Excerpt: BALENCIAGA RESORT 2024 - PARIS

 After my Pre-Fall 2023 review of Demna Gvasalia's Balenciaga, I felt that a conclusion is probably in line as a fashion reviewer of the many of Gvasalia's Balenciaga's shows, it is the relentless expectations of the Balenciaga brand name via its holding company Kering, to have a perpetual presence for the iconic fashion house.  And in light of the comeback of this so called anti-establishment fashion designer after his fall from grace.  There is a growing repetitiveness of the Balenciaga showpiece, that by its definition is becoming more and more diluted with Gvasalia's creative drive.  So, this review of Gvasalia's Resort 2024 showing for Balenciaga, which is clearly a reworking of Couture that is deliberately out of season. And I mean this literally, as the filmed collection shows Gvasalia's displaced and misplaced looking models move in and out of the wind and rain, in front of the late Cristóbal Balenciaga couture maison in Paris.

Toying with the spirits of the past is an unwise motavation.     

I will choose, maybe randomly, snippets from all my reviews of Balenciaga over the many years.  See if it matches up for this Resort collection.

BALENCIAGA. PRE-FALL 2022

"...Which is also seen in Demna’s latest collection, drawing up styles that do feel like the worst part of 1990s fashion when MDMA and dance clubbing became a fused indulgence, ensuring it to be a more forgettable time than a nostalgic one and so were these styles of so called 90’s dance fashion. Which have shown up of late, seen with Rick Owens latest collections of imprinting 1970s hedonism onto 1990s dance clubs. Although Demna has also inscribed the grunge/techno fusion of denim and oversize flared pants in a similar vein to Owens, he has done so with an inspired underground club feel ala Eastern Europe less-stylized array.

It is hard to see this Pre Fall collection as developmental to Demna’s Balenciaga apart from the gimmick of bygone visual technology and maybe the desire to return to an era, that, as mentioned, was the beginning and end of that digitized Utopian ‘dream’ that we are all living today."

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(A.Glass 2022/2023)