BEAUTY: Shoes--Balenciaga

Balenciaga, the house started by Cristóbal Balenciaga in 1919, has seen a veritable revolving door of creative directors in the last five years. After Nicolas Ghesquière left the house in 2012, futurist Alexander Wang took over (see some amazing, sleek, collections previously posted here, here, and here) only for him to part ways with the house in 2015.

Enter Demna Gvasalia, a Georgian designer who has previously worked at Maison Margiela and at Vuitton. His Fall-winter collection was nice enough, all square cut suits and ankle-length boxy overcoats...pleasant enough. But the delightful spanner in the works was the amazing moto-cross boots he showed under the rather traditional suiting. The juxtaposition is SO cool...

http://www.balenciaga.com/us

BEAUTY: Clothing--Balenciaga

For Balenciaga's first-ever actual menswear runway show at Paris Fashion Week (the house has only ever shown lookbooks for collections), newly appointed creative director Demma Gvasalia sent out a furiously arresting SS '17 collection based on an unfinished coat he found in the Balenciaga archives. Cristóbal Balenciaga had actually made the coat for himself but had never finished it...so Gvasalia did it for him, nearly 50 years later. Balenciaga was known for sparse, geometrical designs and this coat certainly falls within that purview. We don't really know exactly what the original coat looked like, but I think it is safe to assume that it had some of the same boxiness and volume so Gvalasia could riff. And riff he has done with a startling silhouette. The enormous shoulders and roomy cut of coats and jackets are brilliantly contrasted with cinched pieces plastered to the body. He has used a trick that all god artists should know and that is that when you contrast two things, that contrast highlights both original objects, making them stand out even more. The tight trousers and shorts make the roomy outerwear seem even bigger and the tight bodice-like tops are paired beautifully with loose, flowing trousers. And a fascinating detail slipped in late in the collection along with saturated jewel-toned fabrics actually sourced from a supplier who furnishes fabric for the Vatican: we see a bit of a white lace apron peeking out from under coats, lending an ecclesiastical flair. One wonders how and why this motif was discreetly added, although fashion journalist Alexander Fury links it to Cristóbal Balenciaga's devout Catholicism...but for me, when I hear of his devout Catholicism, all I can think of is the fact that he was a gay man, closeted to the world, participating in a religion that would have cast him out if had dared to share his true self. What a shame. But there was a sense of strange ceremony to the entire show--watch the video below, and listen for the strains of a liturgical choir creeping in just like the lace aprons.

And of course we cannot leave this collection without ogling the incredible shoes: a parade of amazing, knee-high, stacked-heel boots in velvet, leather, metallics, and python. WOW.

http://www.balenciaga.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Balenciaga

Ever since Alexander Wang took over in 2012 as creative director at Balenciaga, he has been constructing clothing for a future that may never arrive. Sleek, utilitarian shapes in blacks, whites, greys, exist in his sci-fi world for Spring Summer '16. In past posts about Wang's work for Balenciaga, I have mentioned how the silhouettes remind me of the sci-fi film "Aeon Flux" but something about this collection brought to mind the short-lived English-Italian sci-fi TV series "Space: 1999" with Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, filmed in the late 70s. These beautiful, spartan looks would be right at home on our Moon Colony. Which we don't have yet. And might never have. But we can dream...

Here are some shots of the original costumes from "Space: 1999."

http://www.balenciaga.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Balenciaga

Head of Balenciaga since 2012, Alexander Wang continues to channel clothing from a future that will probaby never arrive, but it is fun to imagine such a sleek, ultra-functioning, ultra-high-tech future anyhow. When I posted his Spring-Summer '15 collection here, I remarked about how similar it all felt to the amazing costumes for the equally amazing live-action film of "Aeon Flux"  and the set for Wang's lookbook for this current collection, with its cement stairs and wall, and carefully planned "random" hills and unnaturally green grass even looks like some of the sets from "Aeon Flux" which portrayed a sanitized, engineered city of the future. And here we are again with the same glorious, spartan silhouette that looks it should be worn on the Lunar Colony...if we ever get one. And those boots! They appear to have a little pocket on the side!

Below: costumes from "Aeon Flux"

http://www.balenciaga.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Balenciaga

In December of 2012 when Alexander Wang took over the venerable house of Balenciaga from Nicolas Ghesquière, we wondered--worried?--what would be in store. But Wang has proved an admirable successor to Ghesquière and his Spring Summer '15 collection at Paris Fashion Week showed a menswear collection that, while referencing traditional elements, looked forward to the future. In fact, there is something about the collection--or perhaps it is the location of the photo shoot for the lookbook--that recalls for me the severe, spartan, streamlined costumes from the live action film version of "Aeon Flux" with Charlize Theron.

Below: costumes from "Aeon Flux."

But of course the name of the house will forever ring in my ears as the last word ever uttered, hilariously, by Myrtle Snow, the brilliant Frances Conroy's character, from "American Horror Story: Coven."

http://www.balenciaga.com/