“After two years at Balenciaga, I wanted to take all the codes of the house and filter them so they can be one aesthetic and one ethic,” said Demna Gvasalia. It was the first time women and men walked together in a unified show, and for Gvasalia, it represented a conceptual and personal leap forward. Instead of merely imitating the heritage looks of Cristóbal Balenciaga, he’d dedicated R&D time to working on a high-tech computer-enabled process for molding tailoring for women and men alike. Bodies had been 3-D scanned, the “fittings” were done in a computer file, and then molds were printed out. Traditional fabrics—tweeds, wool, velvet—were then bonded to a lightweight foam.
We saw the results: people walking in their identically shaped razor-sharp, sleek, basque-waisted jackets and coats, looking almost like a cast of post-humans in some futuristic Bond-movie ski scene.
There were Bond girls in dangerously draped body-con minis, Miss Moneypenny replicants in tweeds, and 007 clones dressed in knife-sharp ski trousers tucked into their shoes.
Behind them was a fake snow mountain, its crags and crevasses graffitied with Balenciaga’s logos, smileys, a peace sign, and a big “Be Aware” slogan. Gvasalia described it as “kind of a snowboarder paradise from the beginning of the ’90s. We tagged it with all the things we were talking about in the studio at the time.” The theme of snow brought on the idea of layering against the cold. Coats upon jackets upon fleeces upon flannel shirts were progressively piled up until, by the end, there were people covered in up to seven pieces of fused-together outerwear. There was a phase where it began to look very similar to the mounds of clothing Gvasalia presented at Vetements in January. But then came the correction: At the end, a huge turquoise nylon parka and two fake furs seemed to reconnect with the volume and glamor of ’50s Balenciaga bubble gowns. Back to Cristóbal again.
Progressive ideas are much needed in fashion today, on all kinds of levels. Gvasalia’s mission to recode Balenciaga tailoring in the cyber age might not be a future solution—it still involves the use of synthetics, and you could argue that it negates the skills of the human hand. Nevertheless, the thinking behind this collection marks Gvasalia as a designer who wants to be an agent of change in the fashion industry, and who goes for social change, too. The show included World Food Program–branded merchandise that will be sold to benefit the United Nations charity which acts to relieve food poverty. A simultaneous donation of $250,000 was made by Balenciaga to the fund. “You see, I don’t want to be just a T-shirt-and-hoodie man. We sell them, of course—but I feel I have a responsibility to do it in a way which brings a message.” Ethics x aesthetics. Sounds like a timely way forward.
