This year, few trends have appeared as proclaimed as 1980s power dressing – and nobody wears it better than the S/S17 Balenciaga woman, who teamed her Dynasty suiting with Jonny Trunk fetishism. There was rubber and patent alongside angular Claude Montana tailoring: it was Working Girl by day and the glory era of Les Bains Douche by night. Creative director Demna Gvasalia’s impact on the industry has been remarkably visible this season – his subversion of luxury conventions and emphatic use of structural silhouettes alike – and here, couture techniques were applied to spandex instead of Cristobal’s beloved silk gazaar, while flasher macs came with sharply tailored shoulders. It was a modern vision of the storied house, steeped in Gvasalia’s remarkable ability to transform the lurid into the desirable, and a proud statement that his aesthetic confidence is certainly here to stay. We’ll raise our martini glasses to that.
