How Did Balenciaga Get So Cheeky and So Biting?

A childhood of scarcity shaped how Demna Gvasalia sees the world — and became the "dark side" running through his designs.

Demna Gvasalia, a designer of 36, is a formidable figure.

He holds two full-time jobs: founder and designer of the fashion label Vetements, and, since 2015, creative director of Balenciaga.

At the Paris men's fashion week for spring/summer 2018, which has just wrapped, Demna Gvasalia was again the center of attention.

He moved the show into a shaded green jungle, taking his inspiration from "a young father taking his kid to the park on the weekend," so the male models each walked the runway leading a child by the hand. As always, plenty of "anti-fashion" hits came strolling out of the jungle: faux three-piece layered trousers, transparent plastic coats, oversized suit jackets.

At the same time, Balenciaga released a limited-edition bicycle made with the famous Paris boutique Colette, priced at 3,500 euros.

Two months ago, the ever elegant and dignified Balenciaga put out a bag that looks almost exactly like Ikea's plastic Frakta shopping bag, but sells for 2,145 US dollars — enough to buy more than 3,000 real Ikea bags. Ikea didn't mind in the least. Seeing how loudly the story landed, it played along and got several rounds of social-media marketing out of it.

Demna Gvasalia had no plans to stop there. In late June he used the same idea again, and Balenciaga released a white bag that looks like a department-store shopping bag — made in Italy from calfskin, with Nappa leather handles, at 1,100 US dollars.

In his hands, Balenciaga's style has turned street as never before, and openly embraced meme culture.

Sure enough, everyone began debating "how street style got into the luxury world." That has happened before and will keep happening. The nerve of this episode lies not in street style seeping in, but in how one man can take designs that look unfit for polite company, use them to turn around a lifeless old luxury house, and have all of society read the result as "a sense of humor."

To the fashion world, Demna Gvasalia is the child in The Emperor's New Clothes — the one who shouts.

Vetements Was Bad at Exactly the Right Moment

If the fashion designer who generated the most talk in 2016 was Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele, then this year's man of the hour is Demna Gvasalia.

He and his older brother Guram Gvasalia founded the streetwear label Vetements in 2013. Its style was street and deconstructed, with a little mockery and humor in it, and from the start it produced hit after hit — the yellow DHL T-shirt, a black police-uniform raincoat with "Vetements" printed across the back, deconstructed jeans.

"Enthusiastic" is the word for how the market took to the brand. As it happened, the years after Vetements launched coincided with a worldwide athleisure wave, when dressing like a slob became fashionable; sneakers turning into an item that goes with everything is one obvious example. In under three years, Vetements was stocked in more than 200 stores worldwide, and in 2016 it was invited to show at Paris Haute Couture Week as a "guest brand." Soon after, Kering announced that Demna Gvasalia would become creative director of Balenciaga.

Rising at the same time was the Russian designer Gosha Rubchinskiy. The two have somewhat similar styles: both keep finding new ways to make the whole world look hard at their Russian street style and take in its cynical, prank-driven humor. They also get on well. Demna Gvasalia opened one of Gosha's shows as a guest, wearing that yellow T-shirt that spoofs DHL.

Before these two, fashion had never seen a look that mixed the coarse and the fine and made both better for it. For years the entire industry had been studying one question: how to make people more beautiful, more poised, more distinctive. Even the occasional snarling punk look made itself cool through a core spirit of "rebelling against the patriarchy." Nobody had thought to make a joke out of "looking good" or "looking chic."

Where Did Demna Gvasalia's Designs Come From?

Demna Gvasalia was born in Georgia, on the Black Sea, a country wedged between Turkey and Russia. By his own account, he grew up "with Stalinism, Leninism and Communism." In all those years he read only two magazines, which carried a scrap of fashion news on the side.

As he remembers it, Georgians under Soviet rule all dressed much the same. He was already keenly interested in clothes as a child, because there was "never anything to change into." As he saw it, the taste of Georgian women in the 1980s and '90s was not quite that of Russian women; people back home preferred black, with a theatrical element added — a bit like the taste of people on Sicily, but taken further.

"Then the Soviet Union collapsed and Georgia opened up to the outside world. It was like an explosion. Suddenly you had Fanta, Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Vogue," Demna Gvasalia recalled. "The coolest thing was to have your birthday party at McDonald's. I celebrated a birthday there once. All I can say is, wow."

By 14, Demna Gvasalia had fallen for hip-hop. He was still living in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, and joined a crew called East Coast whose members idolized Notorious B.I.G. "Sometimes we'd smoke weed and then go start street fights with the West Coast crew. It was pretty stupid, but fun," Demna Gvasalia said. "After that I went into the dark period of my life. I was extremely antisocial, depressed, and hated everything."

The turning point came in 2000. That year he and his family moved to Düsseldorf, Germany, and stayed a year and a half. Demna Gvasalia treasures that stretch of time; he feels "it was then that he worked out what he wanted to do."

"Living in Germany was a culture shock. There was so much to discover — music, fashion, art. For all those years I'd heard nothing about any of it," Demna Gvasalia said. "It was like I had bulimia for it. Remember, I was already 19 when I got to Germany. At 19 I was learning what a lot of people knew at 12. So I was busy exploring and discovering, because there was so much new to learn."

He added: "That late information did shape me, in a way."

The rest of the story gets simpler. Back in Georgia, his family had fought hard against his studying fashion, on the grounds that "you can't feed yourself doing design." So Demna Gvasalia read economics as an undergraduate, and once he was in Germany his family urged him to make a living at a bank.

Instead he chose to do his graduate work at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, and then interned at Martin Margiela, taking his master's degree during the internship. His exaggerated silhouettes are in fact learned straight from that house.

He still talks today about this French luxury fashion house, founded in 1988 and now gone (in the original interview Demna Gvasalia used the words "no longer exists"; he most likely meant that founder Martin Margiela announced in 2009 that he was leaving the label bearing his own name). It was there, he says, that he learned methodology: how to cut, how to make something new, how to treat clothes.

As for the jokes and the pranks, Demna Gvasalia calls them a release of an inner "dark side."

That floor-length black trench coat with "Vetements" across the back, for instance, has nothing to do with the "attack on France's Charlie Hebdo" the market later read into it.

Demna Gvasalia collects real police uniforms. He owns about 15 security guard outfits and wears a different one each day. "I don't know why I have this preference. It probably comes from some instinct for self-protection in me," he said. For a while he was obsessed with gathering these clothes, buying them and hanging them in his studio; the floor-length black trench coat with "Vetements" on the back was designed while he looked at them.

"There's a lot of darkness in my designs, even if not everyone feels it. For me, the dark side inside gets expressed in a more creative way," Demna Gvasalia said. "I design better when I'm not very happy. When I'm happy, I don't have much creative inspiration."

At Last He Went to Work on Balenciaga

Judging by the stunts Balenciaga keeps pulling lately, there is no doubt Demna Gvasalia brought Vetements' way of running a brand, and its design style, over to this house too.

Earlier he said that one important test in deciding whether to take the job was whether he could tell a different story at Balenciaga than the one he tells at Vetements. It hasn't quite worked out that way: under his control, the two brands plainly lend each other strength.

Take Vetememes, the knockoff brand that mimics Vetements, which recently put out a collection spoofing Balenciaga. The pieces have Vetements' hallmarks, oversized silhouettes and street style, but the collection is called "Boolenciaga," which seems to be poking fun at Balenciaga as well.

This knockoff brand has long imitated Vetements by spoofing the spoof. Its most famous piece simply changed the lettering on the floor-length trench coat printed with "Vetements" across the back to read Vetememes.

Demna Gvasalia's attitude has stayed relaxed throughout. He has said publicly that he won't sue the knockoff brand, and that he hopes it is having as much fun as he is. Even though this "Boolenciaga" joke went a bit far, touching both brands he controls, he showed no urge to stop it.

The result, of course, paid off on several fronts at once: both Vetements and Balenciaga became something people talked about again.

Founded in 1919, Balenciaga first opened in Spain and later made its way to Paris. Its founder, Cristóbal Balenciaga, ranked with Christian Dior as a "revolutionary of the silhouette." Designers working at the same time included Coco Chanel and her sworn rival Elsa Schiaparelli.

Up to 1972, the year its founder died, the house was never especially well behaved. In innovation and daring, Balenciaga was a historic pioneer. In 1953 it gave the market the balloon coat; in 1957, the high-waisted baby-doll dress. In the 1960s it also brought new fabrics to market, developing silk gazar. In 1967 Cristóbal Balenciaga designed a minimalist wedding dress that, in a period of the 1950s and '60s ruled by cinched waists and A-line silhouettes, overturned the look of the traditional evening gown at the level of the silhouette itself.

In the 1960s, the veteran Vogue editor Bettina Ballard wrote a memoir about Cristóbal Balenciaga, In My Fashion, in which she assessed the house's tastes very bluntly.

"He never made clothes for pretty girls, or for sweet-faced girls, and many of the models he hired were known for looking 'ferocious.' One of the fiercest of them, named Colette, walked like a zombie out of Bram Stoker's Dracula; her head was large and her shoulders drooped, wildly out of keeping with her face. Any woman could wear those off-proportion Balenciaga clothes," Bettina Ballard wrote.

In 1968, before his death, Cristóbal Balenciaga closed the Balenciaga fashion house. More than twenty years later Jacques Bogart S.A. revived it, and only once Kering took over did Balenciaga settle into the business model of changing creative directors again and again to keep creativity and buzz alive.

Michel Goma, Josephus Thimister, Nicolas Ghesquière and Alexander Wang were the creative directors before Demna Gvasalia. Nicolas Ghesquière, who took the job in 1997, brought Balenciaga a modern feel, and his hit was the motorcycle bag; Alexander Wang, arriving in 2012, brought it a sporty one. On the whole, though, all of them worked hard to express the elegance of feminine beauty, just as Cristóbal Balenciaga had done.

Not Street Style, But Irony — the More Sarcastic, the More High-End

Demna Gvasalia has said: "At Vetements I don't think about elegance. At Balenciaga it's a key factor, but I can define elegance in a new way."

This goes well beyond "a different creative director, a different fashion style." The luxury world has never lacked examples of tearing down and rebuilding, but most of them were reinventions of aesthetics — Gucci last year, for instance, simply found another way to be beautiful.

Alessandro Michele came to the show when Demna Gvasalia presented his first collection for Balenciaga. He said: "I think Demna Gvasalia is looking for a different kind of beauty, especially in an industry that has long grown tired of defining beauty and dictating it."

Since the 1990s, fashion has gone through blazing red lips, corsets, magazine fashion spreads, bold prints, do-it-yourself clothing, sun-tanning, women's trousers, zippers, open-toe shoes, shoulder pads, stiletto heels, miniskirts, hot pants, thongs and the rest — and then, all at once, lost its appetite (which may be another way of saying "fashion runs in cycles").

After the heated arguments over convenience, beauty, public nudity, mass production, the effects of globalization, logo worship, "women dressing like men," even "men dressing more and more like women" — all topics that were sensitive and fiercely contested in their day — none of it felt new anymore. The only thing left to challenge was rigid social class and the attitudes that come with it.

That is exactly what Demna Gvasalia did. This Georgian designer brought the finish of haute couture to Vetements' streetwear, and in return brought streetwear's attitude into his work at Balenciaga. Both belong under the aftereffects of consumerism: if the old rule was "the brand you buy makes you who you are," now someone has come along to break the stereotype.

Mocking Consumerism, and Opening a New Consumer Market

Kering has always rated Demna Gvasalia highly; every quarterly report since he took the job has named him. According to those reports, Balenciaga kept expanding its retail network in 2016, opening stores in Germany, Hong Kong and Los Angeles. Its e-commerce site performed well, and it had more than 1.2 million followers on Facebook and 3 million on Instagram.

"This reflects the brand's growing reputation. Since Demna Gvasalia became creative director of Balenciaga in 2015, he has carried on the house's tradition and renewed it with his own creativity. His designs put the founder's core values into practice and give them a place in contemporary society. Balenciaga has thus opened a new chapter in its history, and its standing in ready-to-wear carries real weight," Kering's 2016 annual report said.

Demna Gvasalia, it seems, is winning ever wider recognition. Balenciaga, at any rate, has certainly acknowledged his talent. On the official website, the work of every earlier designer has disappeared; the only thing left to see is Demna Gvasalia's work, plus a looping clip of the jungle runway show from Paris men's fashion week.

On the day in 2016 when Kering announced his appointment at Balenciaga, Georgian state television reportedly called it "a national holiday." Demna Gvasalia says that sounds silly and is a little embarrassing.

He also says his family has never quite worked out what he and his brother Guram Gvasalia are up to out there, or what any of these achievements actually mean.

"My grandmother doesn't much like my designs. She says they're not her thing," he said.

Cover and in-text images: pmcwwd.files.wordpress.com, theredlist.com, blog.monicadmurgia.com, upload.art.ifeng.com, htatic.highsnobiety.com.