People visit natural history museums to see dinosaur bones. Maybe one day they go to experience winter to see what the snow was like?
Demna asked this gruesome question—and addressed the Russian invasion of Ukraine head-on—at her powerful and sometimes jarring fall fashion show for Balenciaga, set in a giant white fishbow of living space with a built-in snowstorm. , swirling pieces of paper stood. For the real stuff.
Guests arriving at the sprawling exhibition hall on the edge of Paris discovered oversized T-shirts in every seat the colors of the Ukrainian flag and a note card from Demna, whose family fled the civil war in Georgia in 1993. “And I became a refugee forever,” he declared. The current headlines “trigger the pain” of that past trauma, making Fashion Week such an “absurd” that he seriously considered closing the show. did.
“But then I realized that canceling this show would mean surrendering to the evil that has already hurt me so much for almost 30 years. I decided I was no longer going to go to that silly, heartless war of ego. Can’t relinquish some of its parts,” he wrote, dedicating the performance to “fearlessness, resistance, and the triumph of love and peace.”
His title for the show, “360 Degrees”, appropriates the language of VR technology, which he destroyed by recreating the same effect in real life behind a giant glass screen. The logistics – and cost – of this giant snow globe boggles my mind.
It was something like a thumb in the eye for the Metaverse, which was hurtling towards the latest cometary planet fashion. “It’s really important to be in real life, even though we enjoy technology and we’ll have no choice but to use it,” he explained in an interview the day before the show. “I also wanted to show how much more effort it takes to make this kind of thing in real life — and how beautiful it is.”
The title also refers to our overheating planet. The designer lives outside Zurich and described a “shock” when visiting familiar peaks at 3,500 meters and not getting snow. (He set the concept of fall after months of headlines about obscene water consumption to make snow for the recent Winter Olympics in Beijing.)
He views the show as a pre-pandemic “chapter two” of his previous IRL runway extravaganza, which had models splashing through water in a dark, flooded area as a metaphor for global warming. “Scenes like snow and such are going to be one of those things that would only exist in a digital world or in an artificial set like this. We’re missing the real thing.”
Before the lights went up, Demna’s voice could be heard reading a poem in Ukrainian by Oleksandr Ols, whose message, he said backstage, tells Ukraine “to be strong, to focus on love”. .
As models trampled through this simulated winter storm, tightening in the air and looking at what looked like garbage bags, a third and heartbreaking narrative added – with millions of Ukrainians now fleeing the war . It was very difficult to pay attention to the clothes.
In the backstage scrum, Demna explained that the model’s struggle against the elements—wind turbines cranked all the way up—intentionally, was an echo of the dark days in Georgia when he was “in a shelter like any other 10-year-old”. Ukrainian boys and girls are now with their parents, not knowing when the roof over their heads will fall. ,
Ultimately, clothing questions arose, and guest Kim Kardashian, like some of the models on the show, dressed in a catsuit made of logo packing tape. Demna called the tape, which she wound around faux fur, a way to break bourgeois code, and to offer something for sale that wasn’t too expensive that could be whipped into cloth. “It only took half an hour,” he said of Kardashian’s gummy dress.
The collection was strong and bowed not to any story, but to Demna’s apparel-centric approach to fashion. He points to a lengthy conversation with Yeh (who, preferring Demna, dropped his last name) about the button, which turns off as a lightbulb, causing puffers, bombers and jean jackets to head over. Pulled off, fasteners be damned.
His storage problems and obsession with travel lighting – and perhaps some remorse for his old multilayer parkas – led him to invent pre-wrinkled trenchcoats and double-breasted suits that could be folded up for easy packing. Is.
It’s amusing to think how many can fit in the latest dispatch of luxury leather goods—trash bags, which look exactly like you’re hitting the curb. “I can’t miss the chance to make the world’s most expensive garbage bag, because who doesn’t love a fashion scandal?” he said with a laugh.
Originally published at Pen 18
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