The black Le Cagole bags are back in the via Montenapoleone window

The black Le Cagole bags are back in the via Montenapoleone window. Not the original spike-studded ones from 2022, but a cleaner iteration — same slouch, fewer rivets, priced at €2,100. The fact that they're here at all, displayed without irony or distance, tells you something about where Balenciaga has landed. Two years ago, this bag was the subject of crisis meetings. Now it's product.

Cristóbal Balenciaga opened his first atelier in San Sebastián in 1919, moved to Paris in 1937 when the Spanish Civil War made staying impossible, and spent the next thirty years building a reputation so technically unassailable that Dior called him "the master of us all." He worked in sculptural volume — cocoon coats, balloon skirts, the sack dress that made Vogue's editors recoil in 1957 before every American department store ordered it. He closed the house in 1968 rather than adapt to ready-to-wear, and died four years later.

The house reopened under new ownership in 1986. What followed were two decades of designers who understood the assignment intellectually but couldn't move product. Nicolas Ghesquière changed that.

The Ghesquière decade and what it built

Ghesquière arrived in 1997 at twenty-five, hired to design a licenced line that no longer exists. He was made creative director within months. His first proper collection came in spring 1998 — leather jackets with origami shoulders, trousers cut like jodhpurs, a palette of rust and petroleum blue. It didn't look like anything else on a Paris runway. It especially didn't look like Cristóbal's work, which was the point. Ghesquière wasn't reviving the archive. He was using the name's authority to validate something new.

The Motorcycle bag launched in 2001. Distressed lambskin, brass hardware that looked pre-tarnished, a long shoulder strap with buckles down the length. It retailed around $1,200 and became the kind of object women recognised across restaurant tables. By 2005, Balenciaga's accessories were generating more revenue than the clothing. The bags funded the experimentation in the ready-to-wear, which in turn gave the bags their conceptual cover. It was a functional loop.

Ghesquière left in 2012 after a contract dispute. The house went to Alexander Wang, then to Demna Gvasalia in 2015. Demna — he dropped the surname professionally in 2021 — had spent the previous four years making Vetements into the most argued-about label in Paris. Balenciaga gave him infrastructure.

Demna's first act: making ugly desirable

Demna's early collections for Balenciaga worked by inversion. The Triple S sneaker, introduced in 2017, was thick-soled and aggressively unbeautiful, priced at €795. It sold faster than the house expected. The oversized logo hoodies, the stretched proportions, the Ikea-blue shopping tote remade in calfskin for €1,790 — these were products designed to be divisive, and division turned out to be commercially efficient. You either understood why someone would pay that much for a piece of irony, or you didn't. Both reactions kept the brand in circulation.

The ready-to-wear leaned into exaggeration. Shoulders cantilevered out, hemlines pooled on the floor, sleeves extended past the hand. Demna called it "wardrobe hacking," a term that meant taking familiar shapes and rendering them slightly wrong. It worked best on outerwear — the puffer coats that looked inflated to twice their normal volume, the oversized blazers that turned suiting into costume.

By 2019, Balenciaga was Kering's third-largest brand by revenue, behind Gucci and Bottega Veneta. The handbag line had expanded to include the Hourglass, a structured top-handle that felt like a direct answer to the Motorcycle's slouch, and the Le Cagole, which brought back the hardware and distressing that had been Ghesquière's signature. The house was operating in two registers at once — conceptual provocation in the runway work, accessible luxury in the leather goods — and managing not to collapse the distance between them.

Then November 2022.

The campaign crisis and what it exposed

The specifics have been reported elsewhere. A holiday campaign featured children holding bags styled to resemble stuffed animals in bondage gear. A second campaign included a barely visible document from a Supreme Court case involving child exploitation laws. Both were Balenciaga-produced shoots. The images went viral in the way only moral panic can accelerate. The brand pulled the campaigns, issued an apology, filed a lawsuit against the production company, then dropped the lawsuit. Demna posted a statement. Kim Kardashian, the house's most visible ambassador, said she was reconsidering the relationship.

What followed wasn't a boycott in any organised sense, but a period of consumer withdrawal that showed up in the numbers. Kering doesn't break out Balenciaga's revenue separately, but analysts estimated the brand's sales declined between fifteen and twenty percent in the first half of 2023. The waiting lists for certain bags evaporated. The resale market softened. Stores that had stocked the Triple S moved them to the sale floor.

The crisis wasn't only about the campaigns. It was about the fact that Balenciaga's entire aesthetic had been built on discomfort — on making people look twice, on turning bad taste into a form of cultural capital. That strategy works until the discomfort tips into something the brand can't control. The campaigns did that. They made the provocation feel unintentional, which is the one thing provocation can't afford to be.

Where the house is now

Balenciaga's collections since then have been quieter. The spring 2024 show, held in a raw concrete space in Paris, featured clothing that still played with proportion but had pulled back from the more theatrical gestures. The silhouettes were softer, the palette more muted. Demna described it in the show notes as a return to "reality," which is a word you don't often hear in fashion criticism because it suggests the previous work was operating somewhere else.

The product assortment has shifted as well. The Le Cagole is still in the line, but it's been joined by more structured bags — the Neo Classic, a top-handle in smooth calf, and the Crush, a quilted clutch that feels aimed at the customer who found the earlier work too ironic. The Triple S is still available, but the newer sneaker styles — the Defender, the Runner — are sleeker, less deliberately ugly. The logo hoodies remain, but they're no longer the first thing you see when you walk into a store.

Sales have stabilised. Kering's most recent earnings report showed Balenciaga growing again, though not at the pace it was before 2022. The brand is no longer the subject of crisis coverage, but it's also not generating the kind of cultural conversation it once did. It's become, in other words, a luxury brand that sells luxury products. Which is what it always was underneath the provocation, but also what it spent years pretending it wasn't.

The question now is whether that's sustainable. Balenciaga built its recent success on being the brand that made other brands look too careful, too worried about offending. That position is harder to occupy when you've spent a year apologising. The house can still design a bag that sells, can still cut a coat that photographs well, can still command four-figure price points for cotton jersey. Whether it can do that without the aura of transgression it spent the last decade constructing is the thing no one, including Kering, seems certain about yet.

A friend who works in buying for a Milanese department store told me last month that the Balenciaga orders are coming in steadier now, but smaller. Not tentative, just recalibrated. The stores are carrying the bags, the shoes, some of the knitwear. They're not carrying the pieces that require explanation. Which means they're not carrying the pieces that made Balenciaga feel like Balenciaga. She said it without judgement, the way you'd describe a menu that's been edited down. Sometimes you realise you don't need that many courses.