The house of Balenciaga was founded by Cristóbal Balenciaga in 1937. Barnum and its Walter Benjamin, possessing a simultaneous talent for leading the spectacle and subjecting it to critique. If fashion was entertainment, he was its P. Until now, Demna had been the industry’s greatest impresario. He concluded, “This is why fashion to me can no longer be seen as an entertainment, but rather as the art of making clothes.” “In the last couple of months, I needed to seek shelter for my love affair with fashion,” he wrote, explaining that he’d found solace in darts and notches, shoulder lines and armholes. On each seat sat a white card bearing a message from Demna, the brand’s artistic director. The Business of Fashion was calling it Balenciaga’s “make-or-break” moment the Times, “the single most fraught show of the season.” The brand was trying to recover from a pair of botched ad campaigns that, in December, had led to a wild farrago of accusations, including that it had sexualized children and condoned child abuse. It was eleven-thirty on a Sunday morning in March-the Mass hour, Balenciaga’s traditional slot on the Paris Fashion Week calendar-and editors, buyers, clients, and the odd quidnunc had gathered at the Carrousel du Louvre, a cavernous mall under the museum, to attend the presentation of the house’s Fall 2023 collection. Nervous coughs going around like the wave.
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