Adding Up, Letting go. Demna’s Final Stand at Balenciaga.
A ghost-lit runway, couture chaos, and one final whisper from fashion’s master disruptor.
Balenciaga 54th Couture Collection
It was one of the most beautiful modern fairy tales ever written at Rue de Sèvres, albeit punctuated with poetic darkness and sartorial mega-zest. Demna Gvasalia, fashion’s foremost cultural insurgent, cultivated one of the most innovative interplays between an old school fashion house and the global zeitgeist. Graphic and ghoulish with gigawatts of gusto, Demna delivered a decade’s worth of masterful tailoring, manic influences and post-modern chaos that synthesized street with luxury.
Dolly Parton joined models on the runway .
Naomi Campbell one of Demna’s muses
Hijacking the fashion system wholesale and always exerting a seditious punch, Demna spawned uber-refined alternatives and an irrevocably original aesthetic. In a moment that felt both inevitable and surreal, fashion’s baddest boy presented his final collection for Balenciaga in Paris this week — a stark, cinematic farewell shrouded in silence and smoke. No press release, no parting bow. Just a show that read like a goodbye letter written in black eyeliner and wet cement.
Naomi Watts walked the show.
The runway — super-moody, minimal, and dimly lit — was a theater of ghosts. Naomi Campbell waltzed through wearing razor-sharp tailoring like an orphic fashion revenant. Kim Kardashian, masked and gloved in liquid latex, looked less like a guest and more like a specter of the Balenciaga machine. Playwrights, punks, and cool kids festooned the front row, including Michelle Lamy, Offset, and Salma Hayek — many in tears, some draped in full Demna garb as a final tribute, all knowing this was the end of a transformational era.
Nicole Kidman
Salma Hayek
Lauren Sánchez
The styles and silhouettes were classic Demna: oversized trenches, sculptural shoulders, twisted proportions that mocked and exalted couture (and culture) all at once. A final parade of alien beauty and unapologetic irony. Impossibly cool as usual, it was the sum of gravity, glam, and chance — visually hypnotic and filled with primordial interstices. Demna conjured a thousand imported strains of cosmopolitan Pop all rolled into one. Seasoned with hypnotic street influences, mutant futurism, Francis Bacon, goth Minimalism, and punk everything, the Georgian legend merged exhibition with exhibitionism in one final manifestation.
Farewell: François-Henri Pinault and Demna Gvasalia
There was no speech, but the message was clear: fashion is art, and art doesn’t beg for applause. Demna didn’t exit with noise — he left with myth, leaving an indelible mark on the industry. Critically, he gave us pop and cultural aggression, exploitation, glee, stealth, the attempt to flip hierarchy. Bang. And whimper.
