Au Revoir, Demna!
Demna’s final offering at the altar of Parisian couture reads like an executive summary of his decade-long devotion to Cristóbal Balenciaga.
Demna’s last dance at Balenciaga caps off a staggering decade spent in pursuit of “impossible perfection.” Look 2 features one of the show’s highlights: the tulip lapel, shown here on a black scuba wool overcoat structured to create a dramatic silhouette without negating attention from the wearer. Image sourced via Dazed Magazine courtesy of Marios Mystidis © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
In any fashion show, the opening look sets the tone. For Demna’s final display at the centenarian couture house, it was an all-white ensemble: a square-shouldered tunic, its sleeves cut two inches above the wrist in a nod to the founder’s precision, layered over a floor-length skirt. White gloves completed the look. No jewellery. No irony. It wasn’t the show’s most compelling moment, but it was the most devout, evoking the sincerity of a designer paying homage like a Catholic whispering a prayer to the Virgin.
If you’ve somehow missed the last decade of a Demnified Balenciaga, this final collection isn’t a bad place to start. It reads like an executive summary of his approach: a bottom-up design ethos that uses streetwear as a tool to disrupt the rarefied traditions of couture — and, by extension, the essence of luxury itself.
Demna’s streetwear codes appeared early: an oversized bomber jacket, re-engineered in ultra-light technical silk for maximum comfort, followed by another familiar Demnaism — the full-leather moto aesthetic. These cultural nods to his younger, faux-fringe following were punctuated by pieces that felt truly worthy of Cristóbal’s Avenue George V salon; chief among them: a series of “tulip lapel” looks that curled inward with a vampiric elegance, framing the face like petals. They seemed to echo the founder’s 1965 “tulip dress,” inspired by the same flower, but arriving at a different silhouette. Still, the core idea remained: sculptural volume that stands apart from the body, yet draws the eye back to it.
An ode to Old Hollywood arrived via longtime muse Kim Kardashian, who channelled Elizabeth Taylor in an ivory silk slip, flanked by two columns of embroidered feathers from a champagne “mink” coat sliding off her shoulders in a calculated state of undress. The theme — one Demna has touched on before — continued with a series of evening gowns, including a black sequined Marilyn Monroe number and a baby-pink “debutante” dress with twisted satin bustier that screamed junior prom.
No Demna show is complete without a dose of subversion. This time, it comes in the form of an unstructured Neapolitan-style suit tailored to the proportions of a bodybuilder, then painfully reproduced a further eight times across a variety of body types. It’s a convoluted riff on the old saying that the body defines the garment, not the other way around — a philosophy that flies in the face of couture’s very essence, which literally uses precise measurements of the body to shape each piece.
For many, Demna’s legacy at Balenciaga boils down to one word: modernisation. Look 16 reimagines a streetwear staple — the bomber jacket — in technical silk twill, preserving its bulky silhouette while maximising comfort. Look 34 offers a subtler evolution: a draped bustier in ultra-light Japanese “super organza,” constructed with a single seam. It’s a refined update to one of Cristóbal’s core signatures, designed, in Demna’s words, “to make couture relevant in the context of real life.” Images sourced via Balenciaga Couture © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
Balenciaga’s 54th couture collection was, rightly, an ode to Demna — not Cristóbal. The founder famously refused to sew his name onto anything but made-to-measure garments, staunchly rejecting ready-to-wear and shuttering the house’s doors to it. Ironically, the brand later hired “the first truly internet-literate designer” to remake the house in his own image, aiming to captivate a new generation of luxury consumers that had the cash to splash. The result? A logomaniac, collab-driven streetwear ethos quietly seeping through the timeworn cracks of the maison’s once-impermeable walls after fifty years of commercial estrangement.
The Georgian designer has admitted he “needed to integrate a lot of Demna codes into this house for it to become the business that it is” — a frank acceptance that sometimes innovation requires desecration. This approach transformed Balenciaga from obscure relic of the past into global commercial juggernaut of the present, fuelled by tongue-in-cheek critiques of overconsumption and celebrity culture. These sharp cultural commentaries captured the minds — and, most crucially, the wallets — of Gen-Z shoppers who dress in hoodies and bomber jackets rather than houndstooth suits and structured silk gazar capes. While Cristóbal may never have embraced Demna’s ready-to-wear, he would have surely understood that couture needed modernising, a challenge he was mournfully too exhausted to face in his lifetime.
Look 8 of the 54th couture collection revives the Danielle suit — a houndstooth replica of a 1967 Cristóbal original, named after his favourite fitting model, Danielle Slavik. In 2022, Demna brought Slavik out of retirement to walk in his second couture show — a subtle gesture of respect for the house’s legacy. As Danielle herself put it, “there is something about [Demna] that I had found in Monsieur Balenciaga.” Image sourced via Balenciaga Couture © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
The final look of the final collection was a rigid guipure lace bridal gown; its colour matched to the patina of the decades-old white walls of the couture salon. Crafted with millinery techniques using antique irons, it evoked the silhouette of a Velázquez painting. The bell-shaped skirt relied solely on invisible wiring to hover delicately around the lower body. It stood as a testament to Demna’s technical skill — but also to the repetitive tendencies that have begun to fatigue the fashion world. Had I not mentioned the colour, you might have thought I was describing a look from the 52nd collection.
This is why the collection ultimately feels designed with the next chapter already in mind. Demna poured his entire soul into the monolithic House of Balenciaga, so it hardly matters that his final outing felt like trying to squeeze blood from a stone.
