ON A WARM Paris night this past July, in the identical neo-Classical palace off the Place de la Concorde where coronation balls were once held for Emperor Napoleon I and King Charles X, Balenciaga was hosting a dinner for Demna, its artistic director of seven years. Earlier that day, the 41-year-old Georgian designer had presented his second couture collection for the French fashion house founded in 1917 by Cristóbal Balenciaga, the Spanish designer whose bubble hemlines, sack dresses and cocoon coats offered an adventurous postwar alternative to Christian Dior’s hyper-feminine Latest Look of the late Nineteen Forties. Now, in a grand reception room of the recently restored 18th-century Hôtel de la Marine, the magician David Blaine was performing a card trick for the pop star Dua Lipa; the actor Alexa Demie was chatting with the truth star and real estate agent Christine Quinn, whose Balenciaga handbag, one in all only 20 in existence, was also a Bang & Olufsen speaker; and Kim Kardashian, the brand’s most loyal and most famous customer, posed in one in all the designer’s tinted polyurethane face shields, which made her appear like she’d stepped out of a John Baldessari photograph.
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Demna was seated at a protracted banquet table with Kardashian; her mother, Kris Jenner; the actor Michelle Yeoh; the supermodels Naomi Campbell and Bella Hadid; the rapper Offset; the country musician Keith Urban; and his wife, the movie star Nicole Kidman, who’d walked her first runway show a couple of hours earlier in a silver-coated silk taffeta gown with a protracted train knotted on the hip. To allay his sometimes-severe social anxiety at such events, Demna has all the time surrounded himself with a circle of confidants — including his husband, the composer and musician Loïck Gomez, also known by his stage name, BFRND, whom he met online in 2016 and married in 2017. But after weekly sessions along with his life coach, he decided to try exposure therapy this time. (He’s been working with the identical therapist since just before starting at Balenciaga; often he finds it easier to speak emotion through a garment he’s made than with words.) “Am I going to say something improper to Nicole?” he anxious. But after I glanced over to ascertain on him, I saw that Demna was nose to nose with Kidman, whom he’d only just met. Her hand was on his heart, and his hand on hers, neither of them moving or speaking. They stayed like that, silent and looking at one another, for nearly two minutes; it’s her preferred way of connecting to someone, she says.
Across the room at the chums’ table, I discovered myself where Demna would normally be, with the painter Eliza Douglas, Demna’s longtime muse; her partner, the artist Anne Imhof; the pop singer Róisín Murphy, who would later perform a couple of songs within the courtyard; the model Julia Nobis; the photographer Nadia Lee Cohen, who shot Balenciaga’s fall 2022 campaign; Martina Tiefenthaler, the corporate’s chief creative officer and one in all the founding members of Vetements, the influential fashion collective Demna began in 2014; and Tiefenthaler’s boyfriend, Gian Gisiger, the graphic designer behind the most recent iteration of Balenciaga’s logo. Amongst other things, Demna is understood for being loyal to his tribe, a creative gang — and informal focus group — of like-minded nonconformists who walk in his shows, star in his look books and cheer him on. “What a crazy carnival of individuals,” Tiefenthaler said to me with pride. “And there he’s, in the midst of all of it.” She motioned within the direction of the designer, whose gray cotton hoodie stood out amid all of the sequins.
His sense of alienation isn’t incidental to his work or a talking point on a press release; it’s visible in every garment he makes — should you know where to look.
Demna was hired by Balenciaga in 2015 with a transparent mandate: to make the garments feel urgent again. As an heir to the legendary tailor once described by Dior as “the master of us all” and by Coco Chanel as “a couturier within the truest sense of the word” — in addition to a more immediate successor to the urbane, forward-thinking French Belgian designer Nicolas Ghesquière, who spent 15 years on the brand’s helm before departing in 2012 — he was not an obvious alternative. Cristóbal Balenciaga was a perfectionist intent on achieving sculptural purity through minimal construction, a feat he got here closest to realizing in his spring 1967 collection, which included a marriage dress held together by a single seam. Demna, who looks like a headbanger, in torn jeans and ratty band T-shirts, with piercings in each ears, looked as if it would have emerged onto fashion’s biggest stage straight from a Rammstein concert.
But since his appointment at Balenciaga, Demna has change into, if not his generation’s most vital designer, definitely its most fun. In an industry where strategy teams struggle to get people talking about their brands, he can’t release a pair of shoes without them turning right into a Cardi B lyric. What’s more striking, though, is how dexterously he has exhumed the archives, reinterpreting Cristóbal’s classic silhouettes with cheek and reverence, splicing house codes with streetwear style principles, making high fashion not only from satin and velvet but nylon and denim, as well. His contributions to the home have ranged from homage (his fall 2016 debut opened with a two-button gray flannel jacket that flared on the hips, a subtle tackle the trademark Balenciaga bell shape of the Fifties) to histrionic (for spring 2020, he took the development to its extreme, exaggerating the shape in order that models in matching gold and silver lamé gowns resembled a pair of Hershey’s Kisses on creatine).
Much as he might need to recede at times, Demna has found himself ever more scrutinized. In this manner, too, he recalls his predecessor: Back within the Nineteen Forties and ’50s, Balenciaga the person became a global fashion star despite his best attempts at anonymity. As Mary Blume, creator of “The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, His World” (2013), told NPR, “No one knew how tall he was, if he was slim or fat. … Several French journalists thought he wasn’t one person but that he was a team of designers. And that is just because he didn’t appear.” In 2021, Demna attended the Met Gala with Kardashian, each in matching black fabric face coverings. Although his attendance was meant to signal his emergence as an industry star, many individuals speculated that it was Kanye West, Kardashian’s estranged husband on the time. Still, the mask served a minimum of two purposes: Wearing it calmed his nerves, and it prevented the flashing cameras from capturing unflattering photos of him. “I’ve all the time had an issue with myself within the mirror,” says Demna, whose somewhat stern features — pale skin, strong nose — are softened by his hazel eyes and a warm smile. Since then, he’s chosen to wear one every time he has to have his picture taken.
Words like “rebel” and “iconoclast” are thrown around so often in the style industry that they could as well be the names of latest fragrances. And while it’s unimaginable to consider the creative evolution of garments without the contributions of such sensible, genuinely tortured souls as Yves Saint Laurent or Lee Alexander McQueen, brands almost reflexively market their designers, especially those without name recognition, as misfit mavericks who’ve arrived, against all odds, to change not only a dress however the very notion of fashion itself. In Demna’s case, nonetheless, this happens to be true. His sense of alienation isn’t incidental to his work or a talking point on a press release; it’s visible in every garment he makes — should you know where to look.
WHEN DEMNA WAS 11, he was convinced he was going to die. A few yr after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, ethnic conflict broke out between Georgians and the people of Abkhazia, a disputed area of land within the northwestern region of the country. Early within the war, Abkhaz troops descended on the Georgian-held city of Sukhumi, where Demna was born, laying waste to the favored subtropical tourist destination on the Black Sea. For months, every night at 7 p.m., the wail of an air-raid siren signaled that it was time for him to hitch the remaining of his family — his Georgian father, Guram, the owner of an auto repair shop; his Russian mother, Elvira, a housewife; his younger brother, also named Guram; a pair of uncles and their 4 combined children; and his paternal grandmother — of their underground garage, where Demna played music to drown out the thunder of exploding shells.
Before the realm was reduced to rubble, Demna and his family evacuated their home, packed the automobile with only a couple of essentials — food, warm clothing and photo albums, in addition to some weapons with which to guard themselves — and followed the opposite estimated 240,000 displaced Georgians into the Caucasus Mountains on their approach to Tbilisi, the country’s capital, where they’d relatives. They drove so far as they might, at which point they took what they were capable of carry and began walking. When Demna’s grandmother became too weak to proceed, Elvira, a natural negotiator, traded a machine gun for a horse.
For nearly three weeks, they traveled from village to village, sleeping mostly outdoors or at the back of an abandoned truck. Before his displacement, Demna had been a good-natured boy who loved to placed on musical shows for his family, give his grandmother fashion advice and draw pictures of the Miss Universe pageant contestants; now all he could take into consideration was the “Chechen tie,” a very sadistic type of mutilation he’d heard about involving the tongue. One night on the road, Demna walked in on his father, a former soldier, explaining to an uncle what he’d do in the event that they were ever taken hostage. “I actually have the grenades,” he recalls his father saying, by which Guram meant that he would sooner kill himself and his boys than risk being captured and tortured.
Until this point in our conversation, Demna — who not uses his last name, Gvasalia, professionally, to separate his private self from his work persona — has been recounting the story of his family’s escape like someone telling the plot of a war movie. But he utters those 4 words the best way I imagine his father might need: steely voiced yet in pain. “Just the concept he. …” Demna says, unable to finish the sentence. “I believe he would never have done it, however it made me afraid of him. And I used to be never afraid of my father before that.”
The Gvasalias arrived safely, but penniless, in Tbilisi. Demna, wearing oversize hand-me-downs, the sleeves on his shirt dangling well past his fingers — a motif he would revisit later artistically — shared a mattress along with his brother that first night. “Sleeping on a bed — I’ll always remember it. What more do you would like in life?” he says. Just then, the waiter at our bar arrives with drinks, jolting Demna back to the current: a wood-paneled simulacrum of a Gilded Age drawing room in Manhattan’s financial district on a muggy May afternoon. The subsequent day, he’d change into the primary designer ever to stage a show on the trading floor of the Latest York Stock Exchange. “I’m sorry,” he says with a rather embarrassed laugh. “I don’t mean to abuse you as a therapist.”
That child, that have, is rarely removed from him. This past March, 10 days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Demna presented Balenciaga’s fall 2022 show at an exhibition complex a couple of miles outside of Paris. Separated from an indoor arena by a glass dome, an audience of fashion editors and celebrities — including Kardashian, who wore a catsuit made out of what gave the impression to be yellow barricade tape — watched like spectators in an operating theater as models in stretchy dresses and enormous hoodies, lots of them hauling leather trash bags, struggled to remain upright against a battery of wind and artificial snow. Originally conceived by Demna as an indictment of our failure to deal with the climate crisis, the presentation had change into an allegory for the plight of the roughly a million Ukrainians, mostly women and kids, who in that first week of war had fled to neighboring European countries. Within the accompanying show notes, Demna wrote, “The war in Ukraine has triggered the pain of a past trauma I actually have carried in me since 1993, when the identical thing happened in my home country and I became a without end refugee. Without end, because that’s something that stays in you. The fear, the desperation, the belief that nobody wants you.” Today, he tells me, “That’s why fashion has never really mattered to me. I really like doing it, but I don’t care, to be honest. I’ve seen things that make fashion seem so irrelevant.”
Demna is usually considered fashion’s playful saboteur, suffusing his work with comedy bordering on contempt — and yet behind all of it is a type of sincerity that may sometimes be difficult to discern amid the spectacle. No other working designer is as confessional; with each collection, what looks as if irony is usually a chapter in an ongoing autobiography. Take the $270 DHL-branded T-shirt he made for Vetements in 2016, which was alternately derided by critics as puerile and anti-fashion. “I’d see these guys each day delivering parcels to our office, after which we’d must pay DHL bills, which was loads for us,” he explains. “It was so visually present in my each day skilled life. And that’s what I often do. I take something and I make something.” Then there’s his resort 2023 collection for Balenciaga, which included models in wool coats and sequined gowns worn over full-body latex bondage suits — for an additional designer, the S&M gear might need been little greater than an outré gesture, but that, he says, “was very personal to me, a part of my sexual education.”
HIS SEXUALITY IS something Demna can’t discuss without some extent of sadness creeping into his voice; an early encounter with a neighborhood friend ended abruptly when a member of the family walked in on them and forbade Demna from seeing the boy again. The primary man he fell in love with, who introduced him to sex clubs and cruising spots, “taught me the right way to love him,” he says, “but unfortunately not the right way to love myself.” Essentially the most difficult indignity, though, is the one which hasn’t happened: “I can’t return to Georgia because people have threatened to kill me if I return. … My very own uncle is one in all them.”
He didn’t come out to his parents until he was 32, although he had a boyfriend at 25. Demna studied international economics at Tbilisi State University but, even then, he was recurrently sketching clothes. He befriended a gaggle of “kind of criminals” who probably knew he was gay but didn’t care and guarded him from anyone who did. “Growing up in a rustic where I couldn’t say I used to be gay, I all the time tried to appear like the type of tough guy who would survive within the neighborhoods where I lived,” he says. “But I didn’t feel like that on the within.”
After graduating, Demna got here across a newspaper article about Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Nice Arts, the Belgian college that gave birth to the Antwerp Six: the influential fashion designers Dirk Bikkembergs, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene and Marina Yee, who all graduated from the college within the early Nineteen Eighties. Against his mother’s wishes, Demna applied. Van Beirendonck, who taught within the academy’s fashion department on the time and is a designer known for his own playful riffs on kink, present in Demna a kindred spirit. “We’re each stubborn, and we would like to dream out loud,” Van Beirendonck said in an email. “Being critical, making political statements and adding irony and humor in our work is vital, but so is our love of perfect tailoring and delightful fabrics.”
‘That’s why fashion has never really mattered to me. I really like doing it, but I don’t care, to be honest. I’ve seen things that make fashion seem so irrelevant.’
Demna’s first big job out of fashion school was at Maison Margiela, known for being a laboratory of experimentation and a frontrunner in avant-garde fashion. The hiring committee gave him per week to submit a project. He sent them 10 looks for consideration in a greasy pizza box; two weeks later, he was living in Paris. After a few years there, he was hired to work at Louis Vuitton in 2013 at the top of the Marc Jacobs era, during which the American designer introduced fashion to art, collaborating with Stephen Sprouse on graffitied monogram bags and Yayoi Kusama on a polka-dot collection. Although their time together was transient, Jacobs showed Demna that a luxury house could engage with popular culture, anticipating Instagram fashion even before the age of influencers. “I really like Marc,” says Demna, who learned useful lessons from Jacobs, like the right way to make a whole collection in three days. Plus it was fun: “He’d be working at midnight, doing Barbra Streisand karaoke.” When Ghesquière took over for Jacobs a couple of months later, the mood became more serious. Still, Demna found it helpful to observe Ghesquière execute his sophisticated and futuristic vision of luxury — one very different from his own. For a couple of seasons, he was charged with designing complex outerwear garments, including the most costly piece he’d ever made. “I flew business class for the primary time because of a crocodile coat,” he says. “You couldn’t fold it, so the coat had its own ticket.”
But he was growing weary of developing only other people’s ideas and, finally, he launched a label of his own with a gaggle of friends. The name Vetements, which in French (with a circumflex) means “clothes” — a little bit of a joke, since not one of the collective’s members were French — got here to Demna over lunch at a falafel restaurant as an alternative choice to his original thought, Factory of Found Ideas. “After I began Vetements, I used to be at a degree where I used to be so frustrated with the industry,” he says. “I couldn’t pay my bills, but I didn’t care. I just desired to make clothes.” During his five years because the brand’s creative director, and along with his brother, Guram, as its C.E.O., he organized a show within the basement of a gay club, which one critic complained smelled like a rest room (fall 2015); partnered with 18 different brands, including Manolo Blahnik, Brioni and Juicy Couture, for a single collection of dubious collaborations (spring 2017); and held what was known as a no-show with life-size photographs of nonmodels shot around Zurich, and presented in a car parking zone in Paris (spring 2018).
Vetements became a sensation due to the confusion it caused: Nobody could tell if Demna was joking or not. Although there was the sense that he was having time, there was also the fear that he is likely to be laughing on the industry, a community that, despite its tolerance for frivolity, takes itself extremely seriously. A number of the clothes were ill-fitting, others covered with corporate typefaces — all of them embraced … not ugliness, exactly, but not beauty, either. “It was more of a provocation,” Demna says. “What I wanted was to trigger an emotion. It didn’t matter to me which one.” As more people began being attentive to his off-balance prairie dresses and massive bomber jackets, which were immediate hits at stores similar to Dover Street Market, journalists began drawing parallels between Demna’s deconstructions and people of Martin Margiela. “I used to be really mad,” Demna says. “Suddenly I used to be in a spot to do what I wanted, and it was getting reduced to those two years [I spent] at Margiela.”
So for his fall 2019 collection, unsubtly titled the Elephant within the Room, Demna dragged his audience to the Paul Bert Serpette flea market on the northern outskirts of Paris to indicate them where these so-called Margiela designs were really born — from another person’s clothes. He laughs now excited about all of the stunts he pulled: For his spring 2020 show, one other response to feeling misunderstood and marginalized, he paraded models in law enforcement gear around a Champs-Élysées McDonald’s to the sound of attack dogs. “I felt barked at by this industry,” he says. He even added an umlaut to the reappropriated Bose logo on a T-shirt, translating the name of the audio equipment company into the German word for “indignant.”
In 2015, on the heels of Vetements’ initial success, he was approached by an executive at Kering, the multinational corporation that owns Balenciaga, Gucci, Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen and Bottega Veneta. He recalls being asked, “ ‘Would you be willing to offer up what you do now and go to a giant house in Paris?’ He didn’t tell me where it was.” Demna said that he is likely to be, on the condition that he could keep running Vetements. Within the taxi going home, he opened his phone to the news that Alexander Wang was stepping down as Balenciaga’s creative director.
DEMNA COMPARES THE experience of being at Balenciaga to that of Jesus carrying his cross. “The legacy is amazing and nourishing,” he says, “however it’s also very heavy.” When he arrived at the home in 2015, Paris, he says, “was asleep.” Like Alessandro Michele, who took over at Gucci that very same yr, Demna knew what was expected of him. “My job was and is to create desire,” he says, even though it’s notable that neither brand has relied heavily on sex for sales: Michele’s Edenic universe celebrates romance somewhat than lust, and even when Demna explores kink, it’s more concerning the exchange of power than of fluids. In 2019, 4 years after his appointment, Balenciaga reported record annual revenues, surpassing €1 billion (about $1.12 billion) for the primary time.
Every designer of a significant luxury house has a fiscal responsibility. But they’re alleged to do something else, as well: create clothes that not only herald profits but that change into by some means symbolic of a cultural moment. And Demna has had loads of those previously decade. For Balenciaga’s fall 2020 collection, a deranged twist on Cristóbal’s ecclesiastical garb — the designer tailored one in all his first velvet dresses for a marchioness to wear in church — he sent models in blacked-out contact lenses, chastity belts and flowing clerical robes wading through recycled Paris gray water because the sound of a storm echoed throughout the auditorium and lightning forked across a digital sky. Throughout the early days of Covid-19, when shows could not be presented live, he partnered with Epic Games on “Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow,” a video game set years in the long run whose characters battle it out in Balenciaga’s fall 2021 collection, which included NASA-stamped outerwear, his signature red puffer coat and boots recalling medieval-style armor. Following the return to in-person assemblies for spring 2022, Demna transformed the red carpet right into a runway — or possibly it was the opposite way around — using the footage of celebrities arriving at his show because the show itself by broadcasting the photographs inside a theater crammed with editors, buyers and friends of the home. The “show” culminated within the premiere of a special mini-episode of “The Simpsons” that follows Marge and Bart as they pursue modeling careers in Paris (all wearing Balenciaga, after all).
Although he has many fans, Demna is just not without his detractors. One journalist called his work at Vetements “the bastard attire of a broken generation,” while one other recently admonished him for selling an $1,850 pair of torn and stained Balenciaga sneakers, a “barely wearable shoe costing greater than some people’s monthly rent.” Demna was surprised by the response. “It’s just a grimy shoe,” he says. “But should you want it to be my shoe, it has to appear like any person just dug it out [of the ground].”
It’s not hard to grasp why the designer frustrates some critics. It could actually feel at times like he’s throwing out too many ideas unexpectedly, making it unimaginable to soak up any one in all them. As he works through the attendant concerns of his own identity — as a Georgian refugee, an outsider with impostor syndrome and a gay man with body issues — he’s concurrently expressing a broad spectrum of emotions and creating content for his fans the best way they eat it: with the relentlessness of one million open tabs. Taken together, what Demna has completed isn’t only a selfie of the primary designer who truly understands web culture. It’s also a snapshot of a chaotic digital world.
And yet he can also be an amazing assembler, decontextualizing, then recontextualizing, logos and memes — a $2,145 leather Balenciaga bag inspired by the large blue plastic totes sold at Ikea for 99 cents; a raincoat with a logo recalling the one from Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign for Balenciaga’s fall 2017 men’s wear collection; a T-shirt promoting a fictional outpost of the now-defunct Planet Hollywood restaurant chain for Vetements’ spring 2020 collection — to create recent logos and more memes. A part of what Demna has been capable of achieve this well is poke fun at, while also being openly complicit in, fashion’s limitless loop of iteration. Nothing is just too banal to be copied. And therein lies something else that separates him: Whereas most designers are inspired by a reasonably artwork or landscape, he’s more fascinated by the commercial, the unpretentious, the on a regular basis. “I don’t like that luxury is all the time intended to speak that you just’re wealthy,” he says. “I’d somewhat wear a bag that doesn’t make me appear like the rare bourgeois bitch who can afford it.”
ON THE WAY to Demna’s recent pied-à-terre within the Eighth Arrondissement of Paris, I pass by the string of luxury fashion stores, including Maison Margiela, Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga, that line the Avenue Montaigne. Although he moved away from town six years ago — he and Gomez bought a house outside of Zurich, where Elvira now lives, too, and where, Demna says with relief, “every part is neutral and beige” — his work requires him to spend about half his time here. After walking a couple of flights up a grand marble staircase, I enter his apartment, which feels almost punitive in its emptiness yet by some means lived-in, too. From the foyer, a protracted hallway with herringbone parquet flooring results in a balcony overlooking the Eiffel Tower just across the Seine. Along the corridor, there’s a Tejo Remy bench composed of neatly stacked Balenciaga blankets; a blue airbrush painting of a parent embracing their child titled “Hold” (2022) by the Latest York-based artist Austin Lee; and a vase of yellow chrysanthemums and carnations atop an antique console.
What Demna has completed isn’t only a selfie of the primary designer who truly understands web culture. It’s also a snapshot of a chaotic digital world.
Within the dining room to the correct, alcove shelves display assorted tchotchkes: six porcelain figurines of Diana, Princess of Wales; a glazed ceramic object made to resemble a Balenciaga sneaker; and a piggy bank. Demna leads the best way into his kitchen, a mostly white box, where he brings a bottle of water and two Baccarat crystal tumblers to the table. He sighs contentedly. “I feel really empty in way,” he says. It’s the morning after his second couture show — and the nerve-racking dinner that followed — and he seems relieved. (It’s also the day of the show for Vetements, where his brother took over as creative director last yr, but Demna, who left the brand in 2019, wouldn’t be attending: “I’ve needed to learn to let that go,” he says, admitting that it took him a few yr to achieve this. “It’s not my story anymore.”) Yesterday, editors and clients gathered at 10 Avenue George V, the positioning of Balenciaga’s original salon, and watched, mesmerized, as he sent out models in molded black neoprene scuba dresses, pants composed of upcycled vintage leather wallets, sculptural aluminum-infused jersey shirts and a large bell-shaped wedding gown with 820 feet of tulle that took 7,500 hours to embroider. The looks, which Demna refers to collectively as “a heritage-inspired futuristic extravaganza,” demanded as many as 10 fittings per garment, versus the three or 4 he normally does for ready-to-wear.
Over the phone a couple of weeks after the show, Nicole Kidman tells me that she ranks Demna amongst such designers as John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld and Alexander McQueen. “He uses fashion to speak the world at the moment,” she says, and compares Demna to the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. “Stanley would all the time say to me, ‘Don’t ever put me on a pedestal. Let me have bad ideas and make mistakes, otherwise we’re done for.’ ”
Nevertheless it’s one other compliment, given to him by Naomi Campbell over dinner the night of the show, that makes him emotional. “I felt in your approach,” he recalls her saying, “the best way you made that dress” — making a silhouette by pinning it right down to the precise millimeter — “how essential this work is and the way much you were putting into it. You weren’t just making a dress with a Cristóbal collar. You understood the coutureness of all of it.” He adds, “She said the last time she felt that was with Azzedine,” referring to the French Tunisian couturier Azzedine Alaïa, who died in 2017.
It’s then that Demna starts to cry. Between apologies, he wipes away tears along with his sweatshirt sleeve; he normally saves one of these vulnerability for his work. “They simply think I’m good at making sneakers and selling,” he says about his critics in the style establishment, although he appears to be referring, as well, to an extended, deeper history of rejection: the classmates who bullied him, the lads who didn’t return his affection, the members of the family who turned on him. He pulls himself together and sits just a little taller in his chair. “I’ve given myself a mission in fashion to make it move forward by questioning it, by never being satisfied, by difficult the establishment and whatever the principles have been telling us we’re alleged to do for the last 100 years.
“The roughness of certain silhouettes and the moods of my collections express loads of [what] I went through,” he adds. “It’s easier to indicate pain or joy through my work than to say it out loud.” Though he’s working on that, too. On the couture presentation, before the show got underway and the music began to swell, a poem was broadcast over the sound system. Demna had written it in French with the creator Sophie Fontanel. “I really like you,” said the A.I.-generated voice reading Demna’s words. “I actually have loved you for 30 years. I’ve been waiting for you since I used to be 10 years old. … I closed my eyes and I assumed of you.” It was a love poem, after all, but in addition one in all longing. After which the models began coming down the runway.
Models: Shivaruby at Storm Management, Toni Smith at Elite, Blessing Orji at IMG Models and Barbara Valente at Supreme. Hair: Gary Gill at Streeters. Makeup by Karin Westerlund at Artlist using Dr. Barbara Sturm. Set design by Giovanna Martial. Casting by Franziska Bachofen-Echt. Production: White Dot. Manicurist: Hanaé Goumri at The Wall Group. Digital tech: Daniel Serrato Rodriguez. Photo assistants: François Adragna, Jack Sciacca. Hair assistants: Tom Wright, Rebecca Chang, Natsumi Ebiko. Makeup assistant: Thomas Kergot. Set assistants: Jeanne Briand, Vincent Perrin. Styling assistants: Carla Bottari, Roxana Mirtea. All product images on this story courtesy of Balenciaga