For out-of-towners, Los Angeles has the quality of the surreal. The palm trees, canyons, and golden light, the Facetuned faces and super-toned bodies, the cult of Erewhon, the Hollywood sign. Demna, Balenciaga’s Georgian creative director, is not immune to its allure. After his pre-fall show in LA today, he called it “my favorite city in the world,” saying, “all my cultural evolution, when I was a teenager growing up in this kind of post-Soviet vacuum, it really came from here, through movies, music—I mean, everything that I kind of absorbed, that later on started to kind of become my fashion references.”
There was certainly something surreal about Balenciaga’s gothy black clad guests turning up en masse on a well manicured stretch of Windsor Boulevard in Hancock Park, with that famous Hollywood sign presiding in the distance. “It feels like we’re going to a funeral in sunny Transylvania,” a fellow editor cracked. Or like stepping into a Tim Burton movie shot in Technicolor.
This was the brand’s second destination show in the US. Last year, Demna chose the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to present Balenciaga’s “Garde-Robe,” collection of “upscale classic garments” with an emphasis on tailoring, one of his specialties. This collection skewed more SoCal, starting with the exercise clothes, gym bags, and souped-up sneakers of the first few looks. The circa Y2K velour jumpsuits and giant high-heeled shearling boots that came next will be familiar to readers of US Magazine, which would’ve been another way the young Demna got his celebrity content, unless it was the famous Steven Meisel Hollywood shoot in Vogue Italia that did it for him.
Back in those pre-social media days, the paparazzi lurked outside the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Circa 2023, it’s Erewhon smoothies that the stars are clutching. Timed to today’s event, Balenciaga collaborated with the LA grocer on a juice. Made in part with activated charcoal powder, it’s as black as the stretchy turtleneck and tight jeans worn in the show by Brigitte Nielsen, taking over the actress-moonlighting-as-model role from Isabelle Huppert. “I don’t know what’s in it,” Demna said. “I just wanted it to be black.”
Wellness culture is one of LA’s most successful exports. The show’s powerful soundtrack, made as usual by Demna’s partner BFRND, poked not so subtle fun at its presumptive hollowness. Demna rejected the idea that he approached the collection—or LA itself—with irony, but there’s something comically perverse about a paper grocery bag made in leather.
The sensational evening clothes—some perhaps headed to tomorrow night’s Academy Museum Gala down the road—were as Hollywood as the rest of the show, but it was easier to read earnestness in their elegance and drama. There was a respectful nod to Cristobal Balenciaga in the grand volumes of a white wedding gown whose funnel neck extended to just below the model’s eyes. Two other dresses conjured post-coital bed sheets tied at the bust, if bed sheets came in patent leather. These were pure Demna, and you could make a connection between them and the trash-bag bag he designed for fall 2022, the show that took place days after the start of the Ukraine war.
We were in one of LA’s prettiest enclaves today, but Demna’s not blind to the city’s extreme inequalities. Los Angeles is often called a shallow place, but this Los Angeles lover is deep.
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