There is a big black screen covering one side of the discreet studio space to which I’ve been sent for a meeting with Demna in a suburb of Paris. From the outside, the building looks like an anonymous garage. Inside is the man who arrived at Balenciaga as a 34-year old insurgent from Vetements in 2015, and is now moving on, aged 44, as one of the undisputed creative director titans of luxury fashion, charged to revive the flagging fortunes of Gucci.
He’s waiting for me at a table, in a gray sweatshirt, gaping with holes along a built-up shoulder line. I’m guessing he’s taking a break at the end of a day of fittings for the denouement of his time in Paris, the final couture show he’ll present in early July. But, who knows, maybe there’s stuff going on behind the black curtain for his Gucci debut in Milan in September, too. He was already contemplating what he wanted to do there in LA over the new year holidays, he tells me. “We’d just bought a bungalow, and then the fires came. Loïck (his husband) and I got the alert to evacuate. And I was like: nooo—let me grab my laptop before we run!”
The bungalow survived, but somehow that recollection summons a typically apocalyptic Demna scenario—as anyone who still shudders at the memory of the terrifying burning skies and flooded front row he conjured at his eve-of-the-pandemic March 2020 show will testify. A retrospective exhibition of his tumultuously influential Balenciaga decade opens tomorrow. “I think these 10 years for me, they’re really this journey of how can we push the boundaries? How can we perceive fashion in a different way, especially within the luxury context?”
He puts a scheme of the contents he’s curated on the table. “I’m very lucky,” he observes. “When designers leave these days, usually you don’t get the chance to show what you did,” he remarks. “But this feels like closure.” The show is at Kering headquarters at Rue de Sèvres, open to the public by appointment until July 9. It opens with a print-out of an email Demna received from Balenciaga denying him an internship when he’d just graduated from Antwerp Academy in 2007. “I had to search my old Hotmail account to find that,” he laughs. “I was interviewed for a menswear internship and fortunately was rejected.” Fortunately? “Of course! Because my professional journey would have turned out completely different if I’d been accepted.”
In a way, the exhibition is an autobiography in 101 objects—told in Demna’s own words, through speakers. Or seemingly so. In a typical twist, it’s an AI rendering of his voice. “I wrote the captions. When they played the voice to me, reading it,” he chortles, “I couldn’t tell it wasn’t me.” Collapsing the difference between real and fake has of course been one of Demna’s main plays for a decade. There’s evidence aplenty of him as fashion’s master-manipulator of the meta and the meme: the practice of teasing trompe l’oeil and the Duchampian elevation of the ready-made object. There’s the Balenciaga shopping bag, the price tag (sold as a brooch), the blue “Ikea” bag. “It’s this idea that what you see is not what it is. What people couldn’t see on screen,” he shrugs, “is that they’re leather. Made like an actual luxury.”
His adeptness at playing across so many social channels to so many different types of people (the use of new platforms, as well as media, digital, and gaming technologies were proliferating at the time) was a distinguishing feature of Demna’s rise in the 2010s. It was his talent as a serious designer that had fashion people convinced about him from the first, though. In his retrospective, visitors will be greeted by a startlingly lifelike rendering of Eliza Douglas—a favorite member of his Balenciaga model family—wearing the basque-hipped gray tailored hourglass skirt suit in which she opened Demna’s first show in winter 2016.
That show was a major critical hit. A yet more unforgettable look from that important collection was his genius conversion of a Helly Hansen-like red puffer into an elegant, demi off-the-shoulder “Swing” silhouette, worn with a crystal embroidered turtleneck. “If I had to choose one piece from this 10 years here that represents me, it would be this,” he says. “Once I came to Balenciaga, I went through all this Cristobal imagery, and he did this really amazing thing about the back of the woman’s neck. He found it was so much more elegant to look at the necklace from the back than from the front. So all the necks were dropped. That’s what I did here,” he relates. “But I never wanted to be an impersonator of Cristobal Balenciaga. I wanted it to be on a non-conventional garment for this type of elegance. That was also how I wore my outerwear. So it was a perfect fusion.”
Every piece he’s chosen is a Proustian madeleine: personal memories that are wrapped up in a time that is now coming to an end. There’s the fall 2017 wing-mirror clutch bag. He’d just bought a car at the time. “I think the one heterosexual thing that my father put in me is love for cars. I have to tell you, I love cars!” he laughs. “My husband tells me, you’re too gay to be so much into it. But that’s one common point that I had with my father, because he’s so into it. He’s a car mechanic, you know? And the only moment we shared our experience was when he was washing his car, and I was allowed to polish it up. I mean, these things stay with us. So a lot of cars are present here.”
It’s also a kind of documentary of the times we’ve lived through—the years we’ll recall for being mapped out in Demna’s oversized shapes, the monster Triple S trainers which influenced the entire body of luxury fashion, his socio-politically immersive confrontations, his haute couture ‘Cloche’ ball-gowns, the ubiquitous rise of celebrity in the industry, and the ultimate apotheosis of Marge Simpson at the summer 2022 Red Carpet premiere show, his most delightful meta-moment ever.
A solitary faded denim baseball cap, dating from the fall 2017 menswear show, harks back to the time when the Balenciaga logo, underlined with wavy red and blue lines, looked a lot like Bernie Sanders’s campaign poster graphics. “Back then, in that moment, it was something very relevant to me, that Bernie thing. I didn’t actually expect that people would even see it, what it was. I deliberately chose this one that I have from my archive that is completely destroyed on purpose, like it’s very old. It’s like you’ve worn it to death. Because to me, we’re just no longer in that world anymore.”
There’s not much sense of Demna’s personal turning-points in this decade in the exhibition, but they’ve been huge. In 2017, he moved to Switzerland, and married the musician and composer BFRND (although the heavily veiled wedding dress worn by BFRND on the runway for spring 2024 is on display). In 2019, Demna stepped down from Vetements, which he co-founded with his brother Guram in 2014. In 2021, he shed his second name by decree from the Balenciaga press office: “From now on, Demna uses only his first name.” The next year was marked by an advertising crisis, for which Demna and the then-CEO Cedric Charbit had to issue an apology.
Then, on January 27 of this year, Demna received a medal of the Legion D’Honneur from the French minister of culture. We’d all dressed up to see him decorated in grand rooms at the Palais-Royal. He turned up in an old black t-shirt. “ Finally La France recognized me! I wanted this old French establishment to put it on my t-shirt,” he says. “I felt like otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to me. (It was) a kind of stupid activism on my side, because I went through a lot of xenophobia here. Someone like me being perceived as this kind of streetwear guy, a bit angry, a bit refugee. What you see is not who someone is. Don’t judge a book by its cover! I used that perception in the past 10 years in order to push that agenda. The book being me, and the cover being my old hoodie.”
It was a fateful day for him in more ways than one. “That morning I met with Francois-Henri Pinault. I showed him my vision for Gucci, and he asked me, when can you start? There was this crazy overlap with going there to get this (medal) on my t-shirt, finally getting this, okay, I exist for you [meaning the French establishment] moment. It felt to me that something aligned. I mean, I believe in energy and the universe—God, I don’t know—but I felt like: the story is complete for me now. I came to Paris hoping I could get an internship that I didn’t get, and now I get this. So I can move on.”
The exhibition, he adds, represents “10 years of brain-function. There is a concept to every single thing. It’s almost like I was doing all of that to impress myself. Maybe it’s important, because I’m not going to be doing that now in my next chapter.” What! Is a whole different, non-conceptual Demna about to emerge at Gucci?
“I want to have a break from that. I look at all this, and I just want to have the greatest pair of pants. Maybe it’s about experience, or maturity in terms of how I see fashion. Now I feel like I just want to do this amazing fucking jacket. I want it to be light. I want it to be good to wear. I want to feel sexy in it. I want to have all those things that are not conceptual. Not boring clothes, either. Now,” he pauses, “what does that mean? It involves another kind of brain-work, to be honest. After 10 years of therapy, I learned how not to intellectualize everything. It’s much more about making great clothes that make you feel a certain way, without having to explain a book every time.”
That’s a big challenge, I say. “Yeah, and I love it. There are ways of being creative, still. I believe in that. I think we have to find new ways of expressing creativity—and maybe do good clothes. My next chapter as designer is all about that, and being curious.” And then, he says, he has to go. Off to see Billie Eilish in concert. A big black car is backed up to the garage, waiting for him outside. As we leave, I remember to ask what he’s planning for his final haute couture show, the final seal on his tenure at Balenciaga. “Oh,” he calls, as he waves me off, “it will be something very conceptual.”
If I’ve learned one thing from long experience of interviewing Demna: what he says is rarely what you get. I just cannot picture what he’s going to do, for the life of me. That’s a positive, I reckon. Fashion now is in dire need of the less predictable. As I drive away, some of Demna’s final words are ringing in my ears: “One of the most important driving forces in fashion is surprise,” he said. “I’m going to surprise everyone, but myself first.”
