Demna Gvasalia’s method at Vetements is to look at the street, at what people his age and younger are wearing, and to enlarge on (often literally) what he sees, while running a satisfying seam of subversive commentary through archetypal garments. In evolving his raison d’être for Balenciaga’s menswear, it’s just the same, only the street view is more upmarket and the archetypes more elevated. This season, he only needed to glance across the cobbled courtyard of Balenciaga’s headquarters to take his social reading. There, going to work daily, is a cross section of the constituency Gvasalia wants to persuade to spend their heftier paychecks on luxury clothes: the corporate employees of the brand’s parent company, Kering, the international fashion business powerhouse whose offices are in the opposite wing of the same vast, elegant 17th-century former hospital building on Paris’s Rue de Sèvres. “My work is always about reality,” Gvasalia said. “It’s just honest. That is what’s happening around us.”
At a juncture when the dominance of corporate power seems to have overtaken politics, that remark could be taken in a couple of ways—as could the red, white, and blue reworking of the Balenciaga logo, which appeared on padded scarves and was embroidered onto hoodies. As an American journalist said, pumping Gvasalia’s hand backstage, “Loved the political flags!” There were Kering logos, too, placed on the back of padded coats and prominently emblazoned across a sweatshirt, to interpret as we will.
All ironies and in-jokes aside, Gvasalia takes his job of winning brand loyalty for Balenciaga seriously, analytically, and pragmatically. Traditionally, tailoring is at the heart of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s heritage, and that’s where Gvasalia started, with an impressive series of ankle-length overcoats, slightly curved in at the waist (a nod to Cristóbal’s womenswear basques) and with the kind of sloping unpadded shoulder line perhaps last glimpsed at Giorgio Armani in the late ’80s. “I wanted to look at formal attire, take away its rigidity and coldness, and make it comfortable,” Gvasalia said, adding that he cast the show—which included several older men—“to be physically diverse. Not everyone has a model body. I don’t.”
More important, with this collection, he’s out to convert every type of man who might be susceptible to fashion
expenditures—and he recognizes that it’s a potentially broad demographic. He is commercially gripped about this. Where last season’s show struck a dramatic introductory stance with extreme contrasts of flat and boxy or tight silhouettes, with this one he set out to embrace all manner of men, from the CEOs who might be driven into underground company parking garages by limo, to midlife motorcyclists (the biker boots), to the rising ranks of employees who’ve never had to wear a suit or a formal pair of shoes to work. Since trainers are ubiquitously acceptable these days (footwear that makes the old feel young), the new offering is the Triple-S sneaker, so named because it appears to have three stacked layers of recycled soles. Underfoot comfort, indeed.
Making tailoring sexy again (or, rather, for the first time for anyone born after 1987) was a Gvasalia side mission. He cut the jacket roomy, stripped off the shirt, and lowered the narrow trousers to fractionally above pubic level. (Possibly about as believable a corporate-rep image as Iggy Pop at Davos, but then again, at retail, the easy proportions of the jacket will work well for the non-emaciated.)
Still, it was Gvasalia’s transitioning of the show into sportswear via full-length padded coats—a sublimation of the generic attire of rugby and soccer managers (another super-wealthy, competitive fraternity)—that was really smart. The point about Balenciaga as a brand with a past is that it legitimately includes the extremely haute (via Cristóbal), the proudly experimental (via Nicolas Ghesquière), and modern sportswear (via Alexander Wang). Gvasalia’s talent is that he reads all this and understands how every aspect of it may be pragmatically reactivated and orchestrated for the company right now.
