It’s rare that anyone gets to curate their own legacy. Usually that’s the prerogative of the future, something that can only happen in retrospect.
But on Wednesday in Paris, Demna, the mononymic designer who has defined Balenciaga for the past 10 years, transforming it from a symbol of austere and unattainable perfection into a pop culture phenomenon, was able to use his final couture show to do exactly that. In March it was announced that he was leaving the brand to go to Gucci, but rather than cut ties immediately, he was given the opportunity to design his exit.
Now, that is elegant. And so it was.
The audience was rife with the celebrities who were the avatars of his disruptive, initially shocking, style: Nicole Kidman and Cardi B; Lorde and Katy Perry. Even Lauren Sanchez Bezos, fresh from her Venice wedding, was there.
The show itself was chockablock with characters, including Kim Kardashian channeling Elizabeth Taylor in a champagne duchesse-satin slip dress, a tawny fur coat actually made of feathers trailing from her shoulders and, in her ears, 15 carats of diamond drop earrings that Mike Todd gave Ms. Taylor, on loan from the jeweler Lorraine Schwartz. Also Isabelle Huppert offering Left Bank haute beatnik in skinny black capris and a black turtleneck, a hidden corset turning her into an hourglass.
The soundtrack was composed of the names of those who had helped Demna over the decade, recited in their own voices.
Most of all, however, it was the clothes that spoke for him. Each one representative of how he had assumed the challenge of silhouette inherent in the name of Balenciaga and turned it inside-out, combining his streetwear roots with the highfalutin’ heritage of the house to upend the totems of luxury and genuinely influence how everyone dressed. Whether they bought Balenciaga or not.
Shoulders jutted like iron struts in not-quite-polite tailored coat dresses and midi suits. The collars of simple silk and cashmere sweaters curved up and around the face like razor-edged tulips. Slouchy corduroy trousers turned out to be made from what the team said was 300 kilometers (more than 185 miles) of tufted yarn, and a long quilted puffer came with no side seams, so it resembled the articulated shell of an armadillo.
Classic men’s suiting had been made by traditional Neapolitan ateliers — but prototyped on the frame of a body builder and then modeled not only by him but nine other men of notably different sizes (including Demna’s husband, the composer known as BFRND), so the jackets hung on their frames and twisted around their ankles. The better to suggest, Demna said backstage, that one size could fit all.
The point being, he continued, that it should not be the garment that defines the body, “but the body that defines the garment.”
That’s why he replaced the logos on the oh-so-proper handbags dangling from models’ arms with their own names. Why what looked like extreme corsetry beneath the draped siren dresses of Olde Hollywood that ended the show turned out to be made from a sort of shapewear, built of layers and layers of stretch material, so it allowed the person within to actually breathe. And sit.
And that’s progress.
In the end, it was a reminder of how much Demna had let the air into the cloistered environs not just of couture — it was only four years ago that he reintroduced the practice to Balenciaga after a 53-year hiatus — but fashion in general. How, by using the vernacular of the everyday and applying it to the elite and the exclusive, he pulled down the barriers of both.
To that end, the house photographed every piece in the collection on the streets of Paris, rather than in the salon. After the show, for the first — and last — time, Demna came out to take a bow. Once upon a time, back in 2015 when he arrived, he might have been seen as an interloper, but he was leaving as an agent of change.
On every seat he had put a note that read in part, “Fashion lives on the edge of tomorrow, driven not by what we know but the thrill of discovering what’s next.”
On Monday, he starts at Gucci.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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