From the Magazine | Ikea bags, ugly sneakers: Balenciaga’s Demna Gvasalia is changing what we consider fashion
On a Sunday morning during Fashion Week, in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, glamour was pushed aside. Inside a black box of a production studio, where fashion’s elite had come in search of a revelation, the air smelled of asphalt and diesel exhaust. Black plastic chairs lined the perimeter of the darkened room in which the only sound was hushed conversation.
The models swept close enough to the audience that the encounter felt vibrant and human, but their pace remained brisk and their demeanor distant. The models — some with glowing red contact lenses and wearing coats with dramatically hunched backs, blazers with inflated shoulders, and dresses and shirts suspended from some interior hoop — looked as though they had come from sometime in the future. Not some inconceivable, far-off century, but from a decade hence.
Balenciaga’s fashion show in Paris in September. “I loved clothes since I was very, very small. My mother didn’t have fashion; like she didn’t have a wardrobe or something, so I used found objects as my way of playing fashion when I was a kid,” he says. “I think that kind of evolved, basically, since then. It became part of my creative approach, really, and that’s why for me it was never possible … to look like everybody else, to work with themes or [make] an Alice in Wonderland collection.
The designer is not just refreshing what historians once considered the greatest haute couture house of them all. He’s redefining luxury and recalibrating status. And in the process, he’s kicking up a storm of controversy and admiration. He wanted the model to be a thunderclap to the senses: “When I saw Eliza, I thought immediately that it was her, not only because of how tall she is and how she looks really impressive and she’s very beautiful. But it’s maybe because of the way she talks, the way she walks and moves her body. It’s her attitude that for me was, okay, this is the woman that I want to represent my vision. And she wears glasses.
Despite resolutely leaning forward, Gvasalia acknowledges that his emphasis on shoulders is one of two through lines to the house’s early days and its founder. The Spanish-born Cristóbal Balenciaga, who established his signature house on Avenue George V in 1937 and closed it in 1968, was a “master of illusion,” wrote the late fashion historian Richard Martin. He “projected ideal garments, but allowed for human imperfection.
The second point of connection between Gvasalia and Cristóbal Balenciaga is their mutual fealty to the quotidian. The couturier admired the utilitarian clothes worn by the fishermen in his small Basque hometown and reinvented those garments in the atelier. One of the most memorable examples was his embrace of the vareuse, a short, simply constructed shirt.
“If I had ever known that the effect of this bag would be the way it was, I would maybe have the double thoughts about doing it,” he says. “I never really intended to provoke some kind of reaction or question what is it, a luxury product.” For him, it was just a great bag — with a cheeky provenance. The Triple S, the quintessential dad sneaker, has been held up as one of the key instigators of the ugly-fashion movement. It has been discussed and dissected in publications from the Paris Review to Vogue. The Triple S even elicited an outraged Instagram post from the normally civil designer Ralph Rucci, who lamented what Balenciaga had become: “I cannot tolerate this any longer.
Some observers trace his interest in big, bold shapes to his time working at Maison Margiela, where he was immersed in the brand’s philosophy of fashion as conceptual art: The idea takes precedence over the beauty, comfort or even function of the finished product. Oversized silhouettes were part of founder Martin Margiela’s core vocabulary.
I don’t like ugly things. ... I maybe try to see beauty in other things that are not conventionally considered as beautiful today. Demna Gvasalia “Before Margiela ever was in my life, there was the oversized part of my wardrobe. It just enhanced it obviously by being there. I said, ‘Well, look, actually it’s okay to wear a huge jacket. Somebody made fashion out of it,’ ” Gvasalia says.
Gvasalia references Duchamp in explaining his penchant for fetishizing throwaway items like car air fresheners, fanny packs and shopping bags. It’s how Gvasalia further explains his Ikea bag to critics and how he has come to make sense of his own aesthetic obsessions: “It actually kind of justified me to myself — understanding Duchamp.”
“It was really probably something that needed to happen, for me to learn,” he explains. “Since then, you know, it has been a very important part of my casting.” The audacity of Vetements made the fashion industry hyperventilate in admiration, and it turned Demna into a star. “Did I understand Vetements when it first launched? No. But I could see how influential it was to a certain consumer base,” says Vitale, who traipsed to a seedy sex club in Paris to see the collection. “He tapped into that [energy] very, very quickly. We need that today.”
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