FRESH FIGURES

Resort, Cruise, Pre-spring-call them what you will. The collections destined for boutiques towards the end of the year are packed with big ideas. On masculinity today and how it looks and feels; new shapes in tailoring and even a little fetish-garbed commentary.

BALENCIAGA 

Balenciaga’s Creative Director Demna is a fashion provocateur of the highest order. When he founded Vetements, he toyed with the expectations of designer clothing. At Balenciaga, he’s expanded the scope and imagination of his collections to comment on societal, cultural ideas— celebrity worship, the corridors and seats of political power, the horrors and tribulations of war, environmental collapse and so on.

For his Spring 2023 collection, the designer took the show to New York City, turning the famous Stock Exchange into a show venue. It was Balenciaga’s first time showing outside of Paris, and the first time that a fashion show was held on the trading floor. The timing could not have been more apt. The background in May this year: the Dow on the fall, the Davos World Economic Forum delayed. Yet Kering, Balenciaga’s parent company, had just reported growth in its firstquarter earnings.

So much talk about money. Which was the conceit of this show—money as a force of nature. To illustrate that idea, Demna put every single model in latex gimp suits. Money then, as a kind of fetish, a pursuit and means of its own rather than an end. Money too, as a kind of obliteration of the individual, which press notes described as identities “obscured by fetish bodysuits”.