On the first day of summer, some men took their children to the Bois de Boulogne to play in the woods, where they happened to walk along a path upon which the Balenciaga menswear show was underway. Demna Gvasalia professed to wanting his latest collection to seem almost as if the family involvement was sheer happenstance, hardly fashion at all. "There is nothing more beautiful than seeing young dads with their kids," he said. "This collection began with looking at a lot of pictures of them." The casting wasn't difficult, he added. "We just asked our usual models whether they had kids." The call netted three homemade Balenciaga families. A tall blond guy, Christoffer, impressively topped the paternity league, strolling with his two daughters, Lucy and Alma, and son, Severin. Christoffer was wearing an outfit of the Dad-est clothes Gvasalia could contrive to seem to un-contrived: a white shirt, a drapey teal jacket, a pair of bleached jeans. On his feet, a pair of brown leather shoes were quite regular-looking until you spotted the gilt fifties-script Balenciaga logo on the strap.
The walk in the forest was Part II of Gvasalia's ongoing sociological investigation into of the condition of Corporate Man. Part I was the survey of the dress codes of the Executive Suits and Tech Nerds he conducted for Fall. "This is the same man, on casual Friday and the weekend," Gvasalia explained, adding that his intention was "back to basics" and taking his off-duty fictional character "into his comfort zone."
Comfort zone? Gvasalia was talking about at least a few things there, not just the pleasant leafy surroundings and the simple, happy escape into nature possible even in the midst of a modern city as stressed as Paris. The "comfort" was also in the the way so many of the clothes—washed-out jeans, schlumpy linen jackets, generic Hawaiian-print shirts, nasty, big old anoraks—were constructed to look as if they'd been dug from the archaeological layers of a man-horded wardrobe going back to the late '80s or early '90s.
Part of Gvasalia's agenda here was the re-cooling of the absolutely uncool—the polo and rugby shirt; the excruciating visuals of the hoiked-up and the tucked-in. A central item in that re-presentation was the rumpled-up, lopsided linen-look '80s tailored 'granddad' jacket. Relics of the kind can be found in charity shops everywhere. At Balenciaga, they come deliberately weighted in the pockets and linings to reproduce that specific attitude of lived-in droopiness.
Let it not be thought that this was simply some big, wholesome, traditional family-values excursion to the country. Some of the men in the Balenciaga forest who didn't come with kids looked like hard-living representatives of decades of European nightclub culture—a place Gvasalia has been in, appreciated, and now consciously withdrawn from. On that level, the show read as an ambivalent, autobiographical piece. The show wasn't accompanied by serene woodland noises but side-blasted by loud techno music. It turned out to be a cover of Muse's 1999 song "Unintended" composed by Gvasalia's musician boyfriend Loick. "I'm busy mending broken pieces of the life I had before" goes one line. Nevertheless, it's a kind of love song.
Apart from the time Gvasalia dedicates to being artistic director at Balenciaga in Paris, he has relocated his home (and the Vetements headquarters) to the sparklingly clean Zurich. The distance has given him an appreciation of the surprisingly simple pleasures in life, though still salted with his characteristic sense of humor. A new Balenciaga flat bag, for example, is inspired by the shape of the plastic carriers dispensed at off-license liquor stores everywhere—surely an instantly more affordable update on the already extremely successful Balenciaga 'Market' bag.
Many people at this show took away different things. Everyone had read the slogans which appeared here and there; the iterations of the word for Europe, the exhortation to THINK BIG, and THE POWER OF DREAMS. Meanings slip and slide. Yet in the middle of this forest, in the middle of a European city which has armed police on antiterrorism alert on every corner, this complex designer is still flying the flag for optimism, or as he put it, "The dream of good things and peace. To me, the kids represent that hope."
Vogue has removed a look from this collection at Balenciaga’s request.
