Should Demna Leave Balenciaga?

In today's video I give a critical review of Balenciaga's Pre-Fall 2024 runway show / collection by Demna Gvasalia. For out-of-towners, Los Angeles has the quality of the surreal. The palm trees, canyons, and golden light, the Facetuned faces and super-toned bodies, the cult of Erewhon, the Hollywood sign. Demna, Balenciaga’s Georgian creative director, is not immune to its allure. After his pre-fall show in LA today, he called it “my favorite city in the world,” saying, “all my cultural evolution, when I was a teenager growing up in this kind of post-Soviet vacuum, it really came from here, through movies, music—I mean, everything that I kind of absorbed, that later on started to kind of become my fashion references.” There was certainly something surreal about Balenciaga’s gothy black clad guests turning up en masse on a well manicured stretch of Windsor Boulevard in Hancock Park, with that famous Hollywood sign presiding in the distance. “It feels like we’re going to a funeral in sunny Transylvania,” a fellow editor cracked. Or like stepping into a Tim Burton movie shot in Technicolor. This was the brand’s second destination show in the US. Last year, Demna chose the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to present Balenciaga’s “Garde-Robe,” collection of “upscale classic garments” with an emphasis on tailoring, one of his specialties. This collection skewed more SoCal, starting with the exercise clothes, gym bags, and souped-up sneakers of the first few looks. The circa