Balenciaga creative director Demna is responsible these days for dressing a breathtakingly large chunk of the celebrity triple A-list. You might have already seen who opened Sunday’s Summer 2023 Balenciaga runway show, held in a convention center space near Charles De Gaulle filled with heaps of fragrant, loamy mud, arranged by the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra: as the lights came up, there was Kanye “Ye” West, splashing his way down the runway in an enormous war-core security coat covered in tactical pockets. Ye is a Balenciaga muse whose devotion to the brand, much like his ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s, has created a phenomenally modern cycle around Demna’s work. Through Ye’s patronage of the house, we are exposed nearly daily to Demna’s challenging and thrilling ideas about how to dress right now. There appears to be some influence working back the other way, too. Ye’s runway jacket aligned neatly with his recent luxury-prepper aesthetic; the leather moto pants, meanwhile, called back to a golden era of Kanye style.
You could witness the full force of Demna’s cultural power in the rest of the front row: there was Offset, his face concealed behind a blacked-out Balenciaga Couture helmet. Daniel Kaluuya, wearing a clingy undershirt from Balenciaga's collection with Adidas. Khloe Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, whose arrival caused a minor, muddy stampede of photographers. Demna has assembled a celebrity cult with more social media firepower than any other brand, but he’s not in it for the engagement.
In his show notes, he decried the rinse-and-repeat nature of social media-driven fashion. “Individualism in fashion is downgraded to pseudotrends dictated by a post in stories of some celebrity of the moment,” he wrote. Demna is interested instead in expressing a mood about the world, and his A-list fans express it for him in their relentlessly-tracked daily lives: practically all of the glitzy guests, from Christine Quinn to Dev Hynes, wear Balenciaga of their own accord with remarkable consistency. Demna’s doesn’t express his vision via social posts by flash in the pan starlets: he speaks through some of the most famous people on the planet and their daily wardrobes.
And what he’s saying right now is this, more or less: it’s time to be real. “I cannot be very optimistic right now,” Demna said backstage after the show. That sense was, uh, hard to miss: models, their faces marked with bruise-y makeup, wore dirt-caked sweat sets, waded through the mud with (fake) babies in carriers and go bags in hand, their soaked ballet flats suggesting a sense of only semi-preparedness. (Several clutched meme-ifed leather bags of Lay’s Chips—an official partnership with PepsiCo, Balenciaga CEO Cedric Charbit confirmed backstage.)
Oversized suiting appeared in structural workwear fabrics paired with 3D printed clogs of cartoonish proportions, which forced the models not to walk but to trudge through the mud. “I think this show actually expresses that very much—the music, the set, it spoke about the moment in which we live,” Demna said.
The celebs showed up in fits that reflected the moment Demna conjured inside. Doja Cat’s eye makeup was black-and-blue. Quinn’s hoodie was smeared with mud, part of Demna’s argument that, if a garment can be made luxurious by the amount of construction that goes into it, the opposite must be true as well. Ye wore a tattered baseball cap, pulled low—the ultimate Hollywood accessory, fit for dystopia. See what the rest of the front row wore as they pulled up to the Balenciaga Summer 2023 show below.
