It debuted alongside red carpet turns from celebrities, influencers, and unsuspecting fashion figures – footage of them all projected cinema-scope sized inside for the waiting audience. As a psychological study of the fashion industry’s reaction to scrutiny, it was fascinating. It reminded me of Lee Alexander McQueen’s ‘Voss’ show, in the autumn of 2000, where the audience were forced to wait, staring at their own reflections in a mirrored box .
The Balenciaga clothes were, often, created for posing and preening too: vast, elaborate and amazing ballgowns, slinkily elegant evening dresses, the rapper Cardi B modelling a moulded coat emblazoned with paparazzi-style gossip magazine covers. Other celebrity models included the actors Isabelle Huppert and Elliot Page – and model celebrities Amber Valetta and Naomi Campbell. Who are now personalities larger than fashion.
You assumed the screening was about this – the clothes, the industry, the celebrity. But then the curtain came up on a socially-created episode of ‘The Simpsons’, themed around a Balenciaga show . It was meta – fashion transformed into pop culture in the truest sense of the term. But, for all the pontificating, it did make everyone laugh, just as Gvasalia wanted.
I think imma like this read