Over the past five years, Gvasalia’s aesthetic has changed Balenciaga from one of several jewels in fashion’s high firmament into a kind of magic stone—strangely shaped, completely hypnotic. Under Gvasalia, the house has made a path unique in the industry and a future rich in speculation.

The approach also draws on Gvasalia’s training in the craft. In 2009, recently graduated from fashion school, he got a job at Maison Margiela and began to work at making clothes. Traditionally, garments are draped and cut in basic materials such as muslin and wool. At Margiela, though, the practice was to drape old garments that had already been made. “We always used very cheap pieces, vintage, or old prototypes,” he recalls; they’d throw these on the form and start cutting, draping, and pinning. To the young Gvasalia, trained to design in two dimensions, this approach of walking around and around the piece, slicing and remaking, was a revelation, and he has used it ever since. “The first time patternmakers work with me, they’re quite surprised, I think, at how much I cut things and pin them, manipulate shapes in order to make new things,” he says. The process captures the essential gesture of fashion: breaking up what now exists, then slowly, tenderly reassembling the pieces into something beautiful and unlike what came before.

The past three years have found Gvasalia, once thought to be a wild child tearing at Paris’s gritty edges, in his own reassembly phase. In 2017, he married the French musician and composer Loïk Gomez and moved to Switzerland to gain creative distance from the fashion crucible of the French capital, where Balenciaga is based. He became a vegetarian, began to exercise, and, this past autumn, departed his post at Vetements, leaving the enterprise in the care of his brother (and cofounder) Guram. In early winter, when I visit Gvasalia at his house, set on the outskirts of a hilly village that’s itself on the outskirts of Zurich, I find myself standing in pastoral silence after ringing a bell at the front gate—until a yellow DHL van nearby pulls out from its parking space and zooms off down the little road.

Gvasalia greets me warmly. Like many people who live their public lives behind a self-protective scrim of enigma, he is privately voluble, with a hint of geeky shyness. We descend through a simple downward–sloping garden to his front door. The property is at once boxy and open, all rectilinear geometries and wooden floors. “They built it, as they say in German, a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total piece of art,” Gvasalia tells me after I step inside. He alerts me to a lifelike dummy by the American artist Mark Jenkins standing behind the front door, dressed in a black Gvasalia hoodie and, terrifyingly, clutching a black baseball bat—a nightmare in peripheral vision. “I have to warn people: There are human-like figures all over the house,” he says, deadpan.

As it happens, Gvasalia is dressed similarly, in a black sweatshirt, sleeves reaching down over his hands. He has a chestnut beard of medium length and hair buzzed short; he wears silver hoop earrings in both of his ears. All his adult life, he says, his style of dress has proved a liability for him: People have tossed him out of fancy restaurants because he wore a cap indoors; he once had a can of Coke thrown at him because he looked too “other” and weird. “I probably like provoking that reaction—I realized this recently,” he says. In Switzerland, though, the incomprehension is more genteel. “There is less judgment; it’s the way of Swiss people,” he says. “I feel safe here, and safety has been a big issue for me all my life.”

Once a month, Gvasalia takes the train to Paris, where he spends a week doing fittings, going to meetings, and seeing friends—of whom he has, by choice, virtually none in Switzerland. (“With social media, whenever you meet people in real life, you already know everything: what happened to them, where they hang out,” he says with a quick, high throttle of a giggle. “It’s kind of good not to be there all the time, so you have things to talk about.”) In Zurich, he keeps the mornings for himself and Gomez. They eat breakfast together, do chores, listen to music loud. In mid–morning, like a Romantic hero, Gvasalia goes for a long walk in the woods, and by the time he returns, at 11, he feels creatively charged and ready for his job. Upstairs he has an atelier, where he works up the current collection, giving each garment an average of five fittings, but a lot of his work is done on his laptop or phone, which he uses to crawl through social media, news sites, and archival images. He files away material that he plans to use in his collections now or later. “I realized how many ideas had disappeared, vanished, never become a product just because it was not the right moment for them,” he explains. “Now I just put them aside.”

I ask him how he thinks his work has changed since the move to Switzerland. “I got rid of those insecurities that I used to have, the need to prove something. I just started to listen,” he says. “I always thought, Oh, you cannot be that selfish; you need to work for others—for your brand, for your team. But maybe I’m getting older, and I realize it is kind of inevitable to connect to yourself so you can be a better designer. I’m a different designer now than I was five years ago. I’m no longer on the dark side of the world.”

This, he says, is the reason why he felt he had to leave Vetements. The label had been conceived as a restive, angsty young man’s project—that was the source of its urgency and appeal—and he no longer felt like a restive, angsty young man. “When I started it, I was angry, and I wanted to express myself,” he says. “I called it Vetements—I didn’t call it my name—because I saw it as a project in my becoming a designer.” Success caught him off guard. “I never really believed in myself doing something that, in this brutal and ruthless industry, would have that kind of reaction—if I had realized it, I would have done it much earlier,” he says. “But I started the brand in a period where, through the internet, the anger of the youth became relevant again.” Now he is more experienced and less rageful, and the option, in his view, was either to take Vetements in a very different, big-dog–designer-who-walks-in-the-woods direction or to let someone else lead the brand on its hungry, youthful course. “I realized that, as with any project, Vetements had a deadline for me and my expression there,” he explains. “The archives and the brand DNA there are vast and full of ideas and products that I no longer need to associate myself with. I’ve changed since I started, and fashion changed in general, and Vetements can lead its own story without me being behind it.” Since then, he has focused on Balenciaga.

“Demna maintained the distinctive creative approach that the house has cultivated throughout its existence, based on the observation of a woman’s body, experimentation, rigor, and innovation,” says François-Henri Pinault, the chairman and CEO of the luxury group Kering, which owns Balenciaga. Calling Gvasalia’s approach “radical” in the spirit of the house’s founder, Pinault says he was impressed by the designer’s tapped-in approach and pragmatic head for business. “As he is careful to create clothes that people actually want to wear (Seriously??), he has engaged with a new generation of clients, who are more open to mixing and experimenting,” he says. The bet—the gamble—has proved a good one. Last year, Balenciaga crossed a billion dollars in sales, more than doubling its size from when Gvasalia took over, and it has added 70 or so new stores. Products like the chunky Triple S sneaker and the wide–collared, long-sleeved “swing” shirt have somehow managed to become both indie, counter-“fashion” products and global bestsellers; millennials account for 70 percent of Balenciaga’s current sales. In an age of faster cycles and ever more instantaneous delivery, the brand has focused on accelerating its distribution channels, yet recent products have eclipsed even old standbys.

VETEMENTS’ COLLECTIONS were famously presented with the functional, box-checking disjunction of a Uniqlo floor: trench coat, puffer jacket, suit, trousers, sneakers. With Gvasalia’s arrival at Balenciaga and his marriage, he says, he began to think about collections differently. “When I met Loïk, my whole life changed,” he says. “I started to connect to myself more, to really hear and feel myself. I realized I really needed a narrative in my work. I had a story; I had things to express.”

Gvasalia’s own first act of power realized through fashion came when he was seven years old: He persuaded the Greek tailor who lived next door to shorten his trousers by five centimeters. The school called his parents to see whether they harbored capitalist views. “I just wanted to have cropped pants, but that was not part of the narrative that was dictated by, you know, Vladimir Lenin or whoever,” he says. Money was tight, so his parents always bought him clothing a few sizes ahead, and this extra cloth became more comfortable to him than well-fitted clothes. He wasn’t skinny—he liked to hide inside the extra material—and in adolescence he was acutely self-conscious about the hair on his hands. He liked long sleeves, in which he could bury his hands. At 16, too, he and all his friends would slump their shoulders forward: It was the bodily fashion of the day, and it made them feel secure and cool.

For a while, all of that fell out of his designer’s mind, although he never stopped loving volumes and shapes that seemed to defy close tailoring. After taking a degree in international economics at Tbilisi State University, he enrolled in Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, which then offered the most affordable of the good European fashion courses, and trained in the old crafts of patternmaking and tailoring. It wasn’t easy. “Making a single-breasted men’s jacket was the biggest challenge of my life,” he says. He learned to do it, though, and can still do it; in Vetements’s early days, he used to cut patterns himself to save money. At first, in Antwerp, Gvasalia would make geometric, flamboyantly daring garments; as he matured, that changed.

“They could explode in shapes and colors and whatever, but when they came to me, in the fourth year, they were more mature,” says Linda Loppa, the towering fashion teacher who ran the program. “He knew exactly what he wanted,” she recalls. “That made it easy. I remember giving him remarks like ‘Why five pockets if you only need two?’ because I felt he was up to that.” Gvasalia himself describes this focusing as a turning point: “The teacher told me, ‘Well, you know you’re making it for someone. Do you actually know anyone who would wear that?’ And it hit me: Oh, God, I don’t know anyone, myself included.” Something clicked then, and he began returning to a personal idea of fashion. “This is priority No. 1 in my approach—whenever I’m doing a fitting, one of the first questions is, How do you feel in it?” Gvasalia says. “Does it make you feel ‘Don’t talk to me’? Does it make you feel ‘I’m sexy tonight’? Does it make you feel ‘I’m the boss’?”

When he arrived at Balenciaga, he found that the house’s founder had shared this focus. Like Gvasalia, Cristóbal Balenciaga had designed at the virtuosic front edge of draping and volume in an age of fitted forms. Like Gvasalia, he liked to work outside the box of predictably proportional models and took pride in designing couture to make stooped women appear straight or rounder women look waiflike. Balenciaga, back in the day, was known to employ some of the oldest models in Paris; after facing early criticism for an absence of diversity on his runway, Gvasalia now has one of the most diverse casts in the business, both in ethnicity and in age. Balenciaga’s spring-summer 2020 show included a model wearing an “18+” logo on his sweatshirt—an apparent stance against the hunt for nubile models. The same show featured gray-haired models—not just fashion-gray but true older people. “It’s important for a modern brand to have age diversity; it makes it more authentic,” Gvasalia explains. “When we walk down the street, we don’t necessarily see people all of the same age in groups.”

One of his causes right now is sustainability, not just from brands but as a buying habit. “We have to question ourselves: Why do we consume the way we consume? Do we need to buy this other thing?” he asks. “It’s a bit ironic for me to be talking about this, but it’s something that I ask myself.” Instead of getting better, he thinks, consumption has grown worse. “Sometimes it makes me angry. Yes, we can make a more sustainable product, but if the only reason to do that is to sell more, it makes no sense,” he says. “I believe in the next generation. My niece, who’s 10 years old, is vegan. She doesn’t like to buy things, and she doesn’t want to take a plane.”

Fashion has the potential to be a vector of change, more than ever in its great global age. Gvasalia comes from a world more eastern than many designers at big European houses, and he admits to being closely attuned to the Asian markets—one more thing that he shares with Cristóbal Balenciaga, whose unorthodox shapes drew heavily from kimono forms. “You need to get into details,” he says. “You need to understand what’s going on with the Chinese New Year. You have to know what’s going on in America—sociopolitical issues are important.”

“I used to think that the moments when I was depressed and my life was kind of brutal to me were the most creative moments,” he says. “But I cannot relate to that any longer, because I’ve discovered the other side, the bright side, when you can be good with yourself and 10 times more productive.” He adds, “I think falling in love was one of the most important things for me, because it made me realize how important it is to love yourself.”

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After weeks of silence, Balenciaga’s controversial creative director Demna has finally addressed the BDSM ad scandal torched online for incorporating children with bondage gear and allegations of normalizing sexual fetishization and abuse of children.

The Georgian fashion designer, who goes only by his first name, posted a lengthy statement on Instagram, vowing to “engage with child protection organizations.”

“I want to personally apologize for the wrong artistic choice of concept for the gifting campaign with the kids and I take my responsibility. It was inappropriate to have kids promote objects that had nothing to do with them,” the 41-year-old wrote.

“As much as I would sometimes like to provoke a thought through my work, I would NEVER have an intention to do that with such an awful subject as child abuse that I condemn. Period,” said Demna, who is personal friends with Kim Kardashian and disgraced rapper Kanye West. “I need to learn from this, listen and engage with child protection organizations to know how I can contribute and help on this terrible subject.

(Now, that is BS.  Child Protective Services is notorious for abusing and trafficking children.  All those “orgainzed children’s charities are just tools the Elite use to get their hands on young and very young children.  Donating finances to these organizations is just a smoke screen and an easy way to gain public support for something that really will in the end support the perpetrators.  We need to shut these people down.  That is the ONLY WAY to protect our children.)

“I apologize to anyone offended by the visuals and Balenciaga has guaranteed that adequate measures will be taken not only to avoid similar mistakes in the future but also to take accountability in protecting child welfare in every way we can,” he concluded.  (BLAH, BLAH)

Balenciaga has previously been panned for Demna’s bizarre, pricey creations, like a $1,790 purse that resembled a trash bag as well as his latest fashion show, which had models marching in war trenches.

However, Demna wrote in his show notes that he “became a forever refugee” when his family fled the war in his native Georgia when he was young, noting the conflict with Russia has “triggered the pain” from his past and highlighted the “absurdity” of sartorial spectacles.

“I realized that canceling this show would mean giving in, surrendering to the evil that has already hurt me so much for almost 30 years,” Demna said. “I decided that I can no longer sacrifice parts of me to that senseless, heartless war of ego.”   

(WA, WA, WA so now he wants us to feel sorry for him, HE is the victim here.  Unbelievable!!)s
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So, the world has allowed this wacko, who is hold on to the anger from the trauma he suffered as a youth, dictate “FASHION”.  I understand a little bit why the models are wearing this horrible garbage but the fact that they can get the general public to actually spend money (and a lot of it) for the honor of putting these nightmares on their own bodies is mind boggling!!

LOOK AT THIS BALENCIAGA FASHION SHOW and tell me that you don’t think it should be thrown out.  I would say laughed off the stage, but there is nothing funny about these visions of HELL!