“A tribute to fashion that has a point of view” is how Demna described the Spring/Summer 2025 Balenciaga show, which represented a ferocious process of play with clothes to find newness in their forms
Demna began his journey in fashion, like many, toying with ideas of clothes on a kitchen tabletop. In his case, it was his grandmother’s. But said table probably didn’t look quite how he reinvented it for the Spring/Summer 2025 Balenciaga show, namely several hundred feet long and seating figures including Lindsay Lohan, Kyle MacLachlan and a impersonator in prosthetics to approximate Jack Nicholson, who weirdly is probably the most Demna-Balenciaga of that entire bunch. Not least because this collection opened with looks that approximated lingerie but actually covered the entire body, pretty much, head-to-toe. Because nothing is ever quite what it seems here – sincerity is constantly questioned, appearances deceiving.
“A tribute to fashion that has a point of view” was Demna’s stated intention, and the collection as a whole was about hardcore fashion, transforming even seemingly mundane outfits into intense, intricate statements. The backs of prissy-seeming tea-dresses and denim jean-jacket combos were spliced open and loosely laced, leaving slithers of flesh exposed, while everyday jeans and bomber jackets were transformed through cut, the former slung so low they barely clutched onto the crotch, the latter given the majestic silhouette of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s mid-century cocoon coats.
Indeed, the tribute seemed to swing from the contemporary to the historical – jeans were reconstituted into collars inspired by the Medici, while other funnel-necked collars were bustiers that allowed jackets to be inverted and worn as dresses. And, of course, all that lingerie had a distinct aesthetic – although, in smothering the whole body with fabric (including fleshy gloves) it was arguably stripped of sex, and certainly of notions of undress other than the superficial. In a chilly Paris, they suddenly seemed highly practical.
Not that that was a consideration of this collection, as a whole. The message was an enjoyment of fashion as an art form, a pushing of technical boundaries, a means to transform. If Demna was reminiscing about how he bags in fashion, this show was, it seemed, about bringing back some of that wonder and innocent joy. It was certainly Demna in experimental mode, pushing technical boundaries further than perhaps ever before. The everyday was rendered extraordinary with those cuts and silhouettes, and even coats were wrapped around the body to create bustle-backed evening dresses, in a ferocious process of play with clothes to find newness in their forms.
Demna often sees his work as creating a wardrobe – he founded a label called Vetements, after all, and has imbued everyday items with a frisson of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s hauteur and perfection of cut. But this was Demna pushing the envelope, and proposing new clothes that would excite, even alarm. It remains to be seen if people will be dressed in lingerie body-stockings come next season – then again, a decade ago when he started at Balenciaga, many sneered at the streamlined, two-in-one heigh-heeled ‘pantaboots’ that have since become bestsellers for the house, and a design go-to for labels at every level. So stranger things may happen, when Demna is pushing fashion bravely forwards.