Balenciaga. Pre-Fall 2024 - Los Angeles.

Demna Gvasalia has returned with gusto on the back of his celebritydom and excessive indulgence, that truly is an American 'Hollywood' affair, in all of its simulacrum and contradiction.  As noted in many of my reviews of Demna's shows.  To pinpoint philosophically, why a East European Georgian has a kitsch fascination with American excessiveness, would be almost futile in its observation.  Any more or less than being a strange critique of Western consumerism.  But, alas Demna has reworked Balenciaga into what could be deemed the most garish luxury brand within the industry today, underlining every parody of excess one could wish for, and after his slight fall from grace with the dreadful ad campaigns for his Christmas 2021 and Spring 2022 collections. It was obvious that Demna was not facing a complete loss of respect.  Kering, Balenciaga's holding company, is a financial powerhouse and Balenciaga holds that line of desire for Shanghai's 20 somethings to own a  pair of Balenciaga sneakers, whom for the most part, controversy or not, are captivated by Western luxury fashion brands and their American celebrities via the Chinese owned TikTok (strange Cold War is it not?)

Demna's Balenciaga always seems to invoke in me the theory from the late dissent French postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who famously wrote "Simulacra and Simulation" in 1980 as an underlying blueprint to simulation theory, beyond the science friction of a supercomputer, it is us, living in a postmodern society which has become inundated with exaggerated meaning and images, thus we have all become, willingly or not, part of the hyperreal.  As reality becomes more and more swamped by the hyperreal order.  And without giving too much credit to Demna's creative invigoration, and its possible effect on the spectator, for me it's more of an observation within its absurdity. As he infuses a plethora of celebrities to his deconstructive narrative of the Balenciaga brand name (Please refer to my Pre-Fall 2023 review),  Demna's hyperreal debacle has returned to the only place that could possible host all of his mirrored contradictions, Los Angeles.

It is very difficult to see Demna's collections as avant-garde, risque or even overtly creative, in comparison to his peers of the last 40 years.  Yet, somewhere within the excessiveness and dichotomy of style over substance, when a worn looking pair of Balenciaga sneakers will set you back over $1000, there is something from Demna that seems to want to shine through.  And it may not directly emanate from the designer himself.  As two major proxy wars wage on, it is the genocide of Palestinians by a Western armed Israel which has encapsulated what a 21st Century Fascist state looks like.  As the world is leaning more and more towards the far right.  Demna's Balenciaga mirrors Hollywood hyperreality perfectly, which could well indeed offer a clue, that from here, in this 'desert of the real', as Demna's parody has now become a parody of itself.  Then it would seem, that the collapse of civilisation had already occured. 

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(A.Glass 2023)