It’s hard to spot milestones in fashion when we’re all speeding along so fast (while looking down at our screens) that we barely bother to glance out the window anymore. Well, just a thought, but are the boring tweed pantsuits the most interesting thing in this Balenciaga collection? This is not intended as a slap to Demna Gvasalia, backhanded or otherwise. Nor is it a belittling of the effort put into a pre-collection, where commercial clothes reside. But you know? After Miuccia Prada went back to the simplicity of her ’90s roots for a refresh in her much-applauded pre-collection in New York, there’s a distinct emotional gravitational pull toward non-messy design going on. Uncomplicated, well-cut stuff looks good again.
In this case, the eye is drawn to the long-line, single-breasted jackets with narrow pants—used to be called cigarette—in menswear checks or pinstripes, worn with, say, a tartan pair of low, pointed, stiletto ankle boots. Cristóbal Balenciaga used tweeds, for sure, but these have nothing more than that to do with him. They’re just a very nice case of It Is What It Is.
Well, as we know, people don’t herd in the same direction in fashion anymore, so who will be afraid to be boring and who will leap at it as a massive relief is going to be a purely subjective matter. Possibly Gvasalia wasn’t as focused on being boring as he was on designing this collection, because the lineup bears some of the hallmarks of his main show, a lot of which was more along the lines of It Is What It Isn’t, otherwise known as trompe l’oeil. Here we see, perhaps, the beginnings of when he started fusing garments, turning a pile of things into one piece. They became gigantic coats in the Fall collection; here you see a plaid shirt being sewn onto a silk dress; men’s short-sleeved shirts with printed waterfall sleeves fused onto them; a black jean jacket and a quilted country jacket mated with a black-and-white plaid blanket, complete with fringe. And so on.
Other Balenciaga/Gvasalia interventions and transportations continue, like the curved, reflective piping on the tweed coat at the beginning (an idea borrowed from wet-weather motorcycle-riding kits) and the by-now highly recognizable floral “pantaboots.”
Nevertheless, isn’t it the case that it’s the things you haven’t seen recently that always stand out the most? Perhaps it’s time for boring to be interesting again. Maybe this is actually a milestone of the year, or at least one that’s coming up around the next bend. In which case, we’ll have to think of some new terminology for it. Let’s see . . . not minimalism, not normcore, hmm . . .
