BALENCIAGA: Stoic Elegance for Fall 2022 at the Paris Fashion Week Runway

Balenciaga delivered a stoic elegance for Fall 2022 at the Paris Fashion Week runway and here are some highlights!

Raw resolve was in Demna’s voice as he spoke on the phone about why he’d decided to go ahead with the Balenciaga show. The horrors being inflicted on civilians in Ukraine are re-traumatizing for a man who was a child refugee at the age of 10, fleeing war in Abkhazia, Georgia in 1993. He understands only too accurately, from experience, what the world is seeing as women struggle to take their children to safety in the harshest conditions. “It’s the same,” he said. “The same aggressor, maybe even the same planes that did it to us. Who knows? And seeing this, I was thinking for a while, ‘What are we doing here, with fashion? Should I cancel?’ But no: I decided we must resist.” – Vogue

Set in a glass rotunda as a simulation of a giant snow-globe, the production had been planned as one of Demna’s meta-immersive confrontations with climate change, projected into a time not very far ahead when snow will not exist, and become a wonder only ‘experienced’ through virtual reality. “I went to the mountains last Christmas, and there was no snow,” he said.

But the staging: models struggling forward, bent against driving snow and wind, some carrying heavy tote bags, took on a whole other significance in the agonizing context of current reality. Backstage, Demna was clear that the apocalyptic scenario had synced in with the feeling of helpless exposure to the elements he’d gone through during his escape, trekking on foot up a Georgian mountain as a child. The section where young men were wrapped only in towels and underwear, in particular. – Vogue