Model: Ruth Ikondo for Balenciaga Fall 2022

 

(Image:  Balenciaga 2022)

"...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..."