Trekking Through the Mud at Balenciaga With Ye, Offset, and Bella Hadid

You could witness the full force of Demna’s cultural power in the rest of the front row: there was Offset, his face concealed behind a blacked-out Balenciaga Couture helmet. Daniel Kaluuya, wearing a clingy undershirt from Balenciaga’s collection with Adidas. Khloe Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, whose arrival caused a minor, muddy stampede of photographers. Demna has assembled a celebrity cult with more social media firepower than any other brand, but he’s not in it for the engagement. 

Bella Hadid

In his show notes, he decried the rinse-and-repeat nature of social media-driven fashion. “Individualism in fashion is downgraded to pseudotrends dictated by a post in stories of some celebrity of the moment,” he wrote. Demna is interested instead in expressing a mood about the world, and his A-list fans express it for him in their relentlessly-tracked daily lives: practically all of the glitzy guests, from Christine Quinn to Dev Hynes, wear Balenciaga of their own accord with remarkable consistency. Demna’s doesn’t express his vision via social posts by flash in the pan starlets: he speaks through some of the most famous people on the planet and their daily wardrobes.

Kylie Jenner