Backstage @ Balenciaga Winter 22

It’s been a week since the showⁱ but the prescienceⁱⁱ and poignancy still reverberates.

Like a pebble falling into a pond of formerly calm complacency.

Through Demna’s eyes, we bore witness to the refugee. The stoicism. The brutality. The pragmatism. The essentiality. The tragedy. And the storm.

Layered atop that: The voyeurism. The sick delight. The connection. And the distance.

The projected, self-directed, would-be schadenfreude collapsed in a single up-side-down moment of “that was my family…ⁱⁱⁱ that is my family…”.^iv

Contra the image of expanding empire, replaced by the image of a thick-headed thug. Contra the image of decaying West into the image of a promised land with luxuries beyond our wildest dreams, including that of critique and expression.^v

Starting in typically tardy French fashion, attendees at the Balenciaga Winter 22 Collection: 360° Show^vi were greeted with oversized Ukrainian flag t-shirts and typed notes from the designer on their seats.^vii As the lights dimmed, a mature man’s deep Slavic voice filled broke the hushed silence of the crowd, piercing the dark stage. The man had to be speaking in Ukranianian but god help but a handful of those of us in the crowd to understand it, much less place the reference that was a poem by Oleksandr Oles. One line that I was able to find a translation for works out to “Live Ukraine, live for beauty…like the wind in a wide field.”

Then classical music^viii began playing through the speakers while a stream of sombre but surprisingly unsullen models trickled out from the entrance onto the rounded runway. Crossing my field of view about a quarter of the way around, the models walked along a narrow snow-covered carpet, through the wind storm, before exiting the stage about three-quarters of the way around the circle. With a diameter of at least 50 metres, the stage set flashed bolts of lightning across its canopied ceiling, reminding us that we used to fear the sky more explicitly.

The compassion, empathy, pain, and loneliness echoed throughout the 16-minute performance. But it was Look 21,^ix the brave sunflower dress – a symbol of Ukrainian peace and resistance – that was the first look to give me goosebumps. Breaking the initial stream of darkness was this delicate touch of optimism. Almost baseless but a million miles from unnecessary. Of course, in perfectly dramatic fashion, the moment of sweetness wouldn’t be held much longer. Within a few moments of the hopeful sunflowers, the soft classical music suddenly flipped to hardcore electronic music (@6:47m in the YT video). Increasingly deep concussive bass boomed into our chests on the other side of the glass. Bass like the concussions of bomb shells. Like the concussions of music loud enough to forget the bomb shells. Something loud enough to bury the memories. As if only with new pain could the old pain be suppressed and subdued. However momentarily.

This dramatic crescendo grew and steadily grew, featuring a fascinating collection of ready-at-hand accessories, most notably unbranded garbage bags. How Derelicte, how Margiela!^x All of which culminated in the final pairing of Looks 68 and 69, with colours of the Ukrainian flag being pushed and pulled through the snow storm by Demna’s stalwart model Hansi Schmidt in all-yellow streetwear and his ne plus ultra muse Eliza Douglas in her all-blue gown. Closing the show out, the 38-year-old anything-but-typical Eliza – a towering, often androgynous and massively malleable American artiste – fearlessly fought her way against the elements with what must’ve been a 20-foot train in tow. A train nearly endless in its movement. Like the endless, resilient movement of 2+ million Ukrainian refugees today.^xi

La fin du spectacle. We went backstage. A chilly 7°C outside the Parc des Expositions Paris le Bourget, it wasn’t much warmer inside the seating area. Ironically, after the show, when we had a chance to walk onto the artificially-snow-covered stage, it actually felt even warmer than it did on the other side of the glass. Maybe trauma isn’t as terrible as it always looks? At least long-term.^xii The “snow” tasted salty.

Demna Gvasalia^xiii – creative Director of the Paris-based, Spanish-founded house; seen above with pierced ears and wearing black baseball cap – isn’t yet a household name. But he’s getting there. In a post-Virgil world, there’s a distinct designer vacuum^xiv at the top of the fashion industry. While Demna is no equal to the late Virgil’s openness, positivity, and playfulness, the Georgian is every bit the Chicagoan’s equal as a visionary, storyteller, and world-builder. I’m no gmoney, so I had to beg, borrow, and steal my way into this show in Paris, but I’m sure glad I did.

What a performance. What a spectacle. What a moment.
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1. My first in-person fashion show! ↩
2. Prescience in this case was a twisted rhyming of history. But seriously, 90% of this show had to have been developed before the vol squeeze in Ukraine started in late February. So while the colours of the final outfits and the t-shirts on the chairs were well within the realm of last-minute adjustability, the crystal clear concept practically came from a crystal ball. It was eerie. Nostradamus shit. ↩
3. My father’s family left Ukraine 120 years ago in what I can only image were similar circumstances. My mother’s family left Romania 60 years ago this year in what were very much similar circumstances. ↩
4. None of us on this planet is more than 50th cousins, after all. ↩
5. With a sense hyper-recent nostalgia, invitations to the show were cracked-screen iPhone 6’s with laser-engraved names on the backs. How innocent 2014 now seems, and yet how ironically prescient is it that 2014 was Putin’s LAST expansionist campaign, that into Crimea. Coincidence? And this would set the tone for Demna’s Paradise Lost, set in-the-round at a sparsely but expensively occupied expo hall on the north edge of town. Just to take one example of the investment* made, the custom rounded single-glazed partitions used between the runway and the seating area don’t just fall off the shelf at Home Depot. They take many months of design and precision manufacturing to execute, quite possibly by Saint-Gobain.
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   *Your $1,000 Balencie sneakers are certainly keeping Kering and Pinault in the black, but they’re also financing some of the top artists in the world to create unparalleled performance art. ↩
6. What does 360° refer to? Perhaps the seating-in-the-round, the three-dimensionality of namesake Cristobal Balenciaga’s game-changing couture from the 1930’s, or perhaps even the totality of war as witnessed today and experienced by Demna first-hand 30 years ago when he escaped his native Georgia as a 12-year-old. It also seems to suggest a warmer world, one free of natural snow fall — 360°F is toasty enough to cook turkey. ↩

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8. David Kadouch – Slavonic Dances in E Minor, to be precise. ↩

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10. The Margiela reference isn’t without basis. Demna lead women’s ready-to-wear at Martin’s eponymous house from 2009-2013. ↩
11. Not to to mention the millions of economic and intellectual casualties on the Russian side. Indeed, war takes its toll on both sides. The costs are immense and incredible for all. ↩
12. Archived. ↩
13. aka just Demna. ↩
14. Virgil was 75% of my interest in fashion, Demna was maybe 10% a few months ago. But now Demna is probably 30-40%. ↩