## The Fitting Room on Rue Saint-Honoré

The Fitting Room on Rue Saint-Honoré

Demna Gvasalia stands beside a rack of black coats, each one identical at first glance. He pulls one forward, runs a thumb along the shoulder seam, then sets it back without comment. The silence extends. His assistant shifts weight from one foot to the other. Finally, he lifts a second coat—same silhouette, same cloth—and nods. The difference, he will explain later, is two millimetres in the armhole depth. Balenciaga, under his direction since 2015, has become a house where such distinctions matter more than the applause that follows them.

Gvasalia arrived at the maison with a reputation for disruption, though the word itself makes him visibly uncomfortable. He was thirty-four. He had spent seven years at Maison Margiela, much of it under the tutelage of design teams who valued construction over commentary. Before that: Tbilisi, Antwerp, a degree from the Royal Academy, and a stint at Louis Vuitton that he rarely discusses. His CV read like that of a technician, not a provocateur. Yet within two seasons at Balenciaga, he had turned the house into a subject of argument—always a sign that something consequential is underway.

Training, or the Antwerp Method

The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp does not produce stylists. It produces patternmakers who happen to have opinions. Gvasalia entered in 2001, part of a cohort that included Gosha Rubchinskiy and several designers who would go on to work, quietly, in the ateliers of Paris and Milan. The curriculum then, as now, emphasised draping and flat-pattern construction in equal measure. Students were expected to understand a garment from the inside out—lining first, then shell, then the incidental details that most consumers notice first and professionals notice last.

One instructor, according to a 2016 interview Gvasalia gave to System magazine, required students to remake a single coat pattern ten times, each iteration adjusting the pitch of the sleeve by half a degree. The exercise was tedious. It was also, he said, the moment he understood that design is a negotiation with geometry, not an imposition upon it. That sensibility—rigorous, iterative, sceptical of the decorative—would later define his tenure at Balenciaga, where he has repeatedly stripped familiar forms down to their structural logic and then, only then, reconsidered their proportions.

After Antwerp came a series of positions that built his facility with atelier process. At Margiela, he worked under what was then an anonymous design collective, contributing to collections that treated deconstruction not as aesthetic rebellion but as method. The house was known for its trompe-l'oeil knits, its inside-out seaming, its refusal to court the press. Gvasalia has said, in various forums, that he learned more in those years than in any formal education. He learned, specifically, how to make a garment that looked unfinished but was in fact over-engineered—a trick that requires more skill than its opposite.

The Pivot, and the Triple-S

When Kering appointed Gvasalia to Balenciaga in October 2015, the house was in a curious position. It had been without a creative director for nearly a year. Its archive was revered—Cristóbal Balenciaga's sculptural sleeves, his envelope backs, his refusal of the waist—but reverence does not move product. The question facing Gvasalia was whether he would mine that archive for references or ignore it entirely.

He did neither. Instead, he began with a single observation: Cristóbal Balenciaga had been a master of volume, and volume was currently out of fashion. The industry, in 2015, favoured the slim-cut trouser, the nipped waist, the bodycon knit. Gvasalia's first collection for the house, shown in March 2016, featured coats so oversized they appeared to be borrowed from someone else's closet. Trousers pooled at the ankle. Blazers hung from the shoulder with no attempt to define the torso beneath. The silhouette was, in a word, wrong. It also sold.

By his third season, Gvasalia had introduced the Triple-S sneaker, a chunky, multi-layered trainer that looked like three different shoes fused at the sole. It was widely mocked, then widely copied, then widely accepted as the template for what the industry now calls the "dad shoe." The Triple-S was not, strictly speaking, innovative—Reebok and New Balance had produced similarly bulbous designs in the 1990s—but it was timed correctly, priced audaciously (€795 at launch), and backed by Balenciaga's atelier credibility. Gvasalia has said, in a 2018 Business of Fashion interview, that he did not set out to create a trend. He set out to make a shoe that reflected how people actually dressed, which is to say: in clothes that prioritise comfort over the male gaze.

Signature, or the Exaggerated Ordinary

If one were to distill Gvasalia's approach at Balenciaga into a principle, it would be this: take the mundane, enlarge it, and charge accordingly. His collections have included oversized Ikea-blue totes (€1,700), deconstructed puffer jackets that resemble sleeping bags, T-shirts screen-printed with the logos of delivery services, and handbags shaped like crumpled paper bags. The effect is disorienting. These are not couture gestures. They are, instead, an argument that luxury can be found in the recognition of everyday forms, provided those forms are executed with atelier-level precision.

Consider the puffer jacket, a recurring motif in his work. In his hands, it is not simply inflated for warmth; it is inflated to the point of architectural presence. The quilting is executed in a diamond pattern that requires each channel to be filled by hand, a process borrowed from traditional duvet-making. The result is a garment that photographs as absurd and wears as considered. This tension—between the ridiculous and the rigorous—defines much of what Balenciaga has become under his direction.

His use of branding is similarly doubled. The house now produces garments emblazoned with its own logo in sans-serif capitals, a move that initially read as ironic commentary on logomania. But the irony, if it ever existed, has curdled into sincerity. The logo sells. It sells on hoodies, on hats, on socks. Gvasalia has said he is not interested in irony for its own sake; he is interested in what people actually want to wear, which often includes visible markers of affiliation. Whether this constitutes a critique of consumer culture or a capitulation to it remains, one suspects, an open question.

What Follows

Gvasalia's contract with Balenciaga was renewed in 2021, though the terms were not disclosed. The house continues to generate revenue well above its pre-2015 levels, driven largely by accessories and ready-to-wear. His most recent collections have begun to incorporate elements of couture technique—hand-draped jersey, boned bodices, trains—suggesting a return to the house's original métier, albeit filtered through his own preoccupations with scale and subversion.

In a rare interview with Vogue in 2022, he remarked that he had no interest in being remembered as the designer who made ugly shoes fashionable. He would prefer, he said, to be remembered as someone who understood that fashion is a service industry, and that service, at its best, anticipates needs before they are articulated. Whether Balenciaga under his direction will achieve that remains to be seen. What is certain is that the house, for now, is not quiet. And in fashion, as in most fields, silence is rarely a sign of vitality.