Balenciaga Fall 2024 Ready-to-Wear

Demna sent a voicemail before his show. The kicker in it was his line on the definition of luxury—luxury in the old-fashioned sense of things that are limited by scarcity. “What seems truly rare and finite right now is actually creativity itself,” he said. “I believe that creativity has secretly become a new form of luxury.”

In a preview at Balenciaga HQ, he was talking about examining his own body of work, reconnecting with what fashion means to him and how that relates to the work of Cristóbal Balenciaga, who famously shut himself off to create in a world without distractions. “It’s 10 years since I came out as a fashion designer,” said Demna, meaning the anniversary of the foundation of Vetements. Ironically, that’s meant becoming a lot more Cristóbal in order to rediscover how to be a lot more Demna. “In my personal life, I’ve started to kind of detox around me, I would say,” he observed. “You know, the way I perceive things, letting go of stress, just being happy, like learning how to love yourself and not having toxic people around me who just create obstacles for me and my vision.”

Ironically, that is, because Demna was about to plunge us into a scenario that was all about being mentally surrounded by a billion distractions. His Balenciaga tribe—gum-chewing, septum-ringed, eyes wrapped in futuristic silicone masks—marched headlong through a digital AI–aided visual cacophony playing on hundreds of wall and floor screens. Demna’s description: “It starts with landscapes of like, film, like, I don’t know—Iceland and prairies and all of that, the natural beauty and reality of the world we live in. And then it gets deconstructed and edited, live. Photoshopped into the fake reality, into basically the overload of content that is killing our society, in a way. You know, like TikTok videos.”

It was a Balenciaga immersive spectacular. We saw dawn break, supposedly naturalistically, over mountains, glaciers, and deserts, then forests, where trees started to be moved around by some invisible computer hand—or was it AI?—that was busily altering landscapes into implausible collages. We watched familiar footage of Paris and Tokyo streets morph into totally wrong geographies, then cute digital cats, bunny rabbits, dogs, and sheep rising up everywhere. Then the invasion of a wallpaper depicting a zillion cell-phone videos—dissolving into a “nightfall” scene grabbed from city Christmas light-bedecked trees. And, finally, a fade to multicolored digital static.

It says a lot for the human brain that there could be any attention spared for the clothes at all. Or rather, it says a lot for Demna’s human-made capacities that the collection stood out on its own strengths—his techniques, his displacements and repurposing of garments, the wardrobe he owns that runs the gamut from Academy Awards chic to streetwear.

The most fun Demna had with this was with the looks that came at the end—tailoring cinched around with tape; a cocktail dress made of a straggly boa, a bit of a bikini, and a slip; an evening dress entirely collaged from bras. “We have this one-minute-to-create-a-dress challenge in the studio, like Project Runway,” he said, laughing. “So we were throwing things on the body and then taking pictures together. It’s very playful.” Ultimately, he said, the question for him among this creative spontaneity is “what’s more important, perfection or imperfection? For me, it’s actually this coexistence of both, because that’s what makes us human now—the imperfection, the failure or the ‘miss.’ I love that idea. I think it’s beautiful. That’s what differentiates us from machines.”