INSIDE ‘BALENCIAGA BY DEMNA’ EXHIBITION
words NIA TOPALOVA
editor MAREK BARTEK
A decade of Balenciaga by Demna! The historic Laennec landmark at 40 rue de Sèvres in Paris hosted 101 exhibits personally curated by Demna, encapsulating his deeply personal, living archive. The retrospective exhibition includes 30 different collections created across ten years, breathing through the design codes, volumes, and silhouettes that have defined Demna’s body of work.
The curation revisits his enduring fascinations and philosophical provocations, his radical exercises in proportion and subversion of form. Found within are studies in the “readymade,” trompe-l’œil illusions, acts of upcycling, and a persistent questioning of fashion’s inherited rules, always rooted in the everyday.
The exhibition opens with a selection of objects once used as invitations to Balenciaga shows, Demna’s Spring 2026 final ready-to-wear collection for the House “Exactitudes”, and a rejection letter denying him internship at Balenciaga, which, he finds fortunate, sharing that his professional journey would have been completely different if he’d been accepted.
What Demna has accomplished at Balenciaga over the past ten years is too layered for a straightforward explanation. He’s managed to keep Cristóbal Balenciaga’s legacy intact by understanding it at its core, and reinterpreting it through his own sensibility, rooting it firmly in the present.
Demna grew up in post-Soviet Georgia and that context is impossible to separate from his work. It is visible in the choices he makes – faces with looks devoid of life, industrial fabrics and garments that often feel like shelter. That same context also exists in everything that surrounds them – environments designed to recreate feelings of displacement and unease. Altogether, they form a complete world, shaped by memory, war, and survival. In a way, all of this carries some strange kind of warmth, of familiarity. They reflect a shared discomfort with the world, but also offer a strange kind of solace, making his work incredibly personal.
His collections often speak in a political tone. His Fall 2022 show, staged inside a snow globe-like arena, was dedicated to Ukraine, referencing displacement, survival, and his own memories of fleeing conflict. He opened the show with a message about his past and how his own childhood was shaped by war.
Demna’s incredible “spicy” humor runs through everything he creates. His use of irony doesn’t cancel out the weight of his themes but instead it sharpens them even more. It allows the dystopian tragedy to coexist with the absurd. Cristóbal Balenciaga also designed from a place of instinct and depth. He followed structure, precision, and discipline. He changed the way garments moved, completely redefining the familiar silhouette. Christian Dior once called Balenciaga “the master of us all”, the one who worked in silence and often in solitude, respectfully uninterested. What connects Demna to Cristóbal is the method of work and the refusal to compromise. The commitment to silhouette, to a design that goes beyond the body and the space around it.
This exhibition is a self-curated archive looking back at a decade of work that has been both radically personal and entirely public. The show begins with a rejection letter, and ends with a complete body of work.
