Balenciaga aujourd'hui : où en est la maison

The Garde-robe coat hanging in the Avenue Montaigne boutique last November measured forty-seven centimetres across the shoulder. Cristóbal's original, the one he cut in 1967, ran thirty-nine. The difference matters less than the fact that someone inside Balenciaga measured both and decided the gap was worth preserving in replica. Not homage. Replica. Same weight of gazar, same armhole depth, same sleeve that doesn't set where you expect it to. Sold out in two weeks, reordered for spring.

That's the split the house lives in now. On one end, Demna's dystopian handbags shaped like chip packets. On the other, archival coats reproduced with the kind of fidelity that requires someone on staff who knows what a 1960s shoulder was supposed to do. Both moves are commercial. Both are Balenciaga. And both raise the same question: what exactly is this house selling, and to whom?

Cristóbal and the myth that still pays rent

Cristóbal Balenciaga opened on Avenue George V in 1937, after the Spanish Civil War made San Sebastián untenable. He had clients in Madrid and Barcelona who followed him to Paris, but the French press took longer. What won them wasn't spectacle. It was the engineering. The balloon jacket that didn't collapse. The sack dress that moved. The baby-doll shape that floated three inches off the body and stayed there because he'd rethought how a sleeve transferred weight.

By the late fifties, Balenciaga's atelier was the one other couturiers sent their head cutters to learn from. Givenchy worked under him. Courrèges cut his coats. Ungaro learned construction there before going out on his own. When Cristóbal closed the house in 1968, he did it quietly, mid-season, and retired to Spain. No farewell show. No licensing deals. He died in 1972. The name stayed dormant until 1986, when Jacques Bogart SA bought it and tried to make it work as ready-to-wear.

It didn't. A parade of designers came through in the nineties—Josephus Thimister, Nicolas Ghesquière eventually—but the house had no infrastructure, no atelier continuity, no one left who'd worked under Cristóbal. Ghesquière's arrival in 1997 is usually written as a rescue. More accurately, it was a reinvention that borrowed the name and little else. He made Balenciaga into something commercially viable by ignoring most of what the house had been.

The Ghesquière era and what it built

Ghesquière's Balenciaga had almost nothing to do with the couture house. The silhouettes were fitted, not sculptural. The fabrics were technical, not luxe. The references were science fiction and motorcycle gear, not the Infanta Margarita. What he kept was a reputation for rigour, which he translated into zips that ran in unexpected directions and seams that landed half an inch off the body's natural lines.

The work was cerebral in a way that photographed well and wore harder than it looked. The City bag, introduced in 2001, became the house's first major commercial anchor—soft, slumped, covered in hardware, and copied everywhere within two seasons. By the mid-2000s, Balenciaga had revenue and a customer base that didn't remember Cristóbal.

Ghesquière left in 2012 after a contract dispute with PPR, which had bought the house in 2001. The split was bitter enough that he didn't design for three years afterward. Alexander Wang followed, lasted three years, and produced work that felt like a placeholder. Then Demna Gvasalia arrived in 2015, and the house turned again.

Demna's Balenciaga: irony, volume, and very good sales

Demna's first show for Balenciaga, in October 2016, opened with oversized coats in exaggerated proportions and closed with a model in a floor-length puffer that looked like it had been inflated with a bike pump. The silhouette was pure Cristóbal—volume, structure, a sleeve that defied physics—but the effect was entirely different. Where the founder's work had been about perfection, Demna's read as commentary. On fashion, on luxury, on the idea that any of this should be taken seriously.

The strategy worked. Balenciaga's revenue reportedly doubled between 2016 and 2021. The Triple S sneaker, introduced in 2017, became one of the decade's most successful footwear launches despite—or because of—looking like orthopedic footwear designed by someone who'd never seen a foot. The Hourglass bag, the Le Cagole, the Ville—all sold. Demna understood something Ghesquière had figured out fifteen years earlier: Balenciaga's value wasn't in its past. It was in being the house that could say things other labels couldn't.

But that position has costs. The 2022 campaign scandal—two separate campaigns, one involving children and another with documents referencing child abuse laws—triggered boycotts, executive departures, and a temporary suspension of advertising. Demna issued an apology. Kering issued statements. The house scrubbed its Instagram. And then, quietly, it kept going. By mid-2023, Balenciaga's sales had stabilised. Not recovered—stabilised. The customers who left were loud. The ones who stayed were enough.

Where the house stands now

Balenciaga currently operates in three registers that don't quite reconcile. There's the archival line—those Garde-robe reproductions, selling at five-figure price points to a customer who knows what they're buying. There's the conceptual Demna work—Le Cagole bags shaped like trash bags, dresses that look like they've been shrink-wrapped onto the body. And there's the commercial anchor: logo-heavy leather goods, Triple S restocks, basics that move volume.

The tension isn't a problem. It's the model. Balenciaga doesn't need to be one thing. It needs to be expensive and talked about, which requires staying just destabilising enough to generate coverage without alienating the customer base that pays for the Avenue Montaigne lease.

Recent collections have pulled back slightly from the most abrasive gestures. Spring 2024 featured cleaner tailoring, fewer meme-ready pieces, more wearable proportions. Whether that's a recalibration or a temporary retreat is unclear. Demna has another two years on his contract. Kering's other houses—Gucci especially—are underperforming, which means Balenciaga's stability matters more than it did three years ago.

The house currently sits as Kering's third-largest brand by revenue, behind Gucci and Bottega. It has strong performance in Asia, particularly China, where the scandal had less impact than in Europe and the US. The customer skews younger than most heritage houses—under thirty-five, digitally native, more interested in disruption than tradition. That's both an asset and a risk. Younger customers are less loyal. They move faster. They also spend less per transaction, which means Balenciaga has to sell more units to hit the same revenue targets as a house with an older, wealthier client base.

What the house is actually selling

On a practical level, Balenciaga is selling bags and shoes. Leather goods account for the largest share of revenue, followed by footwear, then ready-to-wear. The Hourglass bag, introduced in 2020, has been the most consistent performer—structured, logo-forward, recognisable from across a room. It's also the least Demna-esque piece in the current lineup, which tells you something about what actually moves.

The ready-to-wear is where the conceptual work lives, but it's not where the money is. A trash-bag-shaped pouch generates press. A logo-stamped tote generates margin. Balenciaga's business model depends on both, but the former exists to make the latter feel worth buying. You're not purchasing a leather bag. You're purchasing proximity to a brand that had the audacity to sell a trash bag as a luxury object.

That positioning has a ceiling. At some point, irony becomes exhausting. At some point, the customer who bought the Triple S in 2018 is thirty-four and wants a shoe that doesn't announce itself. Balenciaga will need to decide whether it follows that customer or replaces them.

Right now, it's doing neither. It's holding the line—reproducing Cristóbal's coats for the archival customer, making trash-bag pouches for the press, and selling Hourglass bags to everyone in between. It's a juggling act. It's also working, for now.

The Garde-robe coat is back in stock this season. Same gazar, same shoulder, same sleeve. It costs €7,900. The waiting list is sixteen weeks. Someone, somewhere, measured that shoulder twice.