For Balenciaga, looking to the past is the only way to look to the future Without memes and provocations, Balenciaga's reset to rely on the brand's past and its designer
«In the last couple of months, I needed to seek shelter for my love affair with fashion and I instinctively found it in the process of making clothes.» This is how Demna, in the statement that accompanied the Fall 2023 collection, presented Balenciaga's return to the scenes a few months after the scandal that had undermined not only the brand's commercial strength but also the certainties of the Georgian designer forced (either by himself or by Kering's top management) to return to the origins of the maison and his work. That tailoring would be at the center of the collection we have known for some time, first with the river interview given to Vogue by Demna himself and then with the invitation that winked at the art of tailoring with the paper pattern of a jacket. The jacket was indeed the star of the first part of the show, the one dedicated to tailoring made of deconstructed and reconstructed garments, the lives inverted with hems and doubled pants. With Eliza Douglas opening the ranks in an austere set shrouded in silence and toile, the feeling was that of witnessing a reset.
To shout, however, at downsizing, at the "step back" of a designer in penance who chooses to creatively flog himself to atone for his sins is to have never gone beyond the most superficial layer of Gvasalia's work, merely judging his work from fifteen minutes of a show. We need only go back to Resort 2023 to see in the Garderobe collection a glimpse of what we saw yesterday. The difference, if we really have to find it, is that in that case the minimalist designs and the absence of logos in plain sight (believe it or not, someone complained about it) were lost within a larger machine, perhaps even too much so that it ended up engulfing Demna's work distorting our perception of it. Having overcome the months made up of TikTok videos of burning sneakers and cut bags, now for the Georgian designer and for Balenciaga itself the real stumbling block is redefining the identity of the brand whose soul seems split down the middle: on the one hand, the need to find a stylistic and creative calm that keeps media attention at bay, on the other the spasmodic need to find the love of those who, after yesterday, feel betrayed. If today Demna seems safe from the winds of dismissal that blew in the winter months (the designer himself said «I'm not going anywhere, it's not goodbye»), his future and that of the brand itself remain deeply tied to the redefinition of Balenciaga's DNA.
