The profound ambiguity of Balenciaga's FW24 show Zigzagging on the line between tribute and parody
Demna is a designer who is, before being ironic, ambiguous. On the one hand, his collections are the delight of critics, his quotes are practically always agreeable, especially regarding the state of the art of the industry, and yet in his shows one never really understands how parody and apologia, ingenious invention and banal gimmickry, are dosed. On the one hand there are the beautiful concepts that the designer expounded to Cathy Horyn about the lost importance of craftsmanship, the over-hunger for celebrity, fashion gimmicks, prevailing commercialism, and the importance of finding a true creative voice--on the other hand there is a boundless rigmarole of logoed garments that have been identical for years, a bevy of celebrities often brought even to the runway, a list of gimmicks that could fill a book, a heavy reliance on commercial products and a constant repetition of silhouettes and products that blurs the line between creative continuity and coherence, and an almost obsessive aesthetic repetitiveness that borders on predictability. This kind of ambiguity was on display with Balenciaga's FW24 show in Los Angeles yesterday: impossible not to see in the procession of figures a citation to LA's celebrity culture seen almost from the inside, to the inherent vulgarity of velour jumpsuits and exposed thongs, to that vaguely Y2K look of Hollkywood stars when they go shopping in sweatsuits. No less: was it really a kind of satire of that prosaic aesthetic, a celebration of it or an elevation of it?
As we wrote in an old article, it is indeed complex to distinguish creative coherence from repetitiveness: among today's most celebrated designers there are certainly creatives who repeat and return to hammer on their own obsessions-and that is without counting the interference of commercial departments that want a certain best-selling piece to be there all the time. The yardstick by which Demna should be judged, perhaps the same yardstick he implicitly chose for himself, is that of actuality: is Balenciaga current today? Does it authentically reflect some elusive zeitgeist that others could not better summarize or synthesize? Does it describe something that is out there subverting those usual concepts of luxury and fashion? The answer, in the face of collections that look very similar to each other, is yes. Balenciaga's main quality is surely to be in the moment, to describe it readily and make a kind of ideal and dystopian portrait of it at the same time. In this sense, the very thin eyebrows of Cardi B (who closed the show) were reminiscent of those of Karen Black in the babelic, maddening, and chilling satire of Hollywood that was John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust. There remains, however, beyond the more conceptual pieces, that whiff of ambiguity: does Demna nurture the culture he judges or judge the culture he nurtures?
