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Haute couture is the pinnacle of French fashion, where designers and their ateliers can spend upwards of hundreds of hours on a single piece. Only the highest quality of craftsmanship qualifies for the title, and it exists purely to serve an estimated 4,000 cumulative clients around the world.
So when Demna sent a dress down the runway for his fourth Balenciaga haute couture show that was made in just 30 minutes and designed to unravel after the first wear, it immediately got people talking.
“It feels a little like a fast fashion iteration of haute couture,” says Victoria Moss, fashion director of The Standard, of the swirling mass of black nylon. “This feels at odds with what fashion at this level should be, which is exquisitely made pieces that somewhat justify their extreme pricing.” She adds that many invest in couture to have garments perfectly fitted to their bodies — and made to last for years.
“Is it beautiful? That’s debatable. Is it impressive? Not really. Is it brazen? Absolutely. Is it a meditation on the creative process? Maybe. Are we bored of these kinds of gimmicks at Balenciaga? Clearly not, as Demna’s work continues to be both a lightning rod and a conversation starter. “Call it ‘pret-a-polarize’,” says fashion journalist and ‘Newfash’ podcast host Mosha Lundström. “To my eye and understanding, I see this look as content rather than couture.”
Other observers found the dress’s one-time-wear perfectly fitting for couture today. On Instagram, Perfect Magazine editor-in-chief Bryan Yambao wrote, “I just love the statement it made. It was clear as ice, I thought it was full of meaning. There is nothing more luxurious than having something custom made for you, on your body, and wearing it once; usually for a special occasion, as is the case for most haute couture clients.”
“The feeling that this dress gives me is perhaps the kind of life that haute couture needs to make this age-old tradition make sense again,” says fashion critic Ryan Yip. “Pure artisanal and intrinsicality isn’t enough, it requires a strong statement, something irreplaceable like the draping of this dress.”
In an email statement, Balenciaga described the garment as “an ephemeral couture performance and experiment”, explaining that the piece is made “in a choreographed process” where the couture atelier team drapes, staples and sculpts 47 metres of black nylon — which was chosen to evoke Cristóbal Balenciaga’s favoured gazar material — “directly on the model moments before it is seen”. They added that it was made specifically to be worn once, with the dress “unwrapped from the model’s body” after the show, never to be recreated in the same manner again. “The magic and poetry and ephemerality of this experience — drape and un-drape — is echoed in the collection’s butterfly motifs,” they note of the collection’s wider message.
Throughout the mixed reactions, the questions remain: who is the brand trying to appeal to? And what does it say about the way we define couture today?
Rethinking haute couture in 2024
Over the years, the meaning and purpose of haute couture in the modern world has been continually questioned. It’s something that Demna himself was thinking about when designing the latest collection.
“I wanted to create a fusion or a tribute to my personal vocabulary as a designer, which is subcultures… but I needed to bring in that kind of equilibrium with Cristóbal, obviously, because this is couture,” he told Vogue Runway’s Nicole Phelps at the time of the show.
Yip likens the dress to the practice of Buddhist monks destroying the sand mandalas they spent hours meticulously working on to symbolise the impermanence of life. “In the context of couture, it is poetic and intimate, the highest practice of sewing and dressmaking is epitomised by this extreme contrast of hard work and the fragility of design. Unlike other couture designs that can be altered and worn again by other people, no one can possibly relive this exact version of the dress, a secret shared only between the couturier and the wearer,” Yip adds.
Does it have an audience? Lundström thinks so. “There is a certain gutsy couture client for whom the bragging rights, ephemerality and excessiveness of this experimental look is indeed worth it,” she says, adding that there’s more at play here than a couture-ified DIY project. “What Balenciaga is selling here is the once-in-a-lifetime experience of being draped by couturiers as a performance versus painstaking art form.” Indeed, for any interested buyers, three artisans from Balenciaga’s ateliers will travel to their home to construct the dress directly on the person.
Then, there’s the question of whether any brand should be pushing a message of clothing being disposable and one-use, let alone at couture level. But it doesn’t have to be; the dress could be redone if taken apart with care. And the idea of design for disassembly is a key pillar of sustainable fashion, allowing for the reuse and repurposing of materials beyond one construction.
But nylon? “The depressing similarity to fast fashion is of course that it uses 47 metres of nylon, a synthetic material created from oil,” says Moss. “It underscores that the platitudes that fashion makes towards addressing its atrocious record on environmental issues are as empty as the closet of the rich woman who may stump up thousands to wear something momentarily.”
Balenciaga explained over email that they used nylon as “a re-envisioning of gazar, an ultra-fine fabric that can no longer be made to the standards of Cristóbal’s era”. However, Sara Brosché, campaign manager of the International Pollutants Elimination Network, cautions that “nylon is a plastic material produced using petrochemicals as starting products and cannot be considered sustainable.”
Demna is clearly pushing the boundaries as to what can be considered couture. To qualify as haute couture, brands must complete at least two fittings per garment, and it must be hand-sewn — look 39 doesn’t meet either of these criteria. A new generation of couturiers have also been pushing for the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture to review these rules to incorporate sustainability measures, something that would also curtail Balenciaga’s dissolvable dress vision. But perhaps in the traditional and somewhat ageing industry of haute couture, breaking a rule or two helps freshen up a brand’s standing.
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