Balenciaga has officially launched its collaboration with PUMA, originally teased last March during the brand’s Paris Fashion Week FW25 runway show. The tie-up, part of Demna‘s second-to-last Balenciaga collection, reiterates the tracksuit as a central archetype in the designer’s language — one that seeks to subvert long-held ideas of luxury, all with an ironic wink.
The earlier runway presentation was a tame reprisal of the tenured creative director’s lexicon: a toned-down mix of classic and bold-shouldered tailoring, normcore numbers, and form-fitting sportswear dominated by a largely grayscale palette. However, towards the middle of the show, PUMA’s inclusion initiated a shift in tone, bringing deep blue and primary red into play and spotlighting Demna’s affinity for tracksuits and sweatsuits.
In addition to crested football training sets, logo-taped tracksuit separates, and 90s-inspired windbreakers, PUMA’s contributions included standard logo caps, socks, gloves, and a PUMA x Balenciaga shopping bag. The collection is also topped with multiple colorways and distressed variants of the Speedcat and an original Ballerina slipper.
Though the PUMA assortment stands out from the subdued collection, the designs are quite standard compared to the designer’s previous explorations of activewear sets. For SS23, Bella Hadid fronted the adidas x Balenciaga campaign, which blew remixed logo tees, tracksuits, and football jerseys to oversized proportions. Such magnified and surrealistic versions of otherwise familiar activewear silhouettes are omnipresent in Demna’s Balenciaga collections.
But now, even as one of the key ushers of fashion’s oversized era, Demna has expressed that he’s through with exploring outsized silhouettes. In a recent interview with Die Zeit, he shared his thoughts on the mass acceptance of oversized fits, stating, “It’s a specific silhouette—one of many possibilities. But right now, I’m very uninterested in oversized fashion. I’ve been there, I’ve done that.”
Furthermore, Demna told Vogue the intentions behind his rather pared-back FW25 collection following the March show: “It’s easy to put a chair on the head and say, oh, that’s wearable art—or putting a parka upside down, (which) I kind of did for the last 12 years—and I love it, by the way—but also I felt like maybe I had enough of that.”
Perhaps this is why the new PUMA collection and the 2024 Under Armour partnership similarly present a shift back to largely regular fits and conventional shapes from the designer.
Often grouped with the “post-Soviet” aesthetics of designers like Gosha Rubchinskiy, Demna’s undying affinity for athletic styles is more firmly rooted in his identity and upbringing than people may realize. Many have tied certain Demna sensibilities, namely, bootlegged sportswear, counterfeit goods, worker uniforms, and underground subcultural style, to his roots in Soviet Georgia and subsequent years in Ukraine, Russia, and Germany.
Demna carried many of these “post-Soviet” throughlines at every step of his journey, including founding Vetements with his brother Guram Gvasalia in 2014. It was 2016 when Vetements famously made Champion cool again with their inaugural collaboration, which adapted the Champion typeface into a Vetements wordmark. However, introducing these everyday themes into Balenciaga’s glamorous Western European ethos completely revolutionized the brand’s historic identity.
Having publicly renounced oversized fashion and expressed his boredom with the avant-garde, Demna signals that his takeover of the Florentine house could herald a departure from the signatures he has so closely cultivated until this point. Indeed, Gucci is a different animal with a much stronger presence in the public imagination — one that may be much more difficult for Demna to challenge than Balenciaga.
Will the designer continue to play with his archetypal Demna themes at Gucci, or is he trying to tell the world that he will showcase a new facet of his capabilities?
The PUMA x Balenciaga collection is available now online and at select Balenciaga stores.
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