Demna’s Journey: From Barely There to Imperial Presence

Demna sent everyone a gold ring with his invitation to Balenciaga’s Spring 2025 show. It was a token of his commitment to fashion. Making it official, like a marriage. It’s taken him a long time to learn to let go, to free up his creative process. He claims he was fearless as a child, but he’s had so much fear projected onto him over the years that he’s never been able to truly express his emotions. “I’m a catastrophic thinker, I don’t give myself a break,” he admitted in a post-show conversation. “But this time, I worked intuitively.”

Therapy helped with the breakthrough (as it did with his former collaborator Alessandro Michele). Demna dug back into his origin story, the six-year-old who sat at his grandmother’s kitchen table and made cardboard cutouts of women in dresses, complete with hair and makeup, which he would then present in a “fashion show” to his family. So the catwalk for his show on Monday was a long table, lined with editors and celebrity guests, as a symbol of that childhood memory. Community, sharing. But the staging also stood for his conviction that fashion needs more than ever to have a point of view, to lay everything out on the table. “Otherwise, it has nothing to offer, apart from covering us up.” He liked the idea that the guests sitting at the table were looking up at fashion as it paraded past them. “Fashion is something that people often look down on.”

Reconnection with life round grandma’s table reactivated a kind of naivete in Demna. “I don’t remember another show like that for me,” he said. “I just wanted to go wherever it brings me.” It brought him initially to a boudoir and a lingerie shop: lacy bra, suspender belt, stockings (in actuality, a trompe l’oeil all-in-one). Maybe a memory of shopping with his mum. It was followed by a relatively linear journey through Demna’s psyche. Sigmund Freud would have had an absolute field day. There were mumsy figures in preacher’s wife dresses that dissolved into symphonies of bondage straps as the models turned their backs to the audience. There were studly teens in stretched-out polo shirts and hipslung jeans that barely made it past the zone of interest. Was this a 16-year-old Demna? Or a 16-year-old Demna’s fantasy? “Not so nice, not so perfect,” he suggested. “I think it should trigger something. Because of our attention span, something needs to wake us up every time and grab our attention. But I just find it hot. I would like to dress like that, to be very honest.” He insisted he was “unconditionally inspired by youth culture.” Those same jeans accessorising hugely inflated puffas (shades of Duran Lantink) might turn the treasure trail into menswear’s new erogenous zone.

But the puffas were actually Demna’s attempt to come to grips with Cristobal Balenciaga’s cocoon silhouette, a challenge he felt he hasn’t quite mastered because it can turn so quickly into a retro statement. They highlighted his experimental streak. Same with the models who walked past laden down with clothes, coats hanging off shoulders, jackets slung round waists. “That’s me, being late for an appointment,” Demna explained. He claimed he’ll run out the door with a bunch of options for the day. “It’s the spontaneity of fashion that I love.” But within minutes of that rather nightmarish scenario, he was showing “clip-on” garments, merest suggestions of clothes which engaged scrawny frames with a simple click, “snapping on like a bracelet,” he said. To be shortly followed by the exact opposite of such an idea, when Demna’s artist muse Eliza Douglas sailed majestically down the table. “I wanted to start with almost nothing and end with this monumental sculpture in silk scuba. That’s a bit like fashion.” I get it. From barely there to imperial presence. The journey of a designer.

And it was a very entertaining trip. But what does it all mean? What happens when these clothes hit the stores? How do they regenerate Balenciaga’s dented fortunes? The scope of Demna’s imagination clearly runs the full A to Z. But maybe he’s exhausted that gamut in fashion. I couldn’t point to anything that felt revelatory in Monday’s show (although the lingerie trompe l’oeil might look fun on front-rower Nicole Kidman and the teen porn menswear was a kick). Cinema, however, is a different story. There are movies brewing in Demna’s bosom. He admitted as much. All those characters he propels down his catwalk can only be fully worked out on screen. Back me up here, Sigmund.