Become a Vogue Business Member to receive unlimited access to Member-only reporting and insights, our Beauty and TikTok Trend Trackers, Member-only newsletters and exclusive event invitations.
This article first appeared on Vogue.
There is a big black screen covering one side of the discreet studio space to which I’ve been sent for a meeting with Demna in a suburb of Paris. From the outside, the building looks like an anonymous garage. Inside, is the man who arrived at Balenciaga as a 34-year-old insurgent from Vetements in 2015, and is now moving on, aged 44, as one of the undisputed creative director titans of luxury fashion, charged to revive the flagging fortunes of Gucci.
He’s waiting for me at a table, in a grey sweatshirt, gaping with holes along a built-up shoulder line. I’m guessing he’s taking a break at the end of a day of fittings for the denouement of his time in Paris, the final couture show he’ll present in early July. But, who knows, maybe there’s stuff going on behind the black curtain for his Gucci debut in Milan in September, too. He was already contemplating what he wanted to do there in LA over the New Year’s holiday, he tells me. “We’d just bought a bungalow, and then the fires came. Loïck [his husband] and I got the alert to evacuate. And I was like, ‘Nooo — let me grab my laptop before we run!’”
The bungalow survived, but somehow that recollection summons a typically apocalyptic Demna scenario — as anyone who still shudders at the memory of the terrifying burning skies and flooded front row he conjured at his eve-of-the-pandemic March 2020 show will testify. A retrospective exhibition of his tumultuously influential Balenciaga decade opens tomorrow, fittingly titled ‘Balenciaga by Demna’. “I think these 10 years for me, they’re really this journey of how can we push the boundaries? How can we perceive fashion in a different way, especially within the luxury context?”
