SIMPSONS FOREVER

Born as a prime-time satire of Middle America, The Simpsons has become something else: the inspiration for all kinds of high art, from the runways of Balenciaga to the canvases of KAWS. GQ goes inside the minds of the show's creators—and gets a rare interview with Matt Groening—to explore our most influential sitcom's second life.

- M.H. MILLER

LAST YEAR, the team behind The Simpsons produced a video for the French luxury fashion house Balenciaga that debuted in October at Paris Fashion Week. (There's a sentence I never thought I'd write.) It featured the show's characters walking a runway in Balenciaga designs, and was, depending on your world view, what you might call a long commercial for the brand or a short episode of the show. David Silverman, a veteran Simpsons producer and animator who directed the short, describes it as "one of the hardest things I ever did”. Demna Gvasalia, Balenciaga's artistic director and, like a lot of 40-somethings, a fan of The Simpsons since childhood, gave note after note, trying to strike the right balance between caricature and sincere presentation of his clothing. "Simpsons characters," Silverman says, “[are] quite different from human proportions, so in some respects we took great liberties. Cheating, we call it.” It took a year's worth of work and in the end gave the people something they didn't know they needed: an animated Homer Simpson-a lovable oaf who once gained 61 pounds to qualify for disability so he could work from home-posing in a red Balenciaga puffer jacket, a more recent iteration of which costs $2,850 (over ₹2 lakh).