End of an Era: Demna’s Last Coup at Balenciaga Couture

In Paris this summer, Demna didn’t stage a fashion show. He staged a pause. His 54th couture collection—his last for Balenciaga—refused the logic of spectacle. Instead, it unfolded like a study: quiet, sculptural, and searching. What does haute couture mean when everything around it demands immediacy?

Demna closes his decade at Balenciaga not with a period, but with a kind of slanted ellipsis. “This collection is the perfect way for me to finish my decade,” he shared in a statement. “I have come as close as possible to being satisfied in this endless pursuit of impossible perfection—the defining ethos of Cristóbal Balenciaga.” And yet, nothing about the show suggested finality. The air was filled with unfinished thoughts.

The looks themselves were photographed across Paris—the city where Demna began his fashion career. Each image read like a note-to-self written on the surface of the city. Silhouettes moved through alleys, climbed façades, dissolved into Haussmannian stillness.

What they wore wasn’t simply “couture” in the expected sense. It was couture held under a microscope. Tulip lapels framed faces like architecture. Medici collars and Nosferatu necklines floated around bodies without asking to be admired. Lightness wasn’t decorative—it was the engineering. Corsetry wasn’t restrictive—it redefined ease.

There were echoes of Cristóbal throughout: in the precision of a 1967 houndstooth suit once worn by muse Danielle, now made strange again; in the purity of a pink debutante dress floating in the lightest organza; in the severity of tailoring that offered no stretch, no shortcuts, no softness without purpose.

Demna’s personal memories slipped in, too—like a 1957 floral motif reworked in sequins, pattern-matched on a skirt suit and handbag, pulled from the tablecloths of his grandmother’s kitchen. Elsewhere, corduroy was rendered in 300 kilometers of tufted embroidery. The joke? He finally made a pair of “corduroy pants I’d actually wear.”

The casting blurred lines, as always. Supermodels, muses, collaborators, and unretouched faces all walked side by side. Couture wasn’t about distance anymore. It was about proximity—about holding space for the imperfect and the too-perfect at once.

Kim Kardashian appeared as a living echo of Demna’s long-standing fascination with mid-century glamour—a type of beauty once defined by its polished flaws, now erased by social media’s sheen. Draped in a faux mink coat crafted from embroidered feathers, cinched into a flesh-toned silk slip dress reminiscent of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and wearing Elizabeth Taylor’s actual diamond earrings from Lorraine Schwartz’s private collection, she embodied an ideal Demna has chased for years: cinematic, hyper-styled, slightly unreal.

Those instincts were present throughout the collection. The images simmered with Demna’s signatures—what could be called his personal couture code. Hidden references, archival prints, and techniques that never announced themselves but revealed their intricacy on second glance. Isabelle Huppert’s look, with a sharply tailored pantsuit and hands framing her face, resembled a New Hollywood figure trying to hide fresh surgery with couture—a vision both absurd and exacting. It recalled the prosthetic lips from the Erewhon pre-fall 2024 show in Los Angeles: performance stitched into fashion.

The oversized suits—made to fit bodybuilders, yet shown slipping from shoulders—and the deliberately contorted evening gowns spoke to a decade of Demna rewriting the rules of elegance. Each piece in this final offering didn’t just reference his legacy—it collapsed it inward. He didn’t just design clothes. He constructed modern archetypes for a generation raised on distortion.

Logos disappeared. In their place: names. On handbags, on details. Not ownership, but identity. Elsewhere, flower brooches crafted from discarded tissue paper and silk pongee by Lemarié and William Amor became quiet declarations of process. A briefcase was reimagined as a jewelry box—for your laptop. Even the couture sneaker, Balenciaga’s first, was built using traditional shoemaking techniques.

Demna didn’t say goodbye. He left something behind instead: a collection that refused resolution, that lived in tension. Between weight and air. Between perfection and the impossibility of it. Between the house’s archive and the city’s sidewalks.
Between the first cut and the silence that comes after.