Should Demna Leave Balenciaga?

In today's video I give a critical review of Balenciaga's Pre-Fall 2024 runway show / collection by Demna Gvasalia.

For out-of-towners, Los Angeles has the quality of the surreal. The palm trees, canyons, and golden light, the Facetuned faces and super-toned bodies, the cult of Erewhon, the Hollywood sign. Demna, Balenciaga’s Georgian creative director, is not immune to its allure. After his pre-fall show in LA today, he called it “my favorite city in the world,” saying, “all my cultural evolution, when I was a teenager growing up in this kind of post-Soviet vacuum, it really came from here, through movies, music—I mean, everything that I kind of absorbed, that later on started to kind of become my fashion references.”

There was certainly something surreal about Balenciaga’s gothy black clad guests turning up en masse on a well manicured stretch of Windsor Boulevard in Hancock Park, with that famous Hollywood sign presiding in the distance. “It feels like we’re going to a funeral in sunny Transylvania,” a fellow editor cracked. Or like stepping into a Tim Burton movie shot in Technicolor.

This was the brand’s second destination show in the US. Last year, Demna chose the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to present Balenciaga’s “Garde-Robe,” collection of “upscale classic garments” with an emphasis on tailoring, one of his specialties. This collection skewed more SoCal, starting with the exercise clothes, gym bags, and souped-up sneakers of the first few looks. The circa Y2K velour jumpsuits and giant high-heeled shearling boots that came next will be familiar to readers of US Magazine, which would’ve been another way the young Demna got his celebrity content, unless it was the famous Steven Meisel Hollywood shoot in Vogue Italia that did it for him.

Back in those pre-social media days, the paparazzi lurked outside the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Circa 2023, it’s Erewhon smoothies that the stars are clutching. Timed to today’s event, Balenciaga collaborated with the LA grocer on a juice. Made in part with activated charcoal powder, it’s as black as the stretchy turtleneck and tight jeans worn in the show by Brigitte Nielsen, taking over the actress-moonlighting-as-model role from Isabelle Huppert. “I don’t know what’s in it,” Demna said. “I just wanted it to be black.”

Wellness culture is one of LA’s most successful exports. The show’s powerful soundtrack, made as usual by Demna’s partner BFRND, poked not so subtle fun at its presumptive hollowness. Demna rejected the idea that he approached the collection—or LA itself—with irony, but there’s something comically perverse about a paper grocery bag made in leather.
- VIA VOGUE (NICOLE PHELPS)

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Видео Should Demna Leave Balenciaga? канала Fashion Roadman