On Wednesday, July 9, Demna will present his final couture collection at Balenciaga. For all the debuts fashion is currently anticipating, this, too, is a much awaited show; it’s a rare thing to get to witness a designer knowingly put a bow around a creative tenure.
Joining Nicole Phelps on this episode of The Run-Through are Sarah Mower, Vogue’s chief fashion critic, and Laia Garcia-Furtado, senior fashion news editor at Vogue Runway. Together, they look at Demna’s tenure at the French brand, and discuss what it says about the last decade in fashion, as well as the culture at large. When he was appointed in 2015, Demna was the designer of the semi-anonymous collective Vetements and not yet well known. He was an unexpected and exciting choice.
“You could feel the anticipation in your every fiber,” recalled Mower of the designer’s Balenciaga debut. “There was no production value. It was clean. It built up to the Helly Hansen red puffer jacket, cut off-the shoulder with this incredible ski turtleneck encrusted with crystals… that’s when you got that jolt of electricity, and you could just feel that he really nailed it.”
Ten years later that puffer is still Demna’s favorite piece. As he told Mower a few weeks ago in an interview ahead of the opening of the “Balenciaga by Demna” exhibition on view in Paris, “when I came to Balenciaga, I went through all this Cristobal imagery, and he did this really amazing thing with 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, 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.”
Beyond his mastery of the high/low, his experiments with pop culture (remember The Simpsons show?), and the “immersive runway experiences” that revealed his concerns about climate change and other social and political issues, the fact remains that Demna is one of the best designers of his generation. “He really did have a big effect on the way people dressed; reflecting or amplifying what was going on the street—literally magnifying it so much that it became hugely outsized,” said Mower. Listen to the episode below.