Balenciaga’s couture salon, located in Paris’ 8th Arrondissement, has been transformed into a rectangular runway ahead of the final presentation from iconic fashion designer Demna, Balenciaga’s creative director for the past decade. As various personnel mill about the quiet space the day before his final show (which took place on July 9), the only sound echoing throughout the room, which contains gold chairs and nothing else, is a series of voices, playing out through speakers during a closed soundcheck.
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“For this couture show, there is no music,” says BFRND, a French composer, musician and artist – and Balenciaga’s music director since 2017. “I wanted the people who work for Balenciaga, who create the collections and the shows and never get really to be in the front, to become the music. So we recorded every Balenciaga employee saying their name, with no music in the background. So they, for the first time, become the show.”
It’s no coincidence that both Demna and BFRND are ending their groundbreaking runs at Balenciaga at the same time. The married couple works in tandem, and exited together to take on the respective roles of creative and music director at Gucci.
Before BFRND stepped down from a role he largely created – carving space for a music director, as opposed to a music curator, within a fashion house, composing original music to soundtrack each show rather than selecting pre-existing songs – he checked two career wins, and fashion firsts, off his list: working with Britney Spears on her first collaboration with a fashion house, and clearing the use of a Sade song for the first time for use in a fashion show.
For Balenciaga’s spring 2025 collection, previewed during an Oct. 2024 show, BFRND wanted to match the aesthetic of the line – as he always does. “The collection of that show was about ‘sexy’ in general, and how to define sexy today,” he recalls. “That’s when I knew I had to rework something that defines sexy for a majority of people – and no one else than Britney [Spears] can do that.”
To close the show, he remixed Spears’ “Gimme More,” a song he says is “so fashion.” As clips started to circulate online, Britney fans begged for an official release of the remix – and the pop star’s team took note.
“After the show, Britney’s team reached out and said, ‘Britney loved the remix you did for the show, and she would like you to do another one.’” She personally selected “Oops! … I Did It Again” (to commemorate the song’s 25th anniversary), which BFRND says was daunting since he’s never used major chords on any song or composition.
“The challenge for me was, ‘How do I make this BFRND? How do I make this sound more emo, darker than the original?’” (BFRND says Spear’s most “emo” song of all is “Everytime”: “It’s perfection.”)
This May, he officially released the remixes on a two-pack titled BRITNEY4EVER; the following month, Balenciaga dropped its 2026 collection in collaboration with Spears, including limited-edition apparel and a playlist she curated herself (including music by Madonna, Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson) released through Balenciaga Music.
Balenciaga Music launched in 2024 and “focuses on the important role music plays in Balenciaga’s creative and cultural impact,” its site reads. The project was, of course, launched in direct collaboration with BFRND. When asked about its future without him, he seems uncertain, simply offering, “Good question.”
Growing up in the south of France, BFRND (born Loïk Gomez) worked at a small venue that booked mostly goth and metal shows. He set out to become a death-metal singer himself, forming a band in his early teens, and says the juxtaposition of his edgier look and sound is exactly why he wanted to remix a Spears song.
“The magical part [of collaboration] is joining forces with someone that no one expects you to work with,” he says. “I have such an etiquette of being a hardcore music composer, always doing hard and dark techno. So no one really expects me to be a Britney fan. And that’s exactly what excites me.”
“Britney is about pushing boundaries, and it pretty much is the same for what I do with Balenciaga,” he continues. “Any pop singer will tell you that she’s the OG. She’s the main inspiration, and will probably remain the main inspiration forever. I mean, you can look at singers like Addison Rae and she represents, for me, the new generation of artists that are following [Britney’s] legacy.”
During his time at Balenciaga, BFRND has indeed pushed boundaries not just within the fashion house but the industry at large. When he started working in fashion eight years ago, he recalls how “there were not a lot of music composers writing music specifically for the show… So when I arrived, I had to hammer that idea of bespoke music, but also building an identity for the brand,” he says. “I see myself almost like what Google Translate is for language: ‘Show me clothes, and I’ll tell you what they sound like.’”
To help with that translation, BFRND enlisted Miraval Studios’ Damien Quintard, who for the last couple years has produced all of BFRND’s music, including for Balenciaga. BFRND recalls when the historic Miraval reopened in 2022, citing a photo the studio — located in the south of France — posted announcing that Sade had returned to record there.
“I was like, ‘Damn, one day I will work at this studio,’” BFRND thought. “But I didn’t even try to reach out because I felt not famous enough. So I just forgot about it. And a year later, someone at Balenciaga told me, ‘Hey, do you want to meet this guy?’”
BFRND met Quintard in a Paris cafe, and the two instantly hit it off. “We have our own alien language,” says BFRND with a laugh, “which is really magical when you work on music, because it’s so important. My music is like my baby, so I need to trust the person I’m working with unconditionally. It’s like finding a second husband for my music.”
Quintard was just as excited to be approached by BFRND, saying that the juncture of fashion and music “is becoming more and more important in the music industry. … You see so many [fashion] houses that work with different people, and it’s amazing. But at Balenciaga, it’s Loïk’s world and it’s Demna’s world, and it’s very specific. When you look at a collection, you know the music – and when you hear the music, you automatically know the collection.”
Quintard cites the Spears remixes as a strong recent example of that growing intersection. “It shows how fun it can be to compose and produce music for a fashion show and how it can affect pop culture.” And for BFRND’s final act, during that July 9 show, Quintard helped him achieve another career dream: clearing a Sade song for a fashion show for the first time. Following the calming quiet of various Balenciaga employees’ names being read aloud, “No Ordinary Love” played as the finale – and not only signaled the end of the couture presentation, but also BFRND and Demna’s boundary-pushing run.
BFRND is already brainstorming how to continue evolving the intersection of fashion and music in his new gig at Gucci – and already knows the one thing he wants to avoid. “We are going [to Gucci] to not do what we did here,” he says. “Because I’ve given so much of myself in the identity I built for Balenciaga, what I would like to do for Gucci is to build an identity that doesn’t have that much of me inside of it.”
Days after Demna’s final Balenciaga show, BFRND took the first step in creating the separation he craved, clearing his Instagram account and launching a new artist identity under the moniker Loki. And while it helps to untangle his identity from Balenciaga, it also helps him avoid the possibility of ever becoming too well-known.
“I come from the underground, and that’s where I feel safe,” he says. “The underground is where everything is being born… That’s why it’s very important to look at it, cherish it and collaborate with those people.” (His current favorite underground artist is Los Angeles-based dark-wave rapper BigKlit, saying, “she’s the best rapper on earth today.”)
That mentality is likely why he doesn’t cite his experiences with Spears or Sade’s music as a favorite memory from his time at Balenciaga. Instead, what immediately comes to mind is the very first soundtrack he did for the fashion house, back in 2017.
“It felt so big, so overwhelming and impressive,” he says, “but at the same time, it gave me such a feeling of belonging and it gave me strength. It told me, ‘You are where you belong, and this is only the beginning.’”