5 Things To Know About Balenciaga’s Virtual Reality AW21 Show

Inspired by the video game Gvasalia created as part of the show, the looks in the collection represented the players featured in the game, which in turn referenced classic video game archetypes. The knight in shining armour materialised, quite literally, in shining armour; a nod, no doubt, to Nicolas Ghesquière’s spring/summer 2007 robot collection for Balenciaga, but reinterpreted in medieval chevalier form in beautiful pieces forged by bona fide armour-makers in France. The valiant astronaut made an appearance, too, mixing with the likes of face-painted goths and post-apocalyptic characters in ragged knitwear, ripped and patched-up denim, tattered cocktail dresses, and massive threaded coats that looked like gutted teddy bears. “Fashion in its essence is a sort of armour today. It completes our personal identities and shows us in the way we want to be visually perceived by the world around us. So, in a way, the way we dress does play a role in our self-protection. This is a metaphor, but in reality, the armour in this collection was made to connect the long-forgotten past to the much-awaited future,” Gvasalia said. “We used the exact craftsmanship used in the Middle Ages to make the armour. It can be seen as a sort of a military sportswear of the time, which protected the warriors but also made their movements possible in battle. The articulation of that medieval armour, however, is exactly the same as that of a futuristic robot or android, because the human body is still the same all those centuries later. And my job as a dressmaker is to explore that relation between the human body and what it wears.”