Between the acrid smell of newly paved asphalt and a low ceiling of strobe lights, the Balenciaga Fall show framed Demna Gvasalia’s view of the Paris street. He called it “my ode to the customer, to people who actually go shopping for fashion. Because of course—this is the reason I do it!”
Like several shows this season, it felt like a clearing away of background distractions so you could see silhouettes—the minimal, cool tailoring with an upstanding, rounded shoulder head; the buttonless wrap-over cocoon coats and jackets; and the run of solemn, minimalistic-chic pantsuits (with no-joke trousers, how rare!) calculated to please both men and women. Gvasalia knows he is dealing with the kind of fussy people who care about integrity and drop-dead fit—potential swing voters in the suddenly rapid competition between houses.
Gvasalia said he’s continued to apply and refine the molded, computer-manipulated techniques he’s brought into the house for the past year, “but now they’re more subtle, I would say. They are the tailoring tricks we apply to making a shoulder structure.”
The fact that he’d cut away the background spectacle—the digital-art tunnel of last season, the ski mountain of the one before—meant that all the attention was focused on the clothes. Up to a point. You can still deliberately grate on an audience’s senses through the smell of the street, the brutally repetitive march of techno music, and exposure to flashing lights for an extended period. Gvasalia is far from alone in wanting to stage a metaphorical reflection of the state of the world in his show—it’s almost a responsibility and a badge of belonging to the intellectually-attuned set of designers which includes Rei Kawakubo, Miuccia Prada, and Rick Owens.
Gvasalia did all that in a long, long 109-look coed show of womenswear and menswear. He said he’s not showing pre-collections anymore, so the entire brand’s stall for the next six months was laid out here in all its varieties of gender, age, and accessory appeal.
Here are one or two things that stood out: his retooling of Cristóbal Balenciaga monastic silhouettes as “incognito” high collars and hoods that obscured the wearer’s face from side view—an extreme, intellectually witty extension of Gvasalia’s reputation as a maker of hoodies. The erasure of trainers, Dad-like or otherwise, in favor of square-toed black leather shoes and new high boots for men. The young men carrying fistfuls of B-branded shopping bags. “It’s real,” said Gvasalia. “When I’m on the streets of Paris, that’s what I see.”