It was funny and powerful to see what passed as totally normal clothes marching down a big-budget catwalk, particularly since all season designers have been navigating their way out of the quiet-luxury doldrums with look-at-me shapes and noisy embellishments. Many are leaning on the stunty viral bait Demna mastered long ago. “Making a jacket out of a chair or [constructing] a parka upside-down, I kind of did it for the last 12 years, and I love it, by the way,” Demna said. “But I also felt like maybe I had enough of that.”
There was nothing complicated about the Puma collaboration that closed out the show. In fact, the track jackets and tight joggers conjured the teenage boys with broccoli perms I saw on the Metro on my way over. The addictively bloopy, BFRND-composed soundtrack was punctuated by video game sound effects, making it all the more uncanny that Demna was showing NPC clothing after a decade of first-person glory. Demna’s cheat code is the edge he finds in wardrobe standards.
“Do I really want to do something that is pretending to be fashion just because it grabs attention?” Demna mused backstage. “Or do I want a person who wears my clothes telling me, ‘This is the best coat I’ve been wearing for the last five years and I don’t need another one?’”
With change in the air, it’s only fitting that Demna’s name is also at the center of designer silly season. In the waning days of Paris Fashion Week, rumors began swirling that he is preparing to leave Balenciaga. Backstage, when a journalist asked him about the whispers, Demna was dismissive but careful. “Fashion has become this giant rumor mill, which is fun too,” he replied. But Demna clearly considers the chatter a distracting sideshow: “Sometimes I read more about rumors and who is going where than, what do we really want from fashion now?”
Whether he’s on the move or not, the designer has clearly discovered something new in his own relationship with fashion. When I fought my way through the crowded backstage on Sunday night, I was surprised to see Demna standing there in a suit, the same black one that opened the show.
He looked like a whole new designer. Demna is famously allergic to classic tailoring—he showed up to the 2021 Met Gala in his airport sweats and recently accepted the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres wearing a T-shirt. (He said he wanted to be the first person in history to receive the French knighthood in a tee.) I have only ever seen him cloaked in a zip-up hoodie. The suit represents his more mature relationship with fashion. “I feel like maybe I’m Demna version 2.0.,” he remarked. “I think I grew up enough to wear a suit, as a designer.”
The challenging part was coming up with one he actually wanted to wear. Last Halloween, Demna explained to the press, he wore the scariest costume he could think of: a made-to-measure corporate suit that followed all the rules. “I have to say, I’ve never felt so uncomfortable in my life,” he said, in a tone of utmost sincerity. The jacket was too broad in the chest, the pants too tight and cropped. “I couldn’t move,” he continued. “I felt like an idiot, honestly. It was the shortest Halloween party for me. But it was a very important experiment.” Knowing what not to do, he was able to design a classic suit that didn’t feel so backwards, a process that he and his team worked on for months. “It’s much easier to put four sleeves, tie two of them, put a collar somewhere than it is to make just a jacket with two sleeves that looks good on many different people,” he said.
There’s something undoubtedly radical today to the painstaking practice of making perfectly normal clothing, especially at the height of the luxury fashion world. If history is any indication, Demna’s rejection of main character syndrome might lead the rest of men’s fashion to elevated normie bliss, too. As for where Demna himself will go? When pressed on whether he is staying at Balenciaga, Demna demurred. “I’m staying with fashion forever,” he said.
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