Balenciaga pour celles qui débutent

The Hourglass bag sits on the counter at the Rue Saint-Honoré boutique, its curved frame catching light in a way that suggests both sculpture and utility. The sales associate turns it slightly, and the leather — grained calfskin, not patent — reveals a topography of texture. Fifteen hundred euros for the small format. A first Balenciaga, perhaps, though not the first one most people picture.

That mental image — the Triple S, the oversized parka, the logo sock-boot from 2017 — belongs to a specific chapter. It was loud, it was lucrative, and it has receded. What remains is a house with a more complicated story, one that predates the streetwear moment by seven decades and continues, in its current form, to ask what luxury means when spectacle has been exhausted.

Cristóbal, puis le silence

Cristóbal Balenciaga opened his couture house in Paris in 1937, having already run successful ateliers in San Sebastián, Madrid, and Barcelona. He was forty-two. He cut fabric the way a sculptor removes marble — by understanding what the material wanted to do, then letting it. His sleeves set without a pad. His collars stood away from the neck, creating negative space that became as important as the garment itself. Clients included Mona von Bismarck, Gloria Guinness, the Duchess of Windsor. Hubert de Givenchy called him "the master of us all."

He closed the house in 1968, abruptly, and died four years later. For the next two decades Balenciaga existed largely in archival photographs and the memories of women who had worn the clothes. When the brand relaunched ready-to-wear in 1986 under new ownership, it was an expensive ghost — present, but not quite inhabited.

L'ère Ghesquière, l'ère Demna

Nicolas Ghesquière arrived in 1997 as a relative unknown and spent fifteen years rebuilding the house around a vision of futurism that borrowed Cristóbal's architectural instincts but applied them to motorcycle jackets, skinny trousers, and bags with hardware that looked vaguely aerospace. The Lariat, the City, the Giant — these were not couture gestures. They were objects for women who moved quickly and wanted their accessories to do the same. By 2012, when Ghesquière departed, Balenciaga had a commercial identity again.

Demna Gvasalia took over in 2015. Georgian, Antwerp-trained, co-founder of Vetements. He had no interest in prettiness. His first collection featured oversized coats that swallowed the body, shirts worn inside-out, and a sensibility that read, depending on one's perspective, as either radically anti-fashion or the most fashion thing happening. The Triple S sneaker — chunky, aggressively unstylish, priced at €850 — became the house's calling card. So did the Ville bag, a structured tote that recalled Cristóbal's rigour but came in DayGlo yellow and electric blue.

The years that followed brought controversy, commercial triumph, and a tonal shift that has yet to settle. Demna staged shows in snow drifts, on mud flats, inside darkened theatres. He cast real people alongside models. He put Bernie Sanders memes on the runway. He also produced some of the decade's most commercially successful handbags — the Hourglass, the Neo Classic, the Le Cagole — each one a different proposition about what a Balenciaga bag could be.

Then, in late 2022, two ad campaigns sparked public outcry. The images were pulled, apologies issued, internal processes overhauled. The house went quiet for a season. When it returned, the tone had changed. Less provocation, more restraint. Whether this represents a permanent recalibration or a temporary pause remains unclear.

Ce qu'on achète aujourd'hui

If you are beginning with Balenciaga now, you are entering during this quieter moment. The bags remain the most accessible entry point, both conceptually and financially.

The Neo Classic is the closest thing the house currently makes to a daily workhorse. Top-handle, structured, offered in small, medium, and large. The leather is stiff but not rigid, the hardware matte gold or silver, the interior lined in canvas. Prices begin at €1,490 for the nano format and climb to €2,100 for the medium. It is not a loud bag. It reads as Balenciaga primarily to people who already know Balenciaga.

The Hourglass, introduced in 2020, is more overtly designed. The curved frame is its signature, a shape that suggests both the cinched waists of Cristóbal's 1950s silhouettes and a kind of Modernist sculpture. It comes in smooth calfskin, crocodile-effect leather, and occasionally shearling. The small size, which is genuinely small, starts at €1,550. The large, which functions as a proper carryall, runs €2,550. This is a bag that announces itself.

The Le Cagole takes the opposite approach — it is loud by design. Studded, logo-stamped, available in metallics and brights, it descends from the City bag of the Ghesquière era but has been turned up several notches. Prices range from €1,850 to €2,450 depending on size and hardware density. If the Neo Classic is a bag for someone who wants to signal taste quietly, the Cagole is for someone who does not care about quiet.

Shoes present a narrower range. The Triple S remains in production, though it no longer dominates the way it did five years ago. At €950, it is an expensive sneaker that reads, in 2025, as a period piece. The Defender, a more recent chunky style with a lug sole, runs €850 and feels slightly less tied to a specific moment. For those inclined toward something sleeker, the Knife mule — a pointed-toe, kitten-heel slip-on — starts at €695 and has been a consistent seller since its introduction in 2017.

Ready-to-wear is where the house's identity becomes harder to parse. A logo hoodie costs €750. An oversized denim jacket, €1,490. A tailored coat in wool-cashmere, €3,200. These are not irrational prices for a Paris maison, but they ask the buyer to commit to a specific idea of what Balenciaga represents — and that idea has shifted often enough in the past decade to make the commitment feel provisional.

Savoir-faire, ou son absence

One persistent question around Balenciaga, particularly in its current iteration, is whether the house still operates within the tradition of French craft or whether it has moved into a different category entirely. The answer is: both, depending on the object.

The bags are made in Italy, primarily in Veneto and Tuscany, by suppliers who also work with other luxury houses. The leather is good — full-grain calfskin, lambskin for softer styles, occasional exotics — and the construction is sound. A Balenciaga bag will not fall apart. But it is not hand-stitched in a Parisian atelier. It is industrially produced to a high standard, which is a different thing.

The ready-to-wear varies. Tailoring and couture-adjacent pieces are made in France or Italy, often with considerable handwork. Jersey basics, logo pieces, and collaborations are frequently produced in Portugal or Turkey, which is standard practice across the industry but worth noting if one assumes all luxury goods are made in the country whose name is on the label.

Cristóbal Balenciaga cut and sewed his own toiles. Demna does not. This is not a criticism — few contemporary designers do — but it does mean the house's relationship to craft is more managerial than artisanal. The savoir-faire is there, but it is outsourced, supervised, branded.

Avant d'acheter

Three things to consider before committing to a Balenciaga piece.

First: the house's identity is still in flux. Demna has been in place for nearly a decade, which is a long tenure by contemporary standards, but the direction has shifted enough times that predicting where it will be in five years is difficult. A bag bought now may or may not feel continuous with whatever comes next.

Second: resale value is uneven. The Triple S, which commanded premiums on secondary markets in 2018, now sells below retail. The Hourglass and Neo Classic hold value better, but not as reliably as a Chanel flap or a Hermès Constance. If you are buying Balenciaga, buy it because you want to carry it, not because you expect it to appreciate.

Third: the house's recent controversies have not been forgotten. Some buyers have walked away permanently. Others have returned. Where you fall on that spectrum is a personal calculation, but it is worth making the calculation consciously rather than pretending the past three years did not happen.

Une image, pour finir

There is a photograph from 1967, one of the last collections Cristóbal showed before closing the house. A model wears a coat in black wool, cut away from the body in a single sweeping line, the sleeves set so the fabric falls in soft folds from shoulder to wrist. Her hands are bare. The coat needs nothing else.

Demna has never made that coat. He has referenced it, deconstructed it, blown it up to three times its original size and shown it in traffic-cone orange. But he has never simply remade it, which is probably the right instinct. Balenciaga in 2025 is not the house Cristóbal closed in 1968, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

What it is, instead, is a house trying to be several things at once — a commercial engine, a site of conceptual provocation, a brand legible to eighteen-year-olds and sixty-year-olds alike. Whether that is sustainable is an open question. Whether it produces objects worth owning is a question each buyer answers alone, standing at a counter, turning a bag slightly, watching the light catch.