Excerpt: 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..."

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Full review:  chiasmusmagazine.blogspot.com/2024/07/balenciaga-fall-2024-couture-paris.html 

(A.Glass 2024)