Balenciaga's best 5 campaigns in the Demna Gvasalia era Weird is beautiful
Despite being a fashion house with over a hundred years of history, Balenciaga has had a very alternating life over the decades, including a phase of apparent death lasting for eighteen years and a revival at the hands of Nicolas Ghesquière, current creative director of Louis Vuitton's women's collections. But his most interesting life phase began in 2015 when Georgian designer Demna Gvasalia and stylist Lotta Volkova made their entrance into the fashion house transforming it into the most surreal, post-modern and meme-worthy fashion brand ever and equipping it with a new language accessible to new generations of luxury consumers.
As the artist Miloš Trakilović explained well, interviewed about it by 032c:
«My generation, born in ’89, got to know the world not by walls but through transparent screens. t‘s a generation that understands usership but has problems with meaning. A vast, so-called ‘free’ generation of the free market economy that grew up with some freedom of movement, freedom of expression, and no future. Balenciaga and Vetements appeal not only to the global elite, but to this post ‘89 generation specifically, because these brands are crafted on meme-bait strategies».
The main vehicle of this new language that Trakilovic compares to that of memes are the brand's campaigns, which express well its idiosyncratic soul and its world of cyber-glossy references to Georgian society, digital culture and the 90s - best represented by the videos created for the Spring 2019 campaign by Turkish artist Yilman Sen.
For this reason nss magazine has compiled a list of the five best Balenciaga campaigns created under the direction of Demna Gvasalia.
“Real Balenciaga” Capsule Campaign
Balenciaga's most recent video campaign, published to coincide with the presentation of the brand's FW20 campaign, is a video dedicated to the capsule "Real Balenciaga" that almost frames the acronym for Keeping Up With the Kardashians, the famous and long-lived reality show that has followed the life of the eponymous family for eighteen seasons. The genius of the video made by the American photographer Chris Maggio with the music of Sam Shrieve and Liz lies in the recontextualization of fashion within the trash culture of reality shows – which is also the basic process of the irreverent aesthetic given by Gvasalia to the brand.
Summer 2020/Video Campaign
Perhaps the culmination of that hallucinatory normcore style loved by Lotta Volkova, who directed the styling, the SS18 campaign for the Menswear brand recalls the kitsch world of family portraits of the 70s and 80s, exhibiting the fiction of photographic technique through a series of stylish wallpapers and washed-out colors, erasing all the pre-concepts of glamour and beauty through a series of faded and decidedly unerly portraits that channel the ironic awkward in the concept of fashion Gvasalia.
