“We’re more and more controlled, more manipulated, more surveilled,” he says. Balenciaga’s spring-summer 2020 show included a model wearing an “18+” logo on his sweatshirt—an apparent stance against the hunt for nubile models. “I spent my holidays behind a sewing machine,” he tells me with delight.It is starting to get dark out, but we have made it back to the house just in time.
In 2009, recently graduated from fashion school, he got a job at Maison Margiela and began to work at making clothes. 1 in my approach—whenever I’m doing a fitting, one of the first questions is, How do you feel in it?” Gvasalia says. “It’s unusually busy here!” Gvasalia exclaims, and begins studying their owners from afar. Money was tight, so his parents always bought him clothing a few sizes ahead, and this extra cloth became more comfortable to him than well-fitted clothes. “You need to get into details,” he says. “I looked over and over the documentation of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s work and tried to feel the beauty, the architecture of the shape and the human body,” he says. The line will debut in Paris this July, where it will almost de facto be the explosive event of Couture Week.
“It’s kind of good not to be there all the time, so you have things to talk about.”) In Zurich, he keeps the mornings for himself and Gomez. Shop Now.
He dons a coat, Wellingtons, and a black Balenciaga cap, and we head on a path through the woods. Such experiences were his coming of age both as a man and a designer. Does it make you feel ‘I’m sexy tonight’?
Gomez, wearing a white buttoned shirt cheekily embroidered with trompe l’oeil lederhosen straps, brings over a blue-and-white china plate of gorgeous Swiss confections, and Gvasalia eventually has a Coca-Cola in a lowball glass mysteriously embossed with the White House seal. In early winter, when I visit Gvasalia at his house, set on the outskirts of a hilly village that’s itself on the outskirts of Zurich, I find myself standing in pastoral silence after ringing a bell at the front gate—until a yellow DHL van nearby pulls out from its parking space and zooms off down the little road.The steady churn of popularity is all the more impressive given the openness of Gvasalia’s current schedule. “It’s important for a modern brand to have age diversity; it makes it more authentic,” Gvasalia explains.
“It is less about ‘fashion’ and more about amazing, beautiful—from my point of view—clothes,” he says. “I can have even more fun,” he says.Some of this freewheeling focus is about to fall away.
I realized I really needed a narrative in my work. In mid--morning, like a Romantic hero, Gvasalia goes for a long walk in the woods, and by the time he returns, at 11, he feels creatively charged and ready for his job. The spring-summer 2020 Balenciaga show, set against blue carpeting and a swirl of seating banks that many people took to be a reference to the European parliament, was based on the idea of power dressing. Do we need to buy this other thing?” he asks.
“To me, couture is above all trends.
No trends, no seasons, no clustering of cool; each garment about the individual, and made to suit. He became a vegetarian, began to exercise, and, this past autumn, departed his post at Vetements, leaving the enterprise in the care of his brother (and cofounder) Guram. What started with a take on the classic corporate-political power suit ended with a study in great, billowing ballroom dresses.Over the past five years, Gvasalia’s aesthetic has changed Balenciaga from one of several jewels in fashion’s high firmament into a kind of magic stone—strangely shaped, completely hypnotic.