“Personally, I have sacrificed too much to war. This past week is bringing back all the memories that my mother and I put away in a box, and never looked at. We never got over it.”
Raw resolve was in Demna’s voice as he spoke on the phone about why he’d decided to go ahead with the Balenciaga show. The horrors being inflicted on civilians in Ukraine are re-traumatizing for a man who was a child refugee at the age of 10, fleeing war in Abkhazia, Georgia in 1993. He understands only too accurately, from experience, what the world is seeing as women struggle to take their children to safety in the harshest conditions. “It’s the same," he said. "The same aggressor, maybe even the same planes that did it to us. Who knows? And seeing this, I was thinking for a while, ‘What are we doing here, with fashion? Should I cancel?’ But no: I decided we must resist.”
Demna’s connection with Ukraine’s plight is all the more wrenching for the fact that one of his displaced family’s first refuges was in Odessa, the beautiful city in the south of the country which is currently under threat of being occupied by Russian forces. “I went to school in Ukraine. It was always my nightmare of embarrassment to have to stand up and speak poetry in front of people—but now I realized I wanted to do it.”
To preface the show, blue and yellow Ukrainian-flag T-shirts were laid on every chair, with a printed statement from Demna, ending on the note that love must win. Then his voice filled the auditorium, reading the encouragement to believe in Ukraine by Oleksandr Oles, one of the nation’s great cultural poet-heroes. No doubt about it, Demna wanted that to be heard solely in the Ukrainian language. No translation was provided. It would be understood by that those need to hear it, he said.
East-West territorial, ideological and military power struggles in Europe go back very far. But always, amongst all the dual-lingual yet culturally distinct communities co-inhabiting borderlands between power blocks, it’s defenseless peoples who become victims. Ask Kim Kardashian about the history of her Armenian heritage. There she was, all wrapped up in Balenciaga tape, a friend of Demna and the house. A huge fuss, on globally-radiating celeb levels, ensued before the show had begun.
Set in a glass rotunda as a simulation of a giant snow-globe, the production had been planned as one of Demna’s meta-immersive confrontations with climate change, projected into a time not very far ahead when snow will not exist, and become a wonder only ‘experienced’ through virtual reality. “I went to the mountains last Christmas, and there was no snow,” he said.
But the staging: models struggling forward, bent against driving snow and wind, some carrying heavy tote bags, took on a whole other significance in the agonizing context of current reality. Backstage, Demna was clear that the apocalyptic scenario had synced in with the feeling of helpless exposure to the elements he’d gone through during his escape, trekking on foot up a Georgian mountain as a child. The section where young men were wrapped only in towels and underwear, in particular.
Even if current affairs hadn’t overwhelmed this fashion event, Demna’s Balenciaga shows in recent times have always held within them undercurrents of prophetic warning. There was the one he staged as a notional summit of the European Union parliament. An answered question about its diplomatic usefulness, in retrospect. His last terrifying physical show, on the brink of the pandemic in March 2020, confronted the audience with burning skies and an ominous oily lake lapping at their feet—with his sinister male black-clad power avatars of business and religion dominating the scene.
All these anxieties—environmental, geopolitical, the fear of the dark forces that are really in charge—have come to pass. Where does that leave fashion? Demna’s tribe of Balenciaga survivors continued, despite everything, stomping in their stiletto heels and thigh-high boots in snow-blasted headwinds towards whatever future lies ahead.
A stoical elegance, you might call it. Black asymmetric dresses blowing voluminously in the artic wind. Oversized hybrids of hoodie and padded outerwear; leather jackets that turn out to be made from Balenciaga’s new mycelium-derived leather-mimicking alternative. Tote bags mated with boots. And at the end, two looks, one a yellow tracksuit, the other a blue dress with a long, long flag-like train: the two unmistakable colors of the democratic, independent nation of Ukraine.
