Balenciaga Couture Fall 2021
In a couture salon on the Avenue George V, a couture show got underwayx with no music, allowing the guests to hear the rustle of fabrics — on low-slung track pants, on hand-loomed jeans dragging on the beige carpet and on parkas with a waterfall of volume trailing from the shoulders.
Demna Gvasalia had transported high fashion into the contemporary world, zhuzhing up garments familiar to a younger audience — and such cultural lightning rods as Kanye West, who arrived at the Balenciaga couture show wearing a bulbous black puffer from his Gap project, but who may wish to upgrade to one of Gvasalia’s elegant and imposing padded opera coats and stoles.
“How can we be sure it’s you?” luxury titan François-Henri Pinault, chairman and chief executive officer of Kering, said with a chuckle as he greeted West, whose face was obscured with a printed sack punched with a few holes for breathing. Lewis Hamilton, James Harden, Bella Hadid, Lil Baby and Salma Hayek were among the other bold-faced names in the room, meticulously restored to what it looked like in the late 1960s, when Cristóbal Balenciaga abruptly hung up his scissors.
One of the hottest tickets of Paris Couture Week, marking the return of Balenciaga to the couture arena after a 53-year absence, the show had an electric atmosphere and immediately established Gvasalia as a couture maverick — and a tailor and dressmaker as meticulous about silhouette as the late founder.
He opened the display with about a dozen dark suits and tuxedos modeled by men and women in high-heeled boots that pitched their frames forward, putting the focus on the broad, sculpted shoulders, the voluptuous trousers and the occasional nipped waist.
