The store on George V reopened in October with walls the colour of raw plaster and no music

The store on George V reopened in October with walls the colour of raw plaster and no music. The handbags sit on aluminium plinths that could double as medical equipment. A sales associate in black denim will bring you an Hourglass in grained calfskin, and if you ask about the waiting list, she'll tell you there isn't one. Not anymore.

That tells you more about where Balenciaga stands than any runway review.

Cristóbal et après

Cristóbal Balenciaga closed his Paris atelier in 1968 because he couldn't stomach what ready-to-wear was becoming. He'd spent three decades constructing clothes that moved around the body rather than on it—sleeve pitch angled forward, waistlines dropped or erased entirely, volume placed where it destabilised the expected line. His clients were women who understood that a jacket could be architecture. When he shuttered the house on avenue George V, he did it quietly, mid-season, with no succession plan.

The name drifted for thirty years. Ownership changed hands. There were designers—competent, forgettable—who tried to mine the archives for saleable shapes. Then in 1997, Nicolas Ghesquière arrived from the licensing division and spent fifteen years turning Balenciaga into the house that made intellectual fashion commercially viable. He gave us the Lariat, the City, the moto jacket with zips that looked like they'd been lifted from a 1950s bomber. He made it possible to dress like you'd read Deleuze without looking like you were trying.

Demna Gvasalia took over in 2015 and made a different bet.

Le pari Demna

Demna's Balenciaga doesn't reference Cristóbal—it references the idea that fashion can be a system you critique from within while still cashing the cheques. His first collection featured deconstructed trench coats and XXL shirting that looked like it had been stolen from a boyfriend who worked in IT. The silhouette was about refusal: refusal of the waist, of finish, of the premise that luxury should look precious.

It worked because it was legible to two audiences at once. Fashion insiders saw Margiela, Raf, the whole Antwerp lineage. A younger customer, one who'd grown up on memes and Vetements, saw something that looked like their actual wardrobe, only better cut and five times the price.

The Triple S sneaker launched in 2017. Ugly on purpose, retailing for €850, sold out in four hours. Balenciaga's revenue doubled in three years. By 2021, parent company Kering reported the house had crossed two billion in sales. Demna had done what Ghesquière did, only louder and faster: made avant-garde a volume business.

Then came the campaigns.

L'année difficile

November 2022. Two separate campaigns, released within weeks of each other. The first featured children holding teddy bears in bondage-style harnesses. The second included a Supreme Court document on child pornography law, visible in the background as set dressing. The internet moved faster than the crisis team. By the time Balenciaga issued an apology, the images had been screenshotted, annotated, and woven into every conspiracy theory the algorithm could surface.

Kim Kardashian, the house's most visible ambassador, released a statement. She was 'shaken' and 'disgusted'. She did not, however, sever the contract. Neither did most of the other celebrities on retainer. What Balenciaga lost wasn't the talent—it was something harder to rebuild. It lost the presumption of good faith.

Sales dipped in early 2023, though Kering never broke out the numbers. Stores stayed open. The waiting list for the Le Cagole evaporated. On resale platforms, Balenciaga pieces sat longer, sold for less. The house went quiet for a season—no major collaborations, no guerrilla runway in a snowstorm. When Demna returned to the calendar, the collection was muted, almost penitent. Lots of black. Tailoring that looked like apology.

The question wasn't whether Balenciaga would survive. Kering has too much infrastructure sunk into the brand, and Demna's contract runs through 2026. The question was whether the house could reclaim the specific kind of cultural capital it had spent a decade accumulating—the sense that buying Balenciaga meant you were in on something.

Où en sommes-nous

Walk into a Balenciaga boutique now and the aesthetic has shifted. Less irony, more material. The Hourglass bag, introduced in 2020, has become the house's anchor product—a structured, curved silhouette in smooth or grained calf, engineered to photograph well but not scream. It's doing what the City did fifteen years ago: selling consistently, at full price, to women who want a bag that signals taste without requiring a thesis defence.

The ready-to-wear has pulled back from the extremes. You still see oversized tailoring, but it's been tempered. Demna showed a spring 2024 collection that leaned into suiting—sharp, slightly masculine, wearable in a way that didn't demand the buyer perform a character. The reviews were polite. No one called it a reinvention.

Retail partners report steady traffic, but the frenzy is gone. Balenciaga still places well in Lyst's quarterly index, usually somewhere in the top ten, but it's no longer the house that moves the needle on search volume. The Triple S has been quietly phased into archive status. The Defender, its chunkier successor, didn't catch the same momentum. Sneaker collabs, once a reliable hype engine, have slowed.

What's interesting is what Balenciaga hasn't done. It hasn't hired a new creative director. It hasn't pivoted to heritage marketing or trotted out Cristóbal's sketches for a capsule. It hasn't tried to out-Demna itself with a more extreme provocation. Instead, the house has settled into something that looks almost like maturity—a recognition that scale requires steadiness, and steadiness doesn't trend.

Kering's most recent earnings call mentioned Balenciaga once, in passing, as 'stabilising'. In luxury conglomerate speak, that's neither praise nor indictment. It means the house is doing what it's supposed to do: move product, hold margin, not become a liability.

Ce qui reste

There's a photograph from Cristóbal's final collection—a model in a black wool coat, cut with sleeves that bell at the wrist and a collar that stands away from the neck. The shape is clean, almost monastic, and it makes you aware of the air around the body. It's the opposite of what Balenciaga sells now, but maybe that's the point.

A house doesn't have to be what its founder imagined. It just has to know what it's for. Right now, Balenciaga is for customers who want the frisson of fashion without the risk, who'll pay €2,200 for an Hourglass because it's recognisable but not obvious, because it works with the Lemaire trousers and the Totême coat and the life they've built around looking like they don't try.

That's not a failure. It's just not a revolution. And maybe, after everything, that's the smartest play the house could make.