![]() 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 was heralded only by its absence-the fact that the clothes and accessories were wiped clean of logos. These were long, slim, covered-up dresses, minutely embellished, and with a new signature rounded-bump of a shoulderline.Īside from the styling, there is one far more radical change on the way for Balenciaga. 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. “Evolving it is the number one reason why I am here,” as he’d commented to Vogue earlier. Part of Demna’s decision is to refocus on Cristóbal Balenciaga’s legacy. ![]() The problem: how to close the Pandora’s box of the uncontrollable toxic furies of internet opinion? Concentrating on the creative reshaping of a collection to its fundamentals is likely only one step on a long road. It was a ground zero of the Paris fashion establishment, where Balenciaga is situated, now facing the task of navigating its vast business forward through the eye of a storm. If there was a message to read in the location-this is the man, after all, who has alerted the world to scan everything he does for subtexts-it lay in the fact that this place in the Carrousel du Louvre was purpose-built for fashion shows back in the 1990s. Absent a celebrity front row, the professional industry audience numbered 700. The venue he picked today was underground, but a world away from the gritty basement venues from which he first sprang the surprise of his Vetements shows in the mid-2000s. “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.”Ī printed text left on the seats explained that Demna had gone back to his earliest memory of making a choice over clothing as a child in Georgia, when he was given the money to go get a pair of pants made by a neighboring tailor. 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. ![]() “I needed to have a show because I need to move on. His 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. It was the first that Demna, formerly known as Demna Gvasalia, one of the master-architects of meta-ironics, has held in Paris since the global scandal that was detonated by two Balenciaga online advertising campaigns posted last November. Nowhere was the extreme tension between those two poles felt more sharply than at the Balenciaga show for fall 2023. Stripping back to the fundamentals of design-as against the performative, the ‘experiential,’ and meme-generating multi-platform communication harnessed by brands-has been a thrust of this latest round of shows. ![]()
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