Demna Gvasalia show offers hovering cocktail dresses, square shoulders and comfort
Balenciaga stands for the weirdly elegant and the beautifully odd. Its founder, Cristóbal, gave fashion the puffball skirt and the sack-back coat. On Sunday morning at Paris fashion week its current designer, Demna Gvasalia, offered cocktail dresses suspended on boned straps so that they hovered in space around the body, and broke the design world’s last remaining taboo by cutting-and-pasting the storied Balenciaga name into Comic Sans font.
Gvasalia’s take on Balenciaga, where he has been in charge for three years, is like the new album you wish your favourite band would make. Not a lazy rehash, but not throwing the baby out with the bathwater either. Like Cristóbal Balenciaga, Gvasalia is obsessed with silhouette. He has pulled puppet-strings behind the trends for hoodies, for oversized coats, for leg-hugging sock boots.
The first looks on to theis catwalk had an hourglass shape to the waist. Not tight, though: like the house founder, Gvasalia is more interested in shadowing the shape of the body than cinching it. The shoulders that sat haughtily square and wide, as if hung from a spirit level. In fact, they were almost weightless, moulded using a new form of 3D printing developed by the ateliers.