Balanciaga. Fall RTW 2022 - Paris Fashion Week

(Images: Balenciaga 2022)

I've been covering Balenciaga shows since 2015 just before, then creative director, Alexander Wang left the famed fashion house and the antifashion stalwart Demna Gvasalia of Vetements took over the helm. Gvasalia with his shrewd Eastern European ethos, has been able to re-craft the Balenciaga brand name with his innovative and captivating approach, which each season Gvasalia's Balenciaga, very much like his former brand Vetements, upped the ante with its contradistinction of aesthetics. And as this dreadful invasion of Ukraine, instigated by Russia, Gvasalia, being Georgian, has evoked memories of when Russian forces played both sides, mostly supporting Abkhazia, in a brutal ethnic cleanse of Georgians from the breakaway republic Abkhazia in 1993, to which a young Gvasalia had to flee with his mother.

So, for his Fall 2022 showing for Balenciga, he offered a respectful homage to the recent two million displaced Ukrainians who have been driven from their homes and towns due to Russian aggression. Gvasalia embracing, like with prior collections, the darkness that is of both humanity and nature, these natural systems are impartial to its brutality, as humanity on the other hand is conscious of its cruelty and its infliction it causes. It is the human being that suffers like no other animal.   And as Buddha taught from Four Noble Truths, “All I teach is suffering and the end of suffering,” is the necessity that maybe we should face the darkness of ourselves to overcome pain. Seen the many times with Gvasalia's irony with Balenciaga, that we are all too reliant on the instant satisfaction through the digital relays and social media, as a delusional cue to ourselves that all is well.  When in fact our society is far from that Utopian idealism of an interconnected world, rather it is, more than it has been in history, at the acicula of not just catastrophic climate change, but the possibility that a new cold war via a nuclear threat between superpowers has remerged after three decades of peace between America and Russia.

Yet, through all this doom and gloom it is indeed the artist that tries to make sense of it all, to which Gvasalia has shown, via the spending budget of Kering, the holding company that owns the Balenciaga brand name, a spectacular expose for his Fall 2022 Ready-to-Wear array.   A live runway show beyond the immersive presentations that he orchestrated throughout the pandemic of 2020 and 2021, with models tramping through a blizzard like setting, the effect is both impressive and theatrical.  Akin to Rick Owens return to the runway after his hiatus in Lido, Venice, there does seem to be a trend, at least with the larger avant-garde style designers, to create a fixture of environment awareness, through a haze of visual obscurity with their recent runway shows. Whether conscious or not, in this case Gvasalia's snow storm effect was indictive to the disappearing snow in parts of Europe, due to global warming. 

    
Balaenciaga's Fall 2022 collection, as you would expect, have the same elements that Gvasalia's previous pre fall styles represented in December 2021.  Although, there is the return to the apocalyptic showing in similarity to his Fall 2020 showing in March of the same year, which at the cusp of the global pandemic.  He has returned to prophetic and horror oriented concepts, that seem to be now embedded into Gvasalia's Balenciaga. Despite the seasonal collections thereafter the Fall 2020 show, where he attempted to lighten the load and renew an aura positivity to his styles.   It is, as mentioned, before we can all journey into a brighter day, we have to deal with this very humanistic affliction of repeating history, be it war and genocide, mixed with the fact that we're all having an impact on the climate.  Because at the end of that day, the human race is very capable of annihilating itself.  

And nature will carry on.