daddy sneakers and the rubbish bag-inspired trash pouch that made waves on social media. “I am bored of everything conventional; conventional means lazy to me,” he says. “I am interested in searching for beauty in everything, not in what society and history tells us is supposed to be considered beautiful.”
