Perspective | Has Balenciaga lost its luster? (2024)

Los Angeles is certainly ripe for creative interpretation — it’s the city of Rick Owens and Chrome Hearts, after all — but the observations of the brand’s designer, Demna, lacked their usual vibration, suggesting the world may be losing patience for Ugg-like boots and sweatsuits on the runway, even if they’re followed by fantastic gowns. The show’s staleness raises questions of where Demna, who enters his ninth year as creative director, might go from here. Have athleisure and streetwear lost their luster? Has, in fact, Balenciaga?

A little over a year ago, no designer was as big as Demna. His sneakers and sweatshirts, as well as hourglass coats and outlandish gowns, were cool in a way that seems impossible in our overly direct internet age: ubiquitous yet enigmatic.

Every celebrity in the world, whether it’s Marge of “The Simpsons” or Ye, formerly Kanye West, wanted to wear his clothes. He could put a famous person in an outfit — Kardashian in a black void of a dress, or Elliot Page in a suit and Crocs — and make you understand notoriety and the transformative magic of clothing in a new way. And his fashion shows were triumphant, bursting the bubble of industry navel-gazing to say something about the world we live in: a snowstorm in a globe in March 2022 at the outset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a red carpet that functioned as the show in the fall of 2021, underscoring fashion’s engulfment into entertainment years before other designers started bemoaning the world’s emphasis on celebrity.

Since then, the brand has struggled to regain its footing. Even as editors and celebrities admitted privately that the reaction to Balenciaga’s missteps was overzealous, the brand’s ability to persuade us that Ikea bags, dad sneakers and graphic hoodies could be covetable luxury goods was waning. Demna underscored the importance of tailoring and design skill in subsequent collections, and the brand has engaged with celebrity in a more traditional way, with Isabelle Huppert and Michelle Yeoh among the first of its brand ambassadors. Kidman, who walked in the house’s well-received 2022 couture show, was also named an ambassador this past weekend.

Still, the third-quarter report for Kering, the conglomerate that owns Balenciaga, said that sales of “Other Luxury,” which includes Balenciaga, were down 15 percent.

And online, where the brand has always been viewed with a sneering skepticism that Demna was a cynic pulling the wool over shoppers’ eyes, the criticism has only sharpened.

“Someone could just completely change the way that we dress, and the vehicle that they have created can surpass them if they don’t continue innovating themselves,” said Alexandra Hildreth, a fashion commentator who discusses runway shows and trends on TikTok (@guyfieri.superfan). “I don’t know if he’s making an effective enough statement for it to be interpreted as seriousness, as opposed to irony.”

On Saturday, the L.A. in-jokes didn’t arrive with a light touch. Several models had prosthetic lips that appeared freshly, zealously filled with Juvederm. Models as well as Kardashian carried leather trompe l’oeil shopping bags made in collaboration with Erewhon. The opening clothes were primarily athleisure: gym shorts and zip-up hoodies and leggings and Juicy Couture-esque sweatsuits, with models clutching phones to their ears or coffees in their hands.

Toward the end of the show were formal looks — strapless knotted gowns and a bow-front coat and Cardi B in an electric-blue fur — that recalled Demna’s couture collections, which he shows once annually in Paris in the summer. That was a sparkle of something profound, making you ask: “Can this be beautiful?” “Is this chic?” Which is what a good runway show does: dares you.

Former “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” cast member and fashion show regular Lisa Rinna, who has lived in L.A. for 32 years, called the show “ultra-iconic,” saying that “they captured L.A. They captured the ridiculousness. What we do, who we are, it’s everything.”

The collection was widely interpreted online and by those in the audience as a satire of L.A. life, though Demna insisted backstage that it was no joke: “Too often people perceive my work as somehow ironic. Actually, it’s the opposite. I was showing my love to the influence that, actually, I got from this city.” He said that L.A., with its approach to casual style combined with high-wattage personalities, was the city that has affected him the most as a designer.

It’s hard to see his clothes as a love letter, though. Demna’s design language is bulbous and voluminous; he makes gowns and jackets in ridiculous scale, which often works to make his ideas feel omnipotent and inscrutable, but essentially delightful. Yet in streetwear — sneakers, sweats — exaggeration tends to read as satire. The largeness negates the ease, making you look like a fashionable fool. That worked with his Triple S sneakers, but the amplification of the shoes here looks like gratuitous desperation. Glamorizing can do the same thing: Look at the models wearing gowns, clutching coffee cups. It deflates the fantasy of Hollywood, replacing it with something too slight for a runway as provocative as Demna’s.

But it wasn’t just that Demna got his products in the right place at the right time. His earlier collections captured, then poked and prodded at, the global atmosphere — at our paranoia about power and where it was coming from and who had it. His shows were filled with archetypes so specific that you hardly realized they were types until Demna showed us: There’s the woman who wouldn’t give you the time of day at Art Basel, or here’s a security officer at a big office building who looks dowdy in her baggy suit but could take you out in a second. What was fascinating about this was its humor, yes — “Oh my God, I’ve totally seen that person!” — but its ambiguity, which few fashion designers in this era of creative safety are willing to embrace. Was he celebrating these figures? Glamorizing them? Showing us, through the singular theater of fashion, how we’ve completely underestimated the hold that faceless bureaucrats of culture and government have on us?

Much of the criticism of Demna is misplaced: We all wear sweatpants, so isn’t it a designer’s job to make them interesting, a point of invention and commentary? And shouldn’t we stand by our most inventive designers in this time of global creative stasis?

And why are young people so worried about whether a designer is “scamming” wealthy clients, anyway? Wouldn’t that be an ultimate form of sartorial class warfare?!

Smartly, Kering is standing by him; Kering CEO François-Henri Pinault rushed backstage with his wife, Salma Hayek Pinault, to congratulate him.

But those critiques about the tiredness of his aesthetic are beginning to cut close to the bone.

Demna has already done two things that set the agenda for 21st-century fashion: From 2015 through the beginning of the pandemic, he anointed the stuff we were already wearing, sweatpants and sneakers, as a global uniform, showing us that we were more connected to each other than we thought, through the soft Esperanto of terry cloth. And with his couture, which will show its fourth season this summer, he changed the definition of beauty. You can trace the current backlash against algorithmic aesthetics and taste back to his first show, in July 2021.

Now, the time has come for him to set a new agenda.

Lindsey Underwood in Los Angeles contributed to this report.