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Demna’s Balenciaga collections have become almost as famous for their audacious, outrageous show settings as they are for the clothing themselves. For SS25, the designer was back in top form. Guests entered the Palace Invalides into a giant, pitch-black box (many an iPhone torch was used), which housed a giant burl-wood banquet table. The table served as both runway and the official front row, populated by the likes of Nicole Kidman, Katy Perry, Lindsay Lohan, and, wonderfully, Kyle McLachlan, who were, in a sense, performing to the rest of the crowd as they sat and chatted in the half-hour before the show began.
The spectacle didn’t end there. The collection was a study in contrasts, beginning with a selection of scantily-clad lingerie looks. It was a surprise turn for Demna, known better for his maximalist puffers and oversized denim than scant erotica—but there was a delicate twist in his offering of lace wire bras, garters and stockings: they all sat on single bodysuits, designed to mimic the nude body, without actually revealing it.
This delicate dance, between revelation and withholding, between performance and mystery, has clearly been on Demna’s mind. As the collection developed, models wore more and more clothing, until finally they were swaddled in layers upon layers of clothing—plaid shirts over houndstooth dresses, worn with oversized nylon shorts, and sports jackets wrapped around the waist. In a tongue-in-cheek nod to the message, male models wore stiff jeans around their necks like avant-garde scarves.
The soundtrack was hypnotic and mantra-like—Britney Spears’ ‘Gimme More’ played over and over again. It was difficult not to see this as a meditation on, or perhaps a protest against, the state of modern fashion, particularly online critic discourse, which demands designers reinvent the wheel season after season, lest they be decimated by gleeful online hordes. (Or perhaps Demna was rallying against the corporate structure of fashion, which dictates that designers maintain their creative spark while also creating a slew of commercially viable products that sell.)
Demna is not the kind of designer to spell all this out directly, but we do know this collection represented a desire to take things “back to basics”, so to speak. Demna’s inspiration for the show’s large table setting was his own childhood—the dining room is where he first fell in love with fashion. “My early memories of fashion start with me drawing looks on cardboard, cutting them out, and making ‘fashion shows’ on my grandma’s kitchen table,” he wrote in the collection’s show notes. “35 years later, this show reconnects me to the beginning of my vision. It’s a tribute to fashion that has a point of view.”
Balenciaga SS25:
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