#demnamna

“When I started at Balenciaga four years ago, I pressed the buttons that were a bit painful for fashion,” he explains of his sometimes controversial ideas. Such as the time, for example, that he reinterpreted Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Democratic nomination campaign logo and slapped it on his first menswear collection. Or his continued insistence on making luxury accessories designed to recall cheap souvenirs from a Paris tourist store. 

“I asked things like: ‘What is good? What is taste? What is style? What is bad taste? What is luxury? What is literal and not literal appropriation?’ I took this box and shook it up, because I needed that. And I had nothing to lose, to be honest, so I thought I might as well have fun doing it.” “I’ve been a punchbag for so many people,” he admits. “Raising those questions was not easy. When you talk about a beautiful bow on the back of a dress there’s no issue: everybody loves bows in pretty colours. But they don’t like Crocs on a platform sole – and especially not in a house that is nearly 100 years old. I’ve studied Cristóbal’s creative heritage very carefully – more than people imagine, because it doesn’t literally translate in most of my work. But it’s not relevant today to just do the same thing in neoprene or in some kind of technical fabric. Mine is a more conceptual approach.” “By the time that segment of the market understands a silhouette, it’s gone.” And he couldn’t care less about “likes”. “In the end, I try to communicate through clothes,” he says. “I don’t tweet, thank goodness, or do anything like that. I make clothes. For me, Instagram likes are as irrelevant as making a product and then doing a survey about what people think about it. For me, product design is about believing in something; it’s about feeling. And in the past my intuition has always brought me to the right places.” The big Herman Munster shoulder shape he loves, for example, recalls the Georgian Santa Claus, who wears a cape with vast shoulders that makes him look monumental and not the least bit jolly. And his love of oversized silhouettes speaks to the hand-me‑down culture in which he was raised. “My parents used to buy clothes two or three years in advance, so you could wear them in. Everything was oversized. And I wore lots of my cousins’ clothes because they were richer and had quality stuff.” Living a pre-worn, homogenous wardrobe in a world where “literally everybody had the same chairs at home”, persuaded Gvasalia to get creative. “I wanted to make my own stuff,” he says. “I made pants shorter and I cut off part of my shirt collar when I was seven. I just wanted to be different. And I wanted this [difference] to be my identity.” It’s one of the reasons why he thinks fashion is so important today. In the current landscape, where politics are so divisive and people are more tribal in their affiliations, brands have become a powerful shorthand for telegraphing various messages. “It’s a huge responsibility for brands,” agrees Gvasalia about the pressure to ally with different causes. “We cannot ignore politics. The younger generation is very informed and politicised. And I think it’s time for activism and for people to stand up.” Sure enough, recent Balenciaga shows have seen the brand donating money to the United Nations World Food Programme. But if Balenciaga has a message, says Gvasalia, “it’s pretty much related to the F-word: fashion. Because that is what it’s all about for me and it has always been. It’s about the body of a person and what we give to this person as a garment to complement the way they feel and the way they express themselves.” “Balenciaga is a house that makes clothes first and foremost,” he continues. “But I cannot ignore the things people want to buy. I can show a collection full of eveningwear, but it would be hypocritical because that’s not what people buy; that’s not what they have money for. They want to buy sneakers and they want to buy T-shirts. This is not something anybody can change, but I also don’t think a branded T-shirt is any kind of offence to luxury. The hardest thing to achieve in a modern, evolving brand is finding the right balance between the business and the dignity of the brand.”

“You can easily make products that make a lot of money in the short term by printing things on them. And back when I started doing that, of course, it got a lot of criticism. But this is exactly what people wanted. And they still buy it. It doesn’t mean they’ll want to buy it forever. As I said, I shook this box a bit, but I don’t think this is a problem. It’s a step in the evolution. It’s necessary. But I will keep on doing T-shirts and sneakers together with ballroom dresses as long as I do fashion. Because I don’t think it’s honest not to.”