“I was 6 years old when my parents allowed me to have a pair of trousers made by a tailor near my home. I designed them, chose the fabric in a fabric shop and went to the tailor twice for fittings. This was the beginning of my love affair with clothes – what defined my relationship with them and made me want to become a designer.
Fashion has become entertainment, but often this aspect overshadows its true essence, which lies in the shapes and volumes, in the silhouettes, in the way we create relationships between body and fabric, the way we make shoulder lines and armhole. Clothes have the ability to change us and that’s what made me fall in love with fashion. For the last couple of months I’ve needed to seek shelter for my love affair with fashion and I’ve instinctively found it in the process of creating the clothes. It reminded me again of its incredible power to make me feel happy and truly express myself. That’s why for me fashion can no longer be seen as entertainment, but rather as the art of making clothes.”
These are the words of the letter signed by Demna, left on the seats of his new show for Balenciaga, with which the designer narrates the beginning of his love story with clothes, also reaffirming the value of fashion creation as an absolute and technical relationship between body and fabric.
These themes are then those that Demna brings back to the catwalk, in the Balenciaga fashion show for autumn winter 2023 which represents a real return to the origins for the creative director and for the brand itself, made up of tailored suits and evening dresses with experimental and architectural shapes.
Presented on March 5 during Paris Fashion Week, this collection is the first one to be reintroduced to the public since the 2022 campaign scandal. Although the designer had been working on this fashion show since before the crisis sparked by the controversy over the communications choices of the brand, the episode and the increasingly spectacular atmospheres of the latest fashion shows have definitely influenced Balenciaga’s need to detoxify and rediscover the essentiality and tailoring in its style.
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Thus, the Carousel du Louvre, the shopping center located between the Musée du Louvre and the Jardins de la Tuilleries, served as a location, transformed into a minimalist, clean set made up exclusively of a neutral and spacious canvas where, with extreme sobriety and intimacy, the looks of the autumn winter 2023-24 collection can be observed.
In this rediscovered pristine space, the absence of celebrities and ambassadors or anything else that could turn away the focus from the clothes immediately caught the eye. Demna’s choice to not come outside at the end of the show is also pretty eloquent.
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