You can see what you can see about Demna Gvasalia’s pre-fall collection. You can tune into today’s simultaneously-posted “Feel Good” Balenciaga video and not see any fashion at all—just a stock compilation of running horses, kittens, children, and ahh-inducing landscapes. Enjoy!
But the most radical content in this Sunday morning’s Balenciaga brand-blitz is invisible. “When I started this collection,” Gvasalia said, “I said only show me sustainable fabrics. I don’t want to look at anything else.” So everything here, beginning with the pink hoodie, emblazoned varsity-style with the words GAY Pride and swathed with a matching stole, to the black drama of the puffed-sleeve gown-like silhouette at the end, is made from recycled and otherwise certifiably okay materials. Almost wholly, that is, except for outstanding issues such as the the use of glue to stick sneakers together.
That’s big from a brand as powerful and as influential as Balenciaga, one of the major fashion actors of the universe which calls on suppliers who do significant volumes business with them—and which is centered by Gvasalia on selling to the millennial–to–Gen Z fashion public worldwide. “As creative directors, [asking for this] causes a chain reaction, and we have to use it,” he said over the phone from Paris. He added that even luxury fabric suppliers who’ve been hesitant about investing in research and development of more sustainable materials are now seeing it “as a bit of an obligation.”
Well, they would, wouldn’t they, when that means the difference between competing in business and not? Taking action on absolving shoppers’ anxieties about the damaging consequences of how their clothes are made ought to be the norm. Gvasalia promises that what’s gone into this collection isn’t a one-off gesture—because who isn’t suspicious of the greenwashing promo tricks of fashion these days? He started asking for better, more sustainable alternatives a while back, he attests, and began putting some of them into the collection in September. “And I must say, the situation has changed drastically in three years.”
Now to the clothes: a photoshopped look book, posed against a wish-we-were-there travelogue of the famous backdrops of the world. Design-wise, there are just as many familiar Balenciaga-universe destinations here: the oversize hoodies, sweatshirts, tailoring; tweaked takes on signature floral-print dresses; recycled leather and denim things; magnified utility-worker jackets. A lot of the garments, Gvasalia said, are constructed as joined-together all-in-one pieces “trompe l’oeil, so what you see isn’t what you get. A lot of dresses which are actually coats.” Convenience-wear for fashion-lovers to parade in outdoors during these tedious times when social occasion-wear might be banned, perhaps.
So, too his lookalike “furs,” which aren’t either animal pelts or petrochemical fakes. A brown chubby jacket on Rome’s Spanish Steps, and a coat standing against London’s Houses of Parliament are the results of hundreds of hours of chopping up and embroidering recycled cotton. They’re lavishly time-consuming hand-made pieces which will cost in the thousands for the few—but then again, doesn’t that step into the place that “fur” occupied in the first place?
Obviously, Gvasalia is keeping his creative powder dry for the long-deferred launch of the Balenciaga haute couture collection that he’ll show sometime this summer, pandemic willing. Meantime, predictive minds might leap to the elegant silhouette in black—full length, balloon-sleeved, quilted and lace-trimmed drama that Gvasalia swears was inspired by the shape of Princess Diana’s wedding dress. It’s actually a coat. “ She’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans under that.” But you don’t need to be a genius historian to intuit that it’s also heavily hinting at the haute Spanish flavor of Cristobal Balenciaga.
So back to the beginning, with the GAY Pride hoodie and the padded stole—consciously a Demna-for-Balenciaga adaptation from Cristobal’s matching ensembles for couture customers. It’s meme-worthy, with intent. “ I’m gay. I grew up in a society where I couldn’t have worn that, and there are places in the world that you cannot today,” he said. “It’s important to push through against homophobia. I’m not someone who goes out in the street and shouts. But this is the political fashion activism I can do.”
