Balenciaga Occupies Wall Street with Rediculous Models cat-walkers
In its first show outside Paris, the French brand makes a financial play.
Golden Page Paris
On Sunday, the last day of the seventh straight week of a tumbling Dow, as titans of industry and finance gathered in Davos, Switzerland, for a delayed World Economic Forum, a different gathering took place in front of the New York Stock Exchange.
There was screaming. There was jostling. There were gathered police officers and barricades.
They weren’t there for Occupy Wall Street redux, or any sort of protest about the current markets. They were there for the Balenciaga spring 2023 show, the brand’s first show being held outside of Paris, which also happened to be the first show ever held on the trading floor of the symbolic beating heart of American wealth creation and destruction.
Even the financial system, it seems, can be seduced by the promise of fashion. At least for the right price.
Whatever the debate around Demna, the mononymic creative director of Balenciaga — is he a genius, a charlatan, the most influential designer of his generation? — there’s no denying he has impeccable timing. Or that in an era when so much seems reduced to the momentary and the micro, from daily TikTok trends to dressing subcultures, he is the rare designer of giant ambition, willing to take big swings at our shared reality: climate change, celebrity culture, war. And, now, money.
Inside the soaring, neon-lit chamber where company executives gather to ring the opening bell when their companies go public, guests that included Kanye West, Christine Quinn of “Selling Sunset,” Megan Thee Stallion and Mayor Eric Adams perched on stools that snaked through the jumble of broadcast booths.
The first model stomped out in a full-body black latex unitard, with pinholes for the eyes and mouth, worn under a black double-breasted wool coat, shoulders sharp and padded, a luxurious satin pussy bow dangling down at the neck. Oh, and some wire-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of her nose.
As statements go about the fetishization of finance, its dangers and allure, not to mention the dangers and allure of going back to the office, it doesn’t come much clearer than that.
In case you missed it, it happened time and time again. All of the models wore the bodysuit, their faces obscured, some with tufts of hair springing out the top: individuality smothered by the pursuit of lucre, all of them slaves to work and fashion, the pumping blood of the city. (Backstage, Demna wore the latex, too, though he said the bodysuit wasn’t going to be for sale.)
