Balenciaga's cinema-verité for the new SS24 collection

To present its latest SS24 collection, Balenciaga decided to create a video vaguely reminiscent of the "sidewalk scene" from Truffaut's The 400 Blows. If in the historic film the camera followed the characters from above, wandering over them like a glimpse from the rooftops of the city, here, too, several passersby of all ages and social groups stroll in and out of the frame - obviously completely covered in the brand's clothes. The intent of the collection is, to quote the brand itself, «applying the house’s codes into the patterns of the quotidian» which is why we see the garments from the Garde-Robe collection playing a leading role along with the regular ready-to-wear collection-but it is especially in the vein of this cinema-verité that we see the different characters in the video walking the dog, hailing a cab, collecting coins, sheltering from the rain, skateboarding, or riding a moped.

Unlike the video, the lookbook that accompanies the collection is shot inside several Paris apartments, again in the frame of a window overlooking one of the city's Haussmannian palaces, the Place Vendôme and the Arc de Triomphe - all über-signifiers of a strong connection to the city of Paris. The collection's Parisian bent is also present on a musical level, as the soundtrack signed by Demna's husband BFRND is a remix of Edith Piaf's Sous le Ciel de Paris. One senses here a desire to emphasize a kind of symbolic continuity between the brand's past, its present and its city, its intrinsic "Frenchness" and its place of honor in the pantheon of French fashion's rande myth. With the video, Demna intends to slowly chart a new path for the brand that does not constitute a deviation from the past (one can serenely say that this video-presentation belongs to the same universe as the stupendous Rooms campaign of a few years ago) but tries to proceed into the future with a more conscious and cautious - but no less sure - step.