Balenciaga designer puts friends and family on Paris runway

PARIS — Balenciaga designer Demna Gvasalia took a personal turn for the luxury label's runway show in Paris on Sunday (Oct 1), sending out a lineup of reconstructed trench coats, oversize bomber jackets and floor-sweeping floral gowns on an eclectic cast of models plucked from his entourage.

His mother opened the show, marching down a long runway set like a stage and lined with draped red velvet curtains, wearing pointy heels and a long, roomy trench coat, navy blue on one side, black on the other, tightly cinched at the waist with a cloth belt.

Gvasalia — usually known as Demna — used the show's soundtrack to throw the focus on the construction process, featuring actress Isabelle Huppert reading instructions on how to make a tailored jacket.

"It’s a complex job and I wanted to show that appreciation and also to value it," Demna told journalists after the show, explaining that as Huppert's voice sped up during the show, the idea was to relay the intensity of the process, not anger.

Rethinking styles, Demna aimed to make coats that looked as if worn over the shoulders, adding extra sleeves that hung down, and fashioned a clutch bag to look like a pointy-toed shoe.

"I don’t believe in a perfect, polished, beige Angora world," he said, noting his approach is not to make people look rich, or successful, or powerful.

Other models in the Kering owned label's show included a fashion professor, artists, students, a public relations executive, a personal trainer and online fashion magazine The Cut's fashion critic Cathy Horyn.

Closing the show was the designer's husband, Loik Gomez, a music artist known as BFRND, in a wedding dress. Worn with a long, white lace veil over his head, the dress was made from seven dresses, “cut, tiered and piled together anew”, according to the show notes.

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