For Balenciaga, looking to the past is the only way to look to the future

«In the last couple of months, I needed to seek shelter for my love affair with fashion and I instinctively found it in the process of making clothes.» This is how Demna, in the statement that accompanied the Fall 2023 collection, presented Balenciaga's return to the scenes a few months after the scandal that had undermined not only the brand's commercial strength but also the certainties of the Georgian designer forced (either by himself or by Kering's top management) to return to the origins of the maison and his work. That tailoring would be at the center of the collection we have known for some time, first with the river interview given to Vogue by Demna himself and then with the invitation that winked at the art of tailoring with the paper pattern of a jacket. The jacket was indeed the star of the first part of the show, the one dedicated to tailoring made of deconstructed and reconstructed garments, the lives inverted with hems and doubled pants. With Eliza Douglas opening the ranks in an austere set shrouded in silence and toile, the feeling was that of witnessing a reset.

«Fashion has become a kind of entertainment,» said Demna in a strange statement somewhere between a general statement and an admission of guilt from those who that form of fashion understood as excess had brought it to its point of no return. Scandal or not, there was a need for a change, a return to basics without celebrities, without memes, and without provocations after a collection, Summer 23, made of far too many stylistic and scenographic coup de théâtre. Stripped, then, of its most provocative aura, Demna chose to traverse all the souls of Balenciaga, playing in the second part with many of the symbols that had decreed its success: the exaggeratedly pronounced shoulders return this time through inflatable inserts inserted in hoodies, biker jackets, and tracksuits, as do the pleated floral print dresses and trench coats that envelop models and models on the runway. In the finale, eveningwear echoes Cristòbal's couture and heritage with floor-length dresses studded with sequins and crystals, pearl bangs, and lace inserts. In a fashion that seems to be aiming more and more at simplification in favor of collections that aspire to immortality, Demna has therefore chosen to look back, choosing to take up and elevate some of the topos present in her best collections, as in the case of Spring 20202 and the subsequent Fall 2020.

To shout, however, at downsizing, at the "step back" of a designer in penance who chooses to creatively flog himself to atone for his sins is to have never gone beyond the most superficial layer of Gvasalia's work, merely judging his work from fifteen minutes of a show. We need only go back to Resort 2023 to see in the Garderobe collection a glimpse of what we saw yesterday. The difference, if we really have to find it, is that in that case the minimalist designs and the absence of logos in plain sight (believe it or not, someone complained about it) were lost within a larger machine, perhaps even too much so that it ended up engulfing Demna's work distorting our perception of it. Having overcome the months made up of TikTok videos of burning sneakers and cut bags, now for the Georgian designer and for Balenciaga itself the real stumbling block is redefining the identity of the brand whose soul seems split down the middle: on the one hand, the need to find a stylistic and creative calm that keeps media attention at bay, on the other the spasmodic need to find the love of those who, after yesterday, feel betrayed. If today Demna seems safe from the winds of dismissal that blew in the winter months (the designer himself said «I'm not going anywhere, it's not goodbye»), his future and that of the brand itself remain deeply tied to the redefinition of Balenciaga's DNA.