The Balenciaga shopping bag — the black one, matte finish, rope handles — has become rare at Rinascente

The Balenciaga shopping bag — the black one, matte finish, rope handles — has become rare at Rinascente. Not gone, but rare. Two years ago you'd see six leaving the ground floor in an afternoon. Now the staff fold them with a different rhythm, slower, less automatic. The bag itself hasn't changed. What changed is who's willing to carry it out.

Balenciaga has spent the past eighteen months in a particular kind of purgatory: profitable enough that Kering doesn't panic, damaged enough that the house can't move forward without dragging 2022 behind it. The scandal — the holiday campaign, the poorly art-directed BDSM teddy bears, the Supreme Court documents half-visible in another frame — arrived at the worst possible angle. Not a labour violation the industry could quietly settle. Not a quality issue buyers could ignore. A misjudgment about children, about imagery, about what the house thought it could aestheticise without consequence.

What followed wasn't a reckoning so much as a stall. Demna issued an apology. Kering launched an image approval process that now involves multiple sign-offs before anything consumer-facing goes live. The house pulled its advertising for a quarter. And then it tried to continue.

What the house was built to do

Cristóbal Balenciaga opened at 10 Avenue George V in 1937 with a skill set the industry hasn't matched since. He cut sleeves that required no shoulder pad. He invented the sack dress, the baby-doll, the balloon jacket — shapes that moved around the body rather than across it. Carmel Snow called him "the couturier of couturiers." Givenchy called him the master. When he closed the house in 1968, he did it because he believed prêt-à-porter had made his kind of construction commercially unviable.

He was half-right. The house stumbled for thirty years. A series of designers tried to mine the archive — the volume, the cocoon shapes, the structural sleeves — without understanding that Balenciaga's silhouettes were solutions to technical problems, not aesthetic gestures. They looked like costumes.

Nicolas Ghesquière arrived in 1997 and understood something different: that Balenciaga's modernity wasn't in the shapes themselves but in the willingness to abandon the body as a fixed reference. He brought in motorcycle hardware, low-slung waistbands, and a kind of angular, adolescent proportioning that made Chloé look matronly. The lariat-strap bags, the giant hardware, the skinny pant tucked into a wedge boot — this was Balenciaga for a decade and a half. It worked because Ghesquière never tried to be Cristóbal. He tried to be structurally rigorous in his own register.

Demna Gvasalia took over in 2015 with a different proposition: Balenciaga as a house of now, not then. The oversized logo hoodies. The Triple S sneakers that looked like a joke until they didn't. The Ikea-blue shopping tote sold for €1,700. He turned the runway into a set — a snow globe, a muddy field, a supermarket — and cast models who looked like they'd just come from somewhere else. It was clever, and it was also commercially ferocious. By 2021, Balenciaga's revenue had tripled under his tenure.

The work since

Demna's first show after the scandal was Spring 2023, presented in a black box with mud underfoot and models walking through sludge. It was meant, presumably, to signal contrition — a house emerging from something difficult, stripped of ornament. What it actually signalled was that the house didn't know how to recalibrate. The clothes were fine. The staging felt like an apology without a clear object.

The collections since have been technically competent and rhetorically uncertain. There are good pieces: a double-breasted coat in dense wool that holds its line without stiffness, a trompe-l'œil denim jacket printed to look paint-splattered, bags that refine the Hourglass and Le Cagole shapes into something quieter. But the shows themselves have oscillated between too much concept and not enough. The Fall 2023 presentation was held in a fake snowstorm. The Spring 2024 show opened with models walking through a long, dark hallway before emerging into light. Both felt like metaphors that didn't need to be stated.

What's harder to read is whether the work itself has changed in response to the scandal, or whether Demna is simply continuing along the trajectory he was already on. The logomania has receded — not disappeared, but pulled back. The irony has softened. The clothes are more traditionally luxurious: heavier fabrics, cleaner lines, less of the knowing wink that made the Triple S feel like a prank on the industry. It's possible this is maturation. It's also possible this is caution.

Where the house stands now

Balenciaga's revenue dropped roughly 15 percent in the quarters immediately following the scandal, then stabilised. Kering doesn't break out individual brand performance beyond the top tier, but analysts who track wholesale orders report that Balenciaga is moving product again — not at 2021 levels, but enough that stores are restocking. The sneakers still sell. The Hourglass bag still moves. The Le Cagole, with its buckles and curved silhouette, has found a second life among buyers who weren't paying attention in 2022 or don't care.

What hasn't recovered is the house's position as a cultural signifier. Pre-scandal, Balenciaga was the brand celebrities wore when they wanted to signal fluency — not just wealth, but a particular kind of ironic literacy about fashion's own absurdity. Now it's a brand celebrities avoid unless contractually obligated. The front row at the shows is quieter. The paparazzi shots have thinned. Kim Kardashian, once the house's most visible ambassador, stepped back and hasn't returned with the same energy.

Inside the industry, the read is mixed. Buyers respect the product but remain wary of the liability. One accessories director at a European department store group — speaking off the record because vendor relationships don't permit candour — said her team still orders Balenciaga, but they're more conservative with depth. "We're not sitting on inventory the way we did three years ago," she said. "If it sells through, great. If it doesn't, we're not stuck explaining to management why we're sitting on thirty Balenciaga bags in a markdown cycle."

Demna himself has remained largely silent beyond the initial apology. He hasn't given a major interview since the scandal. His Instagram, once a feed of cryptic images and cultural references, is now mostly campaign shots and show documentation. The house's communications strategy has shifted toward control — less spontaneity, more clearance, nothing that could be misread.

A garment, not a thesis

There's a coat from the Fall 2024 collection that keeps coming back to mind. It's a single-breasted wool piece, mid-thigh length, with a slightly dropped shoulder and a sleeve that's cut to fall straight without pulling. No logo, no irony, no wink. It's the kind of thing Cristóbal might have appreciated for its construction, and the kind of thing Ghesquière might have sharpened into something more angular. Demna just let it be a coat.

It's selling quietly — not a headline piece, but the kind of thing that moves through the system and ends up in wardrobes. A buyer in Milan mentioned it in passing as the sort of piece that doesn't generate press but performs. And maybe that's where Balenciaga is now: a house that still knows how to make things, still has the infrastructure and the skill, but has lost the license to be interesting in public. The work continues. The bags leave the store. The house stands, but it stands differently.