BALENCIAGA FALL 2022

“Personally, I have sacrificed too much to war. This past week is bringing back all the memories that my mother and I put away in a box, and never looked at. We never got over it.” 

Raw resolve was in Demna’s voice as he spoke on the phone about why he’d decided to go ahead with the Balenciaga show. The horrors being inflicted on civilians in Ukraine are re-traumatizing for a man who was a child refugee at the age of 10, fleeing war in Abkhazia, Georgia in 1993. He understands only too accurately, from experience, what the world is seeing as women struggle to take their children to safety in the harshest conditions. “It’s the same," he said. "The same aggressor, maybe even the same planes that did it to us. Who knows? And seeing this, I was thinking for a while, ‘What are we doing here, with fashion? Should I cancel?’ But no: I decided we must resist.”

Demna’s connection with Ukraine’s plight is all the more wrenching for the fact that one of his displaced family’s first refuges was in Odessa, the beautiful city in the south of the country which is currently under threat of being occupied by Russian forces. “I went to school in Ukraine. It was always my nightmare of embarrassment to have to stand up and speak poetry in front of people—but now I realized I wanted to do it.”

To preface the show, blue and yellow Ukrainian-flag T-shirts were laid on every chair, with a printed statement from Demna, ending on the note that love must win. Then his voice filled the auditorium, reading the encouragement to believe in Ukraine by Oleksandr Oles, one of the nation’s great cultural poet-heroes. No doubt about it, Demna wanted that to be heard solely in the Ukrainian language. No translation was provided. It would be understood by that those need to hear it, he said.

East-West territorial, ideological and military power struggles in Europe go back very far. But always, amongst all the dual-lingual yet culturally distinct communities co-inhabiting borderlands between power blocks, it’s defenseless peoples who become victims. Ask Kim Kardashian about the history of her Armenian heritage. There she was, all wrapped up in Balenciaga tape, a friend of Demna and the house. A huge fuss, on globally-radiating celeb levels, ensued before the show had begun.

Images courtesy of Balenciaga.