Nonsense Not Nonces This Year at Balenciaga

An edited version of this article is published on UPfront, a site for news and opinion from University of Portsmouth students.

It’s the month of Halloween, and what better way to strike terror into my heart than by watching a ghoulish parade of unholy stick insects clad in weird cloth?

Balenciaga sounds like something I’d pay a Spanish man to do to me in a train station bathroom but today I found out it’s a fashion house – so even more grotesque. Their Summer 24 Collection begins with mournful strings and a French lady talking. Women in black gowns stride confidently alongside celling high crimson drapes, looking for all the world like Red Priestesses ready to birth shadow demons and conquer Westeros.

Balenciaga, I read, are infamous for Satanist imagery and a scandal including – among other beastly things – easter eggs within images from their Spring 23 Collection of court documents pertaining to the promotion of child pornography.

With echoes of Pizzagate, the New York Times suggested that this is all just high fashion meeting QAnon – the campaign being hungry for clickbait rather than jailbait, allegedly – but following a move to sue producers which was quickly dialled back, Balenciaga and creative director Demna did issue apologies for the offence caused, recognising the need to do better.

So that’s alright then.

Perhaps it’s hypocritical of us to lambast this so-called high fashion for exploiting children’s sexuality, when our cheap jeans, t-shirts and shoes exploit their labour. But while art is subjective, “death of the author” should not conjure vigilante fantasies of justice through dressmaking scissors.

But enough of that rabbit hole – back to the catwalk. A lady’s giving off Detective Columbo vibes – if he’d just barely escaped a velociraptor cage. She’s carrying a vajazzled handbag and an expression that would make me anxious about getting on a plane with her. Next, we have an individual who clearly got tangled up in their nan’s old curtains while escaping a house fire.

On the conveyor behind, we have your old physics teacher whose Robert Smith impersonator husband just passed away so she’s wearing all his black at once in mourning. Cruel to remind me that good music exists. I’m not even two minutes in and the dirge of strings with no emotional build up in the score is draining. It’s in the same key as the song at the end of Arrival, but I didn’t just see Amy Adams learn the language of time from the heptapods so she can relive the life with her dead child. Instead, there’s a bald woman with wrap around shades, her head looking like a reverse Robocop made of bubble-gum.

Finally, some colour, and it looks like a soiled bib. Next up, a grimacing woman with a shopping bag and she looks the type to put that bag on the seat next to her on the train then refuse to move it, even when it’s really busy and I’m clearly on crutches.

Wide shoulders stalk now, bald alien androgyny reminding me that I’d rather be watching Star Trek. Seconds turn to minutes long as days, yet the charcoal vomitorium soldiers on. The strings have segued into someone’s cat walking up and down a piano. Even if I could speak French, I wouldn’t be able to understand her over this cacophony. Then the tempo rises, electronic instruments join the fray. It sounds like bad 90s sci-fi now and the French lady is positively insistent but still drowned out by the furore.

I swear to God that last model had tattooed track marks up her arms. How chic. The Star Trek villains and alleyway dealers are back. I have tremendous anxiety and want a Marlboro for the first time in seven years. This is horrible. Why are that lady’s hips a bookcase?

No bespoke babies brandishing bondage bears as blessings to Baal, not this year, no. Balenciaga have gone from walking the garotte tightrope between edgy and beastly to ugly strutting like a hooligan on the night bus.

Fashion is a folly agreed upon; poetry for the preening peacock; vulgar displays for sexual selection that advertise us to predator and prey alike.

I’m quite happy with my Pugs Not Drugs t-shirt, thank you very much.

Family and Friends was the theme for what Demna describes as his most personal collection yet. His mother opened the show, and his husband – glowing like a haunted bride – ended it.

It is this final apparition I expect to find sitting on my chest tonight.

And I take that very personally indeed.