Balenciaga Fall 2024. Couture - Paris

Demna Gsvalia's fourth attempt at reinstating the Couture bequest that was Cristóbal Balenciaga, and if you are interested in the historic overview of Cristóbal Balenciaga's Couture legacy, please refer to an article I wrote in February 2020 for a U.K. fashion magazine, during Spring couture showings in Paris, when the "AZZEDINE ALAÏA COLLECTOR — ALAÏA and BALENCIAGA "Sculptors of shape" took place at the Hôtel de Ville.  So, if I have a critical aspect of Demna's reworking of Couture it would be of course my research of the late Cristóbal's legacy as a couturier and what it meant to the name Balenciaga.  Particularly, when the late couturier himself Azzedine Alaïa, who passed away in 2017, was himself an ardent collector of Cristóbal's gowns, archiving what Couture used to imply, sans it's current expectation as just 'another' seasonal collection under the Fashion Week calendar.

But, let it be known, that Fashion has very much adjusted to changing consumption markets for luxury and designer goods.  Namely from China, as the West became more pragmatic in its spending over the last Two decades, very much like its current simulacrum of the 1950s middle class template, China became that reliant consumer of Western luxury goods.  In its strange dichotomy, seasonal fashion weeks are more or less a continuation of its current designer styles, which are now seasonless.  Let alone the Couturier, who now only exist as an idealism of last Seventy years, before Ready-to-Wear and its duplication of looks, pushed couture out from the 1950s onward.

Demna's fine line of merging controversy with his antifashion ethos, and as I have discussed numerous times with my reviews of his seasonal collections for the famous fashion house, offers very little respite to the curious.  In fact repetition has clearly set in, and this can be seen on the back of Kering, the holding company that owns the Balenciaga brand name, writing, metaphorically speaking, blank cheques for Demna to run loose with in his creative control.  To which he appears to have total reign of Balenciaga, in lieu of Chinese consumption markets buying up Balenciaga's $1000+ preworn looking sneakers.  

Yet, can Demna, who has only recently encroached onto Couture, by utilizing the Balenciaga brand name, respectfully fulfil the Balenciaga couture legacy?  Of course he doesn't.  And nor would Demna, controlling Balenciaga as a modern day rework of timelines, attempt to fit it the brand into any respectfully Couture or artisan project.  Only offering, in its redundancy, the popular culture of hyperreal, which he has intended Balenciaga to become.  Portraying that elusive counterculture, which does not exist.  Sans, a social media feed.  So, essentially this is not a Couture collection by any measure, but a redux of countless Balenciaga showpieces.  Only defined under the couture rules, to which the 35 person workmanship is required to create 'Black Metal' style prints, and postmodern-esque fashion graduate pieces, whilst utilizing recycled offcuts from the piles of disused materials.

Demna's Balenciaga's oversized, overlaying and stuffy looks are abundant with this 'couture' collection, the facial masks of bird feathers, butterflies are overly exaggerated.  Almost in a mocking way of Cristóbal Balenciaga's ballroom gown accessories, to which Demna, towards the end of the collection shows the possibility in maintaining at least some homage to Cristóbal, by showcasing his Couture styled gowns.

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(A.Glass 2024)