There's a photograph from 1951: a woman in a black coat, standing very still in the Place Vendôme

There's a photograph from 1951: a woman in a black coat, standing very still in the Place Vendôme. The coat has no waist. The shoulders drop an inch lower than anatomy would suggest. The sleeves taper but refuse to cling. She looks like someone who doesn't need to be looked at—which is, of course, why you can't stop looking.

That coat is Balenciaga in one frame. Not the house as it exists now, but the original proposition: clothing that worked against the body to create a new kind of proportion. Cristóbal Balenciaga didn't dress women to flatter them. He dressed them to make other dressmakers look amateur.

The architect, 1937–1968

Cristóbal Balenciaga opened his Paris atelier in Avenue George V in August 1937, three weeks before Guernica fell. He'd already spent two decades running salons in San Sebastián, Madrid, and Barcelona, but Paris was the proving ground. What he brought wasn't Spanish exoticism—though the press kept reaching for that—but a structural intelligence no one else had.

He trained as a tailor. That matters. Most couturiers sketched and draped; Balenciaga cut the pattern himself, often directly on the body, adjusting grain and seam placement until the fabric held its own architecture. The 1951 coat that defined him—later called the semi-fitted line—removed the waist suppression that had governed women's silhouettes since the nineteenth century. The tunic dress followed in 1955. The sack dress in 1957. The baby doll in 1958. Each one proposed that elegance might come from volume, not constriction.

His clients included Mona von Bismarck, Gloria Guinness, the Duchess of Windsor. Women who could afford not to follow trends. What they bought wasn't novelty but precision: sleeves set so the arm moved freely, necklines that sat a quarter-inch forward of the collarbone, hems weighted with chain so the fabric fell clean. Balenciaga's atelier employed over two hundred people at its height. He worked them hard. Fittings ran four, sometimes five sessions. He'd remake an entire dress if the closure didn't sit flat.

He closed the house in 1968, the year after Courrèges and Cardin had turned couture into a punchline. No announcement, no final collection. He gave his staff two months' severance and locked the doors. The Balenciaga that exists now is not a continuation of that house. It's a reanimation.

The interregnum, 1986–2015

Balenciaga reopened under Jacques Bogart S.A. in 1986, eighteen years after Cristóbal's death. What followed was a long stretch of creative directors cycling through: Michel Goma, who leaned into eveningwear; Josephus Thimister, who tried sculptural minimalism; Nicolas Ghesquière, who stayed a decade and rebuilt the house's reputation by ignoring most of its codes.

Ghesquière is the hinge. He arrived in 1997, twenty-five years old, no couture training, and spent his first three seasons making clothes the press called unwearable. By 2001 he'd turned Balenciaga into the house editors watched for proportion. Not Cristóbal's proportion—Ghesquière's shapes were sharp, synthetic, often aggressive—but a new grammar of how fabric could sit on a body. The motorcycle bag launched in 2001, a slouched lambskin style with exposed zips and tasselled pulls, became the first Balenciaga object to enter mass consciousness since the 1960s. It also marked the moment the house stopped being a couture reference and became a handbag business.

Ghesquière left in 2012 after a contract dispute. Alexander Wang followed for three years, producing clothes that felt like a mood board: sportswear details, neoprene, logo T-shirts you could buy at Colette. The house was profitable but unmoored. Then came Demna.

The disruptor, 2015–present

Demna Gvasalia was announced as artistic director in October 2015, four months after his own label Vetements had shown oversized hoodies on a Paris runway and been called either genius or a joke, depending on who you asked. Balenciaga under Demna has been both.

His first collection, spring 2016, opened with a parka. Oversized, technical, vaguely post-Soviet. It looked nothing like Cristóbal's work and everything like it: proportion as provocation, silhouette as the only argument that mattered. What followed was seven years of Demna treating fashion as a rhetorical device. He put models in Ikea totes and DHL-branded shirts. He made a bag that looked like a crumpled supermarket sack and priced it at €1,500. He cast real people—or people styled to look unpolished—and sent them down runways in clothes that photographed like memes.

Some of it was sharp. The Triple S sneaker, launched in 2017, looked deliberately ugly and became the template for every chunky trainer that followed. The Hourglass bag, introduced in 2020, referenced Cristóbal's curved-seam tailoring but rendered it in stiff calf that held its shape like moulded plastic. Demna understood that Balenciaga's archive wasn't a set of shapes to reproduce but a method: take the silhouette everyone expects and shift it two inches in the wrong direction.

Other moves felt more like stunts. A collaboration with Crocs. A show staged in a fake snowstorm. A Paris runway held in a giant mud pit, models trudging through sludge in evening gowns, the whole thing either a comment on fashion's absurdity or proof of it. The press wrote it up both ways.

Then the campaigns. In November 2022, Balenciaga released images showing children holding bags styled as teddy bears in bondage harness. The backlash was immediate. Demna apologised. Kering, the parent company, pulled the campaign and announced an internal review. For three months, the house went quiet. When it returned, the tone had shifted—less provocation, more restraint. The spring 2023 show was somber, almost penitent. Demna's statement referenced accountability. The clothes were muted.

What remains

Walk into a Balenciaga boutique now and you'll find the Hourglass, the City bag, the Triple S in six colourways. You'll find logo sweatshirts priced like tailoring. You'll find a version of the house that exists mostly as product, not proposition. Demna is still there, still designing, but the house feels smaller than it did three years ago. Not in revenue—Kering doesn't break out Balenciaga's figures, but handbag sales remain strong—but in cultural scale. The conversation moved on.

What's strange is that this might be closer to Cristóbal's original vision than anything since 1968. He didn't want fame. He wanted clients who understood what he was doing and everyone else to leave him alone. He refused to show his collections to the press until the clients had seen them first. He never gave interviews. When he closed the house, he didn't explain why.

Balenciaga now is a house caught between two models of what a fashion house should be: Cristóbal's atelier, which served two hundred women and influenced everyone, and Demna's platform, which serves two million and influences no one for very long. Neither is sustainable. Neither is entirely honest. But somewhere between them is a coat with no waist, a sleeve that moves when you do, a bag that softens in your hand after a year of use. The house persists not because of what it says but because, occasionally, it still knows how to cut a pattern that makes every other house look like they're guessing.