Balenciaga. Spring 2023 - Paris Fashion Week.
Demna Gvsalia's Balenciaga has reunited with his doomsday ethos, as it was expressed with his Fall 2020 showing at the cusp of the worst pandemic humanity faced since the Spanish Flu over 100 years ago. And we didn't cope. In fact in has been a societal pre curser to a collapse via a micro organism, which was its primer, but we, collectively were heading towards a collapse regardless. The polarization, from both the left and right, with the extreme right flouting its take on the 1990's paleo-libertarianism from repetitive podcasts, trying to convince themselves that the left wing, equality movements are to blame, shows the extend to how fractured and broken society has become. Yet, this sociological breakdown is all but a reverberation of the structural decline that has been occurring from climate change, economic malady and of course the possibility of Nuclear War.
The questions may be numerous on how we all ended up like this, but the reality is and it is sound in its observation, that we have been sleep walking into calamity since the onset of the digital relays. A self centered greedy society is always its own undoing and it is coming undone. Can Demna, who has been on the forefront, in all of its irony as the antithesis fashion designer. Hold an answer?
In its bluntness, only as an aesthetical cue. The artist must always maintain an obscurity to the point that the viewer can discern the underlying elements to his or her art. The subtle is the awareness that there is only so much one can do about the descending chaos. To which we must learn to be fearless. To be courageous and overcome. The Earth was born from Hadean (Hell) and humanity's lesson is to accept its hell state to overcome it. But, the lessons will be brutal.
Can we pullback from the cusp? Hard to say. So far there is no cohesive counterculture. When the 1960's and 1970's set a precedence of a necessary backlash against the institutionalized world, which harbored the rigidity of the family values template, with the promise that technology and the technocrats will set you free. It was the gay and women's right movements, sexual liberation and anti nuclear war protests that gave us the possibility that we could see a society free of war and prejudices. Which petered out going into the 1990's and 2000's, not from cynicism, as we all embraced the template of that 50's stability, while staring into smart phones and taking out home loans. We went backwards.
Demna's latest collection is timely and important, yes, it is a show piece for Paris Fashion Week and he is very much at the helm of a luxury brand. Yet, Balenciaga's Spring 2023 is Demna's most broken down and war-torn collection to date, symbolizing in a personal way, the horrific war in Ukraine, which maybe entering its most devastating stage as winter beckons, which has always been, throughout the wars in history, a make and break for a conflict. As Russia controls the majority gas and grain supplies to Europe and the world. Demna filled a convention center space near Charles De Gaulle, with mountains of mud, arranged by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, with a 'muddy' scent emanating around the dystopia landscape created by aromachologist and visual artist Sissel Tolaas.
And yet, paradoxically Demna's Balenciaga Spring 2023 is not a protest song by any stretch of the imagination, it is however an imprint of his personal story of growing up in Georgia under the threat of Russian aggression, being gay and misaligned in a society that, despite elements of inclusion, continues to stigmatize. The Hollywood-esque backdrop and its stage presence, is to attract and sell a product. And the reality is that Demna's control at Balenciaga is specified as an exclusive appeal to America's celebritydom, who poured into Paris to attend his latest collection. And if we are all at the end and society is in the stages of collapse, the American celebrity has had the least to offer any more than less its obsession with social media and their followers.
Maybe that's the point.
"The sumptuous age of stars and images is reduced to a few artificial tornado effects, pathetic fake buildings, and childish tricks which the crowd pretends to be taken in by to avoid feeling too disappointed. Ghost towns, ghost people. The whole place has the same air of obsolescence about it as Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard."
Jean Baudrillard
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(A.Glass 2022)
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