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How Balenciaga Introduced Streetwear Codes to the World of Luxury

Exploring Demna Gvasalia’s singular impact on global style.

WRITER: CHRIS DANFORTH
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The story of Spanish fashion house Balenciaga begins in 1919, as the namesake of dressmaker Cristóbal Balenciaga Eizaguirre. Balenciaga established his eponymous label by opening a boutique in San Sebastián, followed by doors in Barcelona and Madrid. The Spanish Civil War forced Balenciaga to relocate to Paris, where his designs were celebrated even more so than in his home of Spain. His dressmaking skills and his ability to create patterns set him apart from other designers of the era, causing his contemporary Christian Dior to once famously refer to him as "the master of us all.”

Since 2001, Balenciaga has been operated by Kering, joining Gucci, Bottega Veneta and others under the conglomerate’s umbrella. Attempting to reinvigorate the Balenciaga brand for the 21st century, Kering explored a rotating cast of high-profile designers, including Nicolas Ghesquière, and briefly Alexander Wang, before naming Georgia-born Demna Gvasalia creative director in 2015.

Today Gvasalia weaves his attitudes and aesthetics into the tapestry of Balenciaga season after season from the house’s headquarters in Paris. Gvasalia, a graduate of esteemed fashion school the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, cut his teeth with Walter van Beirendonck, before joining Maison Margiela, where he worked on women’s collections until 2013. Gvasalia then spent time at Louis Vuitton before teaming up with his brother Guram to launch Vetements.

In 2015, Gvasalia joined Kanye West’s roster of Yeezy Season 1 designers, helping West fulfill his creative vision alongside Virgil Abloh, Matthew Williams, Heron Preston and Jerry Lorenzo. Gvasalia arrived at Balenciaga shortly after, joining the house as one of the most talked-about free agents in fashion. While his vision for Vetements was personal and intuitive, Balenciaga represented a new challenge: The need to balance the fashion house’s heritage and history, while implementing changes that would bring Balenciaga up to modern standards. 

Fast forward to the notes for Balenciaga's Fall 2016 show, the first helmed by Gvasalia: "A reimagining of the work of Cristobal Balenciaga—a wardrobe of absolute contemporaneity and realism imbued with the attitude of haute couture. A translation, not a reiteration. A new chapter." Gvasalia’s first womenswear collection played with the posture and the shapes that defined the creations of Cristóbal Balenciaga, manifested via cocoon-shaped outerwear, padded suits, hourglass-shaped dresses and classically feminine silhouettes that took the form of pointedly modern items like puffer jackets and blazers.

At the same time, Gvasalia’s Balenciaga borrowed heavily from the ethos and styles of streetwear. Logo-heavy staples like baseball caps, hoodies and T-shirts comprised an important part of each collection, while logo flips—a foundational element of streetwear that Demna perfected at Vetements—took aim at Gap, Mastercard, IBM and Intel. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign logo later became the inspiration for a substantial range of Balenciaga products, blurring the lines between political statement, mass-market merchandising and high-fashion.

Simply put, Gvasalia’s most effective realization was a special kind of irreverence, the kind pioneered by first-wave streetwear names such as FUCT, Freshjive and Supreme. Gvasalia took these ideas to their natural conclusion within the context of luxury, introducing controversial designs like IKEA-inspired handbags, inflatable jackets that resemble life preservers and a seven-layer parka that recalled a look featured on Friends’ Joey Tribbiani. The resulting media fervor and social media domination proved Gvasalia’s genius lay not just in his ability to apply streetwear sensibilities to luxury, but in his ability to weave complex narratives through clothing, turning everyday styles into wearable meme-art hybrids. 

At the same time, Balenciaga’s footwear program fortified the brand’s impact in the sneaker world, a space usually reserved for sportswear giants and their streetwear co-conspirators. First shown in Paris in January 2017, the Triple S announced itself as a kind of cultural monolith, equipped with exaggerated proportions and bold colorways. The sneaker was soon everywhere, appearing in street style sets alongside modern classics like the Off-White x Air Jordan 1 and the Yeezy Boost 350 V2.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Balenciaga had the Speed Trainer, a sleek, form-fitting silhouette consisting of a knitted upper fastened to an athletic sole. Landing somewhere in between the two silhouettes was the Track Sneaker, a technical silhouette inspired by ’90s running shoes. Today each of these silhouettes is produced in a handful of unique iterations, including mule and sandal versions, demonstrating the brand’s confidence in further subverting its already subversive ways.

But Gvasalia’s interpretation of what streetwear does best didn’t stop there. The designer turned Balenciaga into a collaborative powerhouse, working with everyone from Crocs and Gucci to Sony and Marvel, applying his irreverent sensibilities to some of the world’s most recognized products, logos and franchises. 

August 2021 saw Gvasalia make headlines yet again, collaborating with Kanye West on the presentation of Donda in Atlanta. Serving as the event’s creative director, Gvasalia outfitted West and Kim Kardashian in masked, head-to-toe body suits, before teaming up with West to produce album tie-in merch “engineered by Balenciaga.” Further adding to Gvasalia’s exhaustive list of groundbreaking cultural crossovers, the designer led Balenciaga through an immersive Fortnite collaboration in September 2021, followed by a special short film with The Simpsons in October, made to debut the house’s SS22 collection.

While spanning countless creative disciplines, what each of these designs, collaborations and initiatives have in common is their ability to speak to a singular purpose: Gvasalia’s distillation of culture into something tangible, something that resonates with people. And like all great streetwear, Gvasalia’s Balenciaga makes us wonder if we are in on the joke or if, in-fact, we are the joke.

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