For out-of-towners, Los Angeles has the quality of the surreal. The palm trees, canyons and golden light, the faceted faces and super-toned bodies, the cult of Erewhon, the Hollywood sign. Demna, the Georgian creative director of Balenciaga, is not immune to its appeal. After his pre-fall show in LA today, he called it “my favorite city in the world,” saying, “All my cultural evolution, growing up as a teenager in this kind of post-Soviet vacuum, really came from here, through movies, music – I mean, anything that I kind of absorbed that later kind of started to become my fashion references.
There was certainly something surreal about Balenciaga’s black-clad guests showing up en masse on a manicured stretch of Windsor Boulevard in Hancock Park, with that famous Hollywood sign in the distance. “It feels like we’re going to a funeral in sunny Transylvania,” said a fellow editor. Or like stepping into a Tim Burton film shot in Technicolor.
This was the brand’s second destination show in the US. Last year, Demna chose the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to present Balenciaga’s ‘Garde-Robe’, collection of ‘luxury classic garments’ with an emphasis on tailoring, one of his specialties. This collection brought more SoCal, starting with the sportswear, duffel bags, and souped-up sneakers of the first few looks. The velor jumpsuits around the year 2000 and the gigantic high-heeled boots that followed will be familiar to readers of American magazinewhich would have been another way the young Demna got his celebrity content unless it was the famous Steven Meisel Hollywood shoot in Vogue Italia that did it for him.
In the days before social media, the paparazzi lurked outside the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Around 2023, it will be Erewhon smoothies that will rule the stars. To mark today’s event, Balenciaga collaborated with the LA grocer on a juice. Made partly with activated charcoal powder, it’s as black as the stretchy turtleneck and tight jeans that Brigitte Nielsen wore on the show, taking over the role of actress-moonlighting-as-model from Isabelle Huppert. “I don’t know what’s in there,” Demna said. “I just wanted it to be black.”
Wellness culture is one of LA’s most successful exports. The show’s powerful soundtrack, as usual created by Demna’s partner Loik Gomez, not-so-subtly poked fun at its supposed hollowness. Demna dismissed the idea that he was approaching the collection – or LA itself – with irony, but there’s something comically perverse about a paper shopping bag made of leather.
The sensational evening wear – some might have gone to the Academy Museum Gala down the street tomorrow night – were as Hollywood as the rest of the show, but it was easier to read the seriousness in their elegance and drama. There was a respectful nod to Cristobal Balenciaga in the large volumes of a white wedding dress whose funnel neck reached just below the model’s eyes. Two other dresses were reminiscent of post-coital sheets tied at the bust, while the sheets were patent leather. These were pure Demna, and you could draw a connection between them and the garbage bag he designed for Fall 2022, the show that took place days after the start of the war in Ukraine.
We were in one of LA’s most beautiful enclaves today, but Demna is not blind to the city’s extreme inequalities. Los Angeles is often called a shallow place, but this Los Angeles lover is deep.
