All about the clothes: after the scandal, Balenciaga keeps it simple in Paris

For a brand that created a lot of noise last autumn, the catwalk underneath the Louvre felt eerily quiet on Sunday morning. “There will be nothing to see but clothes,” said Demna, Balenciaga’s artistic director, before the show. “I need to be the radical antidote – to not be in that conversation at all. That’s what Cristóbal Balenciaga would do.”

Cristóbal left Balenciaga in 1968 but Demna’s Balenciaga couldn’t afford to be quiet for ever. It’s still a business, and this is the brand’s first collection since November’s controversial advertising campaign that saw sales drop dramatically, where children were photographed holding teddy bears in bondage gear.

Today, the show was indeed all about clothes. It began with tailored suits – except the jackets were made from trousers, cut open and turned upside down, so that the hem was in fact a waistband. A trenchcoat made from dissected chinos followed. Some were perfectly good suits with retail viability, albeit for the 1%. Demna began working on the collection before the scandal, and says he changed very little since.

Both Demna and Cristóbal Balenciaga were motivated by the relationship between the body and what covered it, and with silhouette. The leather jackets looked like jackets until you saw them from behind, where they looked inflated. Tight tracksuits came with exaggerated, tennis-ball-shaped shoulders. A handful of puffy-shouldered floral dresses – similar to his 2017 collection – were worn with his signature “sock boots”. The shoulder pads were a reference to the “ones that Cristóbal Balenciaga did in the 1960s”, he said.

The collection finished with seven shimmering high-neck, floor-skimming gowns with the same blown-up shoulders. Some of the dresses were red carpet-pretty, assuming people will still wear the brand. Unsurprisingly, there were very few bags.

True to his word there was nothing else to see: no Kardashians on the front row, and no Hadids on the catwalk. There was no external branding, in an effort to prevent protests. Anna Wintour was here, but other faces were absent. No one had known what to expect, except that the brand would no doubt hope to redeem itself through beautiful, inoffensive clothes. But even as we sat in silence beneath Paris’s most well-known building, it felt surprising that Demna was still here.

‘I never really wanted to be seen as a provocateur,’ says Balenciaga’s artistic director, Demna.

Photograph: Geoffroy van der Hasselt/AFP/Getty Images

Since joining Balenciaga in 2015, Demna’s fondness for challenging ideas of taste and beauty – for selling £1,500 rubbish bags and cut up clothes that he says “were hard to digest” – was beginning to rub people up the wrong way. Then, in November, he upped the ante, releasing an ad campaign featuring teddy bear handbags in bondage gear held by children, and another, which displayed papers related to a US supreme court child sexual abuse images case on a desk. It became fashion’s biggest scandal, and saw outrage pour in from TikTok to the BBC. Shops were vandalised and fans cut up their clothes on social media.

After issuing a delayed apology, Balenciaga claimed the props were accidental. Then it released a series of missives, including an announcement that it was working with the National Children’s Alliance, and ran an apology interview in Vogue.

For once, Balenciaga’s collection was in keeping with the rest of Paris. Deconstructed tailoring – turning remnants into clothes, and trousers into coats – has been a feature this weekend: at Vivienne Westwood, old bedding became coats. At Alexander McQueen, baggy trousers became bustiers. “It was about revisiting the structure of a garment, tearing it apart and turning it upside down,” said its creative director, Sarah Burton, backstage after the show.

Demna says he will not go back to his spectacle-ridden shows, in which models traipsed through mud, water and snow, which he says had “overshadowed the collections”. And he will no longer produce the sort of clothes and accessories that “press buttons”.

“You ask me how the business survives without the buzz? I think that’s through the product. I never really wanted to be seen as a provocateur. I’m an introvert who has trouble socialising,” he said. “These clothes are about making people want to wear them.”