Balenciaga Spring 2025 Collection
“The time has come for fashion to have a point of view.” That was Demna’s frank message today backstage at Balenciaga.
The show we witnessed took place in a dark room with a sleek dining table flanked by editors-in-chief, celebrities from Nicole Kidman to Katy Perry, and executives from Balenciaga and Kering. When Demna was a boy in Georgia, the table at his grandmother’s house was where he discovered his interest in clothes. “My earliest memories of fashion begin with drawing looks on cardboard, cutting them out, and creating ‘fashion shows,'” he wrote in a memo distributed to the press.
Demna may have been trying to reconnect with her inner child, but there was nothing malicious about this collection. A significant portion was dedicated to one of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s icons, the cocoon silhouette. Doing this shape too literally would feel too retro, so Demna applied it to an under-25 set of cropped puffers and bombers, paired with jeans that barely cling to her protruding hip bones. Two later works followed Cristóbal’s striking sculptural lines, but pushed his experimentation even further. Cleverly made to be versatile, the men’s featured what Demna called a “17th-century Medici collar” and was actually a corset “built into the neckline.” Women also starred the same jacket, but only wore it as a leather bustier top. And yes, looks 49 and 50 featured starched, stiff jeans instead of folded lapels.
Wearing an evening dress made entirely of bras presented in the fall, Demna created a collection that appeared disjointed. “I like chaos,” he said. “I think the world of fashion tries to be perfect and sophisticated and impeccable in everything…but to me that’s not what fashion is. Fashion needs to be messed up. It’s messed up. It shouldn’t be based on fear.” That was the clearest statement we’ve heard from the industry all season.
During the talk, Demna opened the show with lingerie, a trend category for Spring 2025 (a fellow runway watcher opined after the show, “This is the season to wear no clothes”), but he This is an area that has not received much research so far. “My aesthetic is not based on that kind of very direct sexual appeal, or that kind of fragility,” he said. And, of course, he turned this proposition on its head by layering and embroidering bras, teddies, and garters on flesh-colored body stockings. “It’s a trompe l’oeil,” he said. You can see that the idea is taking hold.
On a parallel track, he and his team devised a clever hinge mechanism that allowed the top to barely click around the ribcage, exposing the entire back. Talking about the innovation backstage, Demna sounded truly childlike and enthusiastic.
https://www.balenciaga.com/en-ie/summer-25
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Source: Pynck – pynck.com
