The fitting room at 10 avenue George V runs narrow and windowless, lit by a bank of LEDs that flatten shadow

The fitting room at 10 avenue George V runs narrow and windowless, lit by a bank of LEDs that flatten shadow. Demna — surname discarded in 2022, a single-name gambit that felt less like branding than erasure — stands three feet from a model wearing what appears to be a black garbage bag gathered at the waist with baling wire. He adjusts the wire. Steps back. Adjusts again. The bag, on closer inspection, is Italian calfskin, hand-crumpled and treated to hold its folds. The wire is sterling silver, oxidised to match construction-site offcuts. This is how Balenciaga works now: the vulgar made precious, the precious made strange.

He arrived at the house in 2015, a Georgian with a Dutch passport and a reputation for cerebral sportswear. His previous label, Vetements, had made a virtue of irony — DHL T-shirts at €200, Champion hoodies deconstructed and reassembled inside-out. The appointment surprised no one and everyone. Balenciaga, under Nicolas Ghesquière, had been a laboratory of form: origami jackets, motorcycle bags that became a secondary currency. Demna's work, by contrast, felt deliberately artless, as though he had walked past the atelier and into the street.

Formation

Born in Sukhumi in 1981, Demna left Georgia during the Abkhaz-Georgian war. The family moved first to Düsseldorf, then Tbilisi, then back west. He has spoken, in interviews with System and 032c, about displacement as a condition rather than an event — the sense that aesthetic codes, like borders, are provisional. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, that reliable incubator of designers who treat fashion as a problem to solve rather than a fantasy to sustain. His cohort included a handful of names that never surfaced; he graduated in 2006 and joined Maison Martin Margiela, then under the guardianship of the collective that had replaced the founder.

Margiela's influence is legible in everything that followed: the exposed seams, the refusal of finish, the idea that a garment could be both object and commentary. Demna spent five years there, then moved to Louis Vuitton under Marc Jacobs, a house with a different grammar — maximalist, celebrity-adjacent, unapologetically commercial. The tension between those two educations — Margiela's conceptual austerity, Vuitton's market fluency — maps neatly onto his later work at Balenciaga.

Virage

His first collection for Balenciaga, spring 2016, opened with a parka so oversized it erased the body beneath. The silhouette was pure Cristóbal — volume as architecture — but the garment itself read as streetwear, something lifted from a Kyiv flea market or a Los Angeles thrift store. Critics were divided. Some saw a designer engaging with the house's DNA; others saw a man cosplaying poverty. The debate, as it turned out, was the point.

Within two seasons, Balenciaga became the most discussed house in Paris. The Triple S sneaker — a chunky, intentionally ugly runner that retailed at €850 — sold out before it arrived in stores. The Ville bag, a reworking of Ghesquière's City, moved units in colourways that previous creative directors would have rejected as too loud. Demna had identified a market segment that legacy houses had ignored: consumers who wanted luxury but distrusted its visual language, who preferred a logo to whisper or shout, never merely announce.

The clothes themselves operated on multiple registers. A trench coat, shown in autumn 2017, appeared at first glance to be a standard Burberry knock-off. On the runway, styled with thigh-high Crocs, it became something else — a comment on appropriation, on the way fashion recycles its own clichés. Whether one found this clever or cynical depended, largely, on whether one believed fashion could sustain that level of self-awareness without collapsing into parody.

Signature

By 2019, the Balenciaga aesthetic had calcified into a recognisable set of moves: exaggerated proportions, logo-forward accessories, a palette that toggled between black and traffic-cone yellow. The house's Instagram account, with its lo-fi graphics and meme-adjacent captions, became as influential as the runway. Demna had effectively turned Balenciaga into a platform for cultural commentary, a position that felt both urgent and precarious.

The autumn 2022 collection marked a shift. Staged in a soundproofed studio filled with artificial snow, the show featured models trudging through drifts in padded nylon coats and boots that appeared to be made from duct tape. The references were obvious — war, displacement, survival — but the execution resisted sentimentality. These were not costumes. The fabrics were technical, the construction precise. A puffer coat, cut to fall past the knee, used a quilting pattern borrowed from Cristóbal's 1950s evening wear. The juxtaposition felt earned.

Then came the scandal. Two ad campaigns, released in November 2022, featured children holding bags shaped like teddy bears in bondage gear, and a separate image included a Supreme Court document related to child pornography laws. The backlash was immediate and severe. Demna issued an apology; Balenciaga pulled the campaigns and filed a lawsuit against the production company. The episode raised questions that extended beyond one designer or one house: who reviews these images, who approves them, and what does it mean when a brand built on provocation misjudges the line between discomfort and harm?

He did not leave. The spring 2023 collection, shown three months later in a mud-slicked warehouse, felt like a reckoning. No gimmicks, no irony. Just clothes — considered, wearable, expensive. A black wool coat, single-breasted and unadorned, closed the show. It could have been made in 1955 or 2025. One suspects that was the point.

What Remains

Balenciaga under Demna is now a house in two modes: the commercial engine that produces Triple S variants and logo hoodies, and the atelier that can still execute a sleeve head with the same precision Cristóbal demanded. Whether those two modes can coexist indefinitely is an open question. The market for irony-laced luxury has matured; younger consumers, particularly in Asia, appear less interested in deconstruction than in facture, in the visible evidence of craft.

Demna's contract runs through 2027. He has hinted, in recent interviews, at a desire to slow down, to make fewer things better. Whether Kering, Balenciaga's parent company, will allow that remains to be seen. The house generates an estimated €2 billion annually, much of it from accessories and licensed products that bear little resemblance to the runway work.

For now, he continues. The fittings at avenue George V proceed, one crumpled leather bag at a time. The atelier remains, as it has since 1937, a place where a sleeve can be remade six times until it hangs just so. Whether the result reads as homage or desecration depends, as always, on who is looking.