To speak of Demna is to talk of revolution. Trading bricks and polemics for padded hips and open, set-back necklines, the Georgian-born designer has turned fashion upside down. As the now mononymous talent departs Balenciaga for Gucci, it’s time to take stock of his legacy at the French fashion house and look back at his work as it appeared in Vogue.
To understand Demna’s impact, it is necessary to place his work in the context of the brand he was tasked with reviving. Cristóbal Balenciaga, born in the village of Getaria, Spain, the son of a fisher and a seamster, became a popelike figure in the Parisian couture. Even Coco Chanel, who was not known for speaking flatteringly of other designers, respected him. “The others are draftsmen or copyists, or else they are inspired people or even geniuses, but Balenciaga alone is a couturier. He is the only one who can design, cut, put together, and sew a suit or a gown entirely alone,” she told Paris Match in 1951.
When Demna was named Balenciaga’s artistic director in 2015, he was a relative unknown. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, he had worked at Maison Margiela and behind the scenes at Louis Vuitton before anonymously launching Vetements with his brother, Guram Gvasalia, in 2014. Like Monsieur Balenciaga he is, by birth, an outsider and a hands-on maker, a man who drapes rather than draws, who once told critic Sarah Mower that he had instituted a “one-minute-to-create-a-dress challenge in the studio.”
That said Demna’s relationship to time—and the times—is almost completely divergent from the house founder’s. The Spanish Civil War brought Monsieur Balenciaga from Spain to Paris, and although he favored austerity in design and his way of living, the couturier inhabited a rarified world of luxury. The reticent couturier, who sat for only one interview, retired in 1968, at a time when ready-to-wear was challenging the position of couture. In contrast, Demna, who was forced to flee from Soviet Georgia and knew hardship firsthand, seemingly recreated the plight of refugees in his fall 2022 ready-to-wear collection, with models struggling to make their way through wind and snow in a closed set.
This was an overtly political statement from a designer who didn’t shy away from things taboo, quotidian, camp, kitsch, or queer (Lay’s potato chips, plastic garbage bags, sweatsuits, Crocs), and who embraced the beautiful with as much ardor as the awkward. Of his vibe-changing debut for fall 2016, Demna told Vogue Runway: “It was the posture and the attitude and Cristóbal’s way of working with the body I found interesting.” From Cristóbal, Demna gleaned fantastic volumes, elements of movement and comportment, and purity of silhouette, both in the ready-to-wear and in the couture, which he relaunched in fall 2021 to great acclaim. Demna applied couture techniques to everyday garments like puffers, and he introduced wardrobe basics like jeans and sweats to the couture. In so doing he constantly challenged our conceptions of what fashion, status, and luxury are.
Demna articulated the primary dichotomy and driver in his work when speaking with Mower at Balenciaga’s fall 2024 ready-to-wear show, saying: “What’s more important, perfection or imperfection? For me it’s actually this coexistence of both because that’s what makes us human now—the imperfection, the failure or the ‘miss.’ I love that idea. I think it’s beautiful. That’s what differentiates us from machines.” That and Demna’s undeniably skilled hand.
