Balenciaga Fall 2024 - Paris Fashion Week

 

Fashion designers, like most creatives who are lead by high stake margins, which Kering, who owns the Balenciaga brand name, as the holding company is as ruthless as you can get.  Can at times issue adverse remarks that are akin to being hypocritical.  Demna Gvasalia would have to rank as the one of the main contenders in this field.  It is, and always has been, all about the money.  And François Pinault, the owner of Kering, current net worth is at $31 Billion USD, has sucked up as many luxury brands as one could under the Kering stronghold.  And the reality is, with two major conglomerates such as Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Kering battling it out for the mega luxury market of Asia, more so China.  Independent designers, even ones who have aspired for an acquisition at some point in the future, are fading out one by one, to the point there are close to none left in the Fashion world.  Sarah Burton who was the Creative Director at Alexander McQueen (owned by Kering), after 26 years has left, to be replaced by an unknown young man, by the name of Seán McGirr.  Which makes all the Creative Directors at Kering, young, white men.  Of course controversy has not being new for Kering, in lieu of Demna's Christmas 2021 and Spring 2022 ad campaigns for Balenciaga.  But, the not so subtle power plays of a public held company such as Kering leaves a bitter taste, after asking Alessandro Michele to step down at Gucci, due to pressure from institutional investors to revamp the Gucci brand name.  Particularly, when the Fashion Industry is transfixed on a Chinese economic recovery. That could very well be on shaky ground.

And if you have been following my reviews of Demna's Balenciaga, you would know that the hyperreal trumps (excuse the pun) the absurdity, which could offer, as mentioned, a contrarian charm.  Unfortunately this is not the case.  Demna's Pre-Fall 2024 collection held in Hollywood, was an overload of garishness and a veiled critique at consumption based elitism, through our beloved digital relays.

Yet, there is no doubting Demna's ability and creative undertone of reworking Eastern European 1990s rave fashion and their, at the time, desire to counterfeit American and U.K. sports brands.  When the rich and poor was more definitive in the 1980s, it was the 90s and dawn of the internet via its global interconnected networks, which ensured the mythos; that everyone could become a entrepreneurial millionaire.  Demna's rise to fame from a relatively obscure Georgian designer, debuting his avant-garde brand Vetements in 2014, then in 2015 he was picked to run the helm of Balenciaga after Alexander Wang exited the same year.  Wang had clocked up just over three years as its creative director, where Demna has now ranked up Ten years for Balenciaga.  And longevity is the key in the fashion industry, as fashion designers are considered old at 40, let alone a model who may not last past 25 on the runway.  The conglomerate run industry requires freshness and revamps at an insatiable rate.  

So, can it be said that Demna's Balenciaga is an indulgent protest song, within a subtle and in some cases, not so subtle overture.   For the extravagance of the Balenciaga engine, Kering obviously spares no expense to showcase Demna's ad hoc array of models, and his deconstructed stylizations.  By not abiding to any couture standard, rather offering that all his shows are a postmodern couture, in a odd show of respect to the late Cristóbal Balenciaga's standard.  But as we all know, Balenciaga is in name only.  That Demna's protest is more of a feigned expression than not.    

Demna's Fall 2024 showing in Paris, after his hyperreal Hollywood affair, falls within the same attributes of his pseudo obverse presentation.  The grandiose and the backlash are all intact, the collection starts of with a simulacrum of Cristóbal's couture imprint, descending closer to Demna's idealism that fashion is all about deconstruction.  In which a budding fashion graduate could find a correlation with, except for the fact Demna would use and utilize materials of quality to create, towards the end of the styles on show, what a 1st year designer would create with what they could afford.  And in its presentation, Demna has ended up mocking the independent fashion designer, who by all definition, as discussed, has Buckley's chance in this current industry.

This in turn creates the difficulty for the rebellious or even the contrarian to identify with Demna, and that maybe the point.  Where, there is no apparent counterculture to be seen, only that over reliance of being graced with celebritydom on TikTok, to which Demna ironically critiques with his AI nightmare inspired video presentation for his Fall collection, of reality consuming itself.  Maybe Demna's collapse of his hyperreal world, that we are observing with Balenciaga's Thousand Dollar price tags, will be solely a masochistic affair.  To be viewed, at our 11th hour.

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(A.Glass 2024)