Balenciaga Is Back After Ad Scandal: ‘Making Clothes Is My Armor’

PARIS– It was unclear in December 2022 if the creative director Demna would weather the storm of controversy whipping around Balenciaga. The French luxury brand was pilloried for being exploitative after its holiday campaign showed images of children with teddy bears in bondage-evoking straps. One photo showed a court document upholding a Supreme Court decision condemning child pornography. Outraged influencers destroyed Balenciaga gear; Kim Kardashian waffled in her support for the label; sales dipped. The brand, owned by luxury conglomerate Kering, said any association was unintentional and apologized repeatedly.

With this past week’s couture show in Paris, Demna (who goes by his first name) continued to dig himself out of the mess using the only tool he has: inventive and covetable design. 

In Balenciaga’s carpeted couture salons on the tony avenue George V, guests including rappers Cardi B and Offset, Academy Award winner Michelle Yeoh and Vogue’s Anna Wintour smiled, nodded and clapped as models including French actress Isabelle Huppert walked somberly to a soundtrack of Maria Callas singing a cappella. Yeoh even giggled at one of the more absurdist looks—a scarf sculpted to appear like it was blowing in the wind.

The show allowed the 42-year-old Georgian fashion designer to flex his couturier muscle. For this couture collection, his third for the house, that resulted in pieces that were occasionally jaw-dropping: a gravity-defying, bell-shaped red guipure lace dress; a gown with 10,000 crystals that took 900 hours to make; trompe l’oeil “jeans” that took months to paint.

Just over six months after the scandal rocked Balenciaga, Demna is clearly more committed than ever to his craft. And to him, the laborious practice of haute couture is an antidote to the “fake creativity and impostors” rampant in the fashion industry. 

The stakes for success are high. Also in the front row was Demna’s boss, Kering Chairman and Chief Executive François-Henri Pinault. Pinault has underlined Balenciaga’s importance to the group by wearing the brand to multiple recent high-profile events including the Met Ball and an event in Cannes in May. Through a representative, Pinault declined to comment. 

The show’s closing look was laden with symbolism: a suit-of-armor ball gown made of 3D-printed galvanized resin in polished chrome. “Making clothes is my armor,” said Demna backstage after the show. He has largely ditched the mask that obscured his face for public appearances earlier on in his career, including to the 2021 Met Ball where he accompanied Kim Kardashian, but the impulse to conceal and protect was still apparent in the black baseball cap and gloves he wore backstage. 

Although journalists had been instructed by Balenciaga’s communications team to limit interviews to the topic of the couture collection, Demna wasn’t shy about discussing the parallels between his work and his life. He said that the armored ball gown was a reference to Joan of Arc being burned at the stake for wearing men’s clothes. “I thought that if she had worn this kind of armor, she probably would have stayed alive,” he said. “I’ve suffered all my life because of the way I dress or what I try to show through my work,” he said, explaining that he finds refuge in his métier. 

“Couture to me is like Moderna,” said Demna, musing on its “antiviral” importance in the fashion world. “It cannot save it, but it can at least highlight the importance of keeping its immunity.” 

For Demna Gvasalia, fashion has been a guiding force since his childhood. He’s talked about the challenges of growing up gay in Georgia. In 1993 his family fled the country’s civil war, first to Tbilisi and eventually to Germany. In a striking parallel, the house of Balenciaga was first established in Paris when Spanish designer Cristóbal Balenciaga fled his country’s civil war in 1937. In March 2022, Demna was one of the first and only designers to address the war in Ukraine with a collection that mined his own past as a refugee. 

After studying at the prestigious fashion school the Royal Academy in Antwerp, and design stints at Maison Martin Margiela and Louis Vuitton, Demna founded the avant-garde brand Vetements in 2014. In 2015, he was named creative director at Balenciaga. During his tenure he showed his work in innovative ways—including a film with the Simpsons characters and a collection in the videogame Afterworld. He often collaborates with his husband, the musician Loïk Gomez, also known as BFRND. The couple lives together in Geneva.

Following a period of retribution, and a relatively quiet series of fall, pre-fall and resort collections earlier this year, couture seemed to indicate a return to normalcy. And judging by the number of celebrities, including Rihanna, who’ve worn the brand recently, the young fans congregating outside the show and the shoppers in the brand’s stores, Balenciaga is back.

Haute couture, fashion’s apex of craftsmanship with one-of-a-kind pieces that can cost well into six figures, is the most rarefied expression of the fashion industry. Shown in Paris in January and July, it attracts well-to-do clients who buy looks directly following the runway show, that are then made specifically for them in a series of fittings. Since Demna began making couture in 2021, he’s modernized the practice, making some pieces available for sale online directly after the show.

Kering doesn’t break out Balenciaga’s revenue in its earnings reports, but the “other houses” division of which it’s part is down 9% over the year-ago period in the first quarter of 2023. In a call with investors, Kering chief financial officer

“The controversy metabolized at the rate of any online scandal these days,” said fashion editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson at the show. 

For couture clients like Fredrik Robertsson, a Swede who runs a charity supporting LGBTQ causes and the hair-care company Björn Axén, the show was a success. Robertsson, who tries to buy a piece from every Balenciaga collection for his archives, has his eye on the fur-printed trompe l’oeil coat and the sculpted windswept pieces. 

Robertsson said he was over the controversy. “They have apologized, we have forgiven, we have moved on. I don’t agree with cancel culture.”

Write to Rory Satran at [email protected]