Demna Highlights Fashion's Consumption Compulsion for Balenciaga FW24

Balenciaga presented its Fall/Winter 2024 collection at Paris Fashion Week, the first showcase to follow its Los Angeles runway which featured its newly appointed (or, re-appointed) brand ambassadors Kim Kardashian and Nicole Kidman. This season, the showcase took on a somewhat existential approach, asking: "What even is fashion?"

In the accompanying show notes, which arrived in the form of a personal voice note from Demna, the designer explained, "As you know, I like to question things that matter to me through my work, and some of the questions I have been thinking about recently are: what is luxury? What is fashion and why does it even matter? Who do I do what I do for? Is fashion enough? In a world oversaturated by content, is anything ever enough? What is enough? The important part is not necessarily finding answers, but the process of questioning in itself."

The brand's invite featured an eBay package, each one including a random vintage object selected by Demna. "The Winter 24 invitation is a random object found on eBay, the platform used by Demna to search for antique collectables. These inspire the imagination of personal stories, which gives the objects a new life," the invitation explained. "Each invitation is a unique and personal found object selected by Demna, representing memorabilia from someone’s past and holding a sense of the familiar yet mysterious."

Alongside the personal and existential exploration, FW24 aimed to represent a "link between the past and future" of the brand, tapping into the creative legacy of Cristobal and reinventing it for a new audience. Looking at how our bodies interact with garments, how we perceive beauty and what it means to have a sense of style, the collection redesigned signature Balenciaga silhouettes with a touch of playfulness. Leopard print gowns paraded down the runway alongside underwear dresses, shrunken hoodies and sellotaped blazers, amidst a digital screen backdrop of projections and landscapes.

Check out the standout looks from Balenciaga FW24 above and in case you missed it, here's a look at Sam Smith for Vivienne Westwood.