Today was the grand finale of everything Demna has brought to Balenciaga over the past decade: his last couture show before he officially hands over the keys of the house to Pierpaolo Piccioli, leaves Paris, and moves on to Gucci. “I feel like it’s my coming-out today,” he laughed backstage, dressed in a washed-out gray hoodie, Balenciaga cap, and camouflage pants. “I never came out after my shows. But this time it was like I owed it to me and Balenciaga and all these things that we did here [for] 10 years. And it just felt like I could not do better than this.”
And oh what a Demna community throwing of the silhouettes it was! Kim Kardashian as a replica Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, wearing Taylor’s actual diamonds. Isabelle Huppert, hamming it up as the ultra-Parisienne d’un certain age, swinging a lady bag from the crook of her elbow in a pair of black corseted trousers and a couture-ified up-sculpted turtleneck. Eva Herzigova, full-throttle supermodeling a neon yellow padded-hip, twisted-satin bustier gown. Even Demna’s husband, BFRND, slouching through in an oversized business suit and insanely elongated derbies, carrying a sinister black leather laptop case.
And as the parade—conceived, as Demna put it, as a study of the dress codes of “la bourgeoisie”—proceeded, all the people who work for Balenciaga, the creative director included, spoke their names on the soundtrack. That was a nice personal thank-you to those who had abetted Demna’s technical feats in sculpting, molding, smoothly corseting, and solidifying the tipped-forward monumental architecture of his Nosferatu shoulders—in short, creating the unmistakable Demna stamp that changed fashion over the past decade.
There were his tributes to Cristóbal Balenciaga, too—in particular an embroidered black-and-white houndstooth skirt suit, a replica of a 1967 number, worn by Danielle Slavik. Demna related a story about how meeting this model had absolved him of his imposter-syndrome feelings about designing for the house of the greatest couturier’s couturier of all. “I often felt like I needed to find justification for myself and being here,” he said. “It felt like a battle, and people didn’t make it easy for me. Then I met Danielle, who used to be Cristóbal Balenciaga’s fitting model, and she single-handedly changed that. She embraced me, not only telling me the most beautiful things about my work and my creativity and the links that she saw between me and Cristóbal Balenciaga. She also justified me being here.”
But there was never menswear at Balenciaga, let alone in the couture salon. That is entirely Demna’s invention, based largely on upgrading the archetypes in his own wardrobe. So, of course, there had to be the blown-up bombers, the trailing trenches, the biker leathers. One point of difference, though: While Demna has never been one for a tailored suit, he said he had collaborated with a Neapolitan tailor to make the black suit for the bodybuilder who walked in the show. The exactitude of the Italian fit was such a marvel that he used the same template for all the men’s suits in the show (which explains the swimming proportions of the suit worn by his husband).
Will Demna be following up this Italianate tailoring at Gucci? We won’t know until his debut at Milan Fashion Week. But for now, his work at Balenciaga is done. Contemplating the past and future, he said he was feeling happy, a job done to as near perfection as he could get. “I needed to integrate a lot of Demna codes into this house for it to become the business that it is,” he reflected. “It was a necessity that I had to do. That’s something that has built the Demna chapter at Balenciaga, a combination of that beautiful but somewhat claustrophobic heritage and my personal style that evolves and has been evolving.”
And how does he feel about Gucci, somebody asked. “For my next chapter, I have quite a luxury of having a lot of different codes that I have actually never used or had before to build on,” he grinned. “And that’s something that excites me a lot.”
As for his very last word, that was in the photos Balenciaga distributed, not from the couture salon but shot on the streets outside discount luggage and hardware shops, as well as on the Seine and outside the house of Balenciaga. “Paris is a place that I love and hate,” he concluded. “It was in my heart to do this tribute to my Paris—not Paris like how it’s seen, maybe abroad, but real Paris. And also putting the couture into that. It’s been a bit my challenge since I came here. I wanted to make couture relevant, to put it in the context of not the palace, not this amazing salon—but there, into real life.”
