From giant, monster sneakers to skirts that look like bath towels, Balenciaga’s Creative Director Demna is known as an outlier within fashion, producing designs that are unconventional, unexpected, and frankly weird. But there’s a reason that Demna’s allowed to be as weird as he likes.
Just like in art, when artists say that they have to conquer realism before they can master the abstract, Demna’s allowed to design crazy sh*t because he’s already shown he knows how to design classic, intricate, integral fashion. He didn’t break into the scene with outlandish designs made out of caution tape; that’s something he’s earnt the right to do over time.
In his career, Demna has graduated from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, collaborated with Walter van Beirendonck (one of the Antwerp Six), had a hand designing Maison Martin Margiela’s womenswear collections, and spent time as senior designer of women’s ready-to-wear at Louis Vuitton under Marc Jacobs and Nicolas Ghesquière.
In particular, when Demna was at Maison Martin Margiela between 2009 to 2012, he supported on some of the House’s most revered recent womenswear collections, helping to create the rigid tailoring of SS11, the gravity-defying silhouettes of SS12, and much more. This was all before launching his own acclaimed brand Vêtements with his brother, Guram Gvasalia, or even stepping foot inside Balenciaga’s acclaimed House.
In fact, when Demna was revealed to be stepping up at Creative Director for Balenciaga in October 2015, Kering’s President and Chief Executive François-Henri Pinault famously called him “a powerful emerging force in today’s creative world,” and that is exactly what makes it OK for him to drop a designer range of crisp packets.
Even at Balenciaga, Demna’s proven his understanding of the intricacies of fashion as a designer, particularly in his Fall 2023 ready-to-wear collection which took a much more timeless approach to Demna’s typical trademark. As the first collection to show following the brand’s controversial ad campaign in 2022 (you know the one), Demna presented a far more reserved offering of refined tailoring and stripped back silhouettes, focusing on the fundamentals of design rather than his familiar viral pieces.
Demna himself said of the Balenciaga Fall 2023 collection: “I have decided to go back to my roots in fashion as well as to the roots of Balenciaga, which is making quality clothes - not making image or buzz.”
So, next time you see something walk onto the runway at Balenciaga that looks out of place in the high fashion world (perhaps a roll of duct tape hanging from a model’s wrist), just accept that Demna’s allowed to do that. Imagine him as the Picasso of the fashion world: quirky but brilliant.
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