Paris Fashion Week SS17 : Balenciaga’s Religious Experience

And it was something of a religious experience, one that paid reverential homage to both Cristobal Balenciaga the man and the designer, while still offering up a new perception of what menswear could be. The blazing heat from the white-hot noon sun also made the audience feel as if they were doing some sort of fashion penance. But the atonement was well worth seeing Gvasalia’s reinterpretation of tailoring through a striking exploration of proportions.

Cristobal himself never designed menswear but when Demna started researching his show, he discovered in the house’s archives a man’s coat that Balenciaga had started for himself but never finished. “It just felt to me that we needed to finish that coat and that is where the silhouette came from,” said the designer backstage after the show.