Demna Highlights Fashion's Consumption Compulsion for Balenciaga FW24
This season delivered Demna’s voice notes as show notes while curated eBay packages served as personal guest invites.
Balenciaga presented its Fall/Winter 2024 collection at Paris Fashion Week, the first showcase to follow its Los Angeles runway which featured its newly appointed (or, re-appointed) brand ambassadors Kim Kardashian and Nicole Kidman. This season, the showcase took on a somewhat existential approach, asking: “What even is fashion?”
In the accompanying show notes, which arrived in the form of a personal voice note from Demna, the designer explained, “As you know, I like to question things that matter to me through my work, and some of the questions I have been thinking about recently are: what is luxury? What is fashion and why does it even matter? Who do I do what I do for? Is fashion enough? In a world oversaturated by content, is anything ever enough? What is enough? The important part is not necessarily finding answers, but the process of questioning in itself.”
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The brand’s invite featured an eBay package, each one including a random vintage object selected by Demna. “The Winter 24 invitation is a random object found on eBay, the platform used by Demna to search for antique collectables. These inspire the imagination of personal stories, which gives the objects a new life,” the invitation explained. “Each invitation is a unique and personal found object selected by Demna, representing memorabilia from someone’s past and holding a sense of the familiar yet mysterious.”
Alongside the personal and existential exploration, FW24 aimed to represent a “link between the past and future” of the brand, tapping into the creative legacy of Cristobal and reinventing it for a new audience. Looking at how our bodies interact with garments, how we perceive beauty and what it means to have a sense of style, the collection redesigned signature Balenciaga silhouettes with a touch of playfulness. Leopard print gowns paraded down the runway alongside underwear dresses, shrunken hoodies and sellotaped blazers, amidst a digital screen backdrop of projections and landscapes.
Check out the standout looks from Balenciaga FW24 above and in case you missed it, here’s a look at Sam Smith for Vivienne Westwood.
