How One of Fashion’s Great Names Turned to Spite and Contempt — Only to Find Itself Devoured by Them
We’re going to do something a little different today. I’m going to attempt to tell the story of how the global economy went wrong — unleashing a fascist mega-wave upon the world — by way of…a fashion brand. Now, if you’re into fashion and culture, this should be interesting, and if you’re not, I’ll try to make it so. The politics will come at the end, and we’ll begin with…
Have you heard of the way that Balenciaga imploded? The story, at least the one that’s told, goes like this. It’s a “high-fashion brand” that did a photoshoot with kids holding…teddy bears..in bondage. Bad taste? This prompted furious accusations of pedophilia, particularly from the right, who then found another photoshoot in which some background prop was a doc of a Supreme Court case about pedophilia. Coincidence? Bad luck? Either way, the conspiratorialists went crazy. Soon enough, Balenciaga was the subject of…LOL…a Tucker Carlson tirade.
What really happened here? Something far more interesting than the story that’s told above, and something far more serious than the conspiracy theory of pedophilia. Nobody can say for sure that she’s not a witch — or that Balenciaga isn’t a satanic pedophile cult…but my guess is they’re just trying to sell hapless suckers overpriced…not even clothes, but far more profitable stuff, like $800 sunglasses that cost $4 to make.
A much better way to tell this story — and it contains the story of how the global economy turned into this shattered smoking wreck in it, is really a parable about it — goes like this. This is what Balenciaga used to be. It was founded by a guy called Cristobal Balenciaga — a genius who became a couturier to the great and good. He was renowned for astonishing designs like the original Egg Coat — ultra-modern, yet perfectly elegant, precisely proportioned, severely, haughtily sophisticated. Cristobal Balenciaga’s house was the epitome of an institution that emerged after the last world war: high fashion.
Now, there’s an important context there. It was only after the last world war that, really, one of the most modern freedoms emerged at all: self-expression. Through the early 1900s, what you could wear was actually legally regulated in many countries. Sorry, only this kind of person can wear this particular garment. Black people couldn’t dress “above their condition,” in 1700’s America, only nobles could wear silk in Victorian England, even in the 1920s, bobbed hair was banned in parts of America. But after the war, self-expression became a beautiful and noble kind of new freedom, particularly in Europe. And “high fashion houses” were born — though we wouldn’t call them that, really, for decades to come, as they took the world by storm.
Yet now if you peruse Balenciaga’s offerings for a moment, you might well wonder, what the hell happened? Go ahead, take a look. It’s oversized jackets that look like your grandpa would wear them. Neon green faux fur coats. Jeans the size of small countries. Elegant, modern, proportioned, sophisticated…it’s not. It seems to be precisely the opposite. A middle finger to any form of…taste.
So why is it like that?
Well, that was a deliberate choice. You see, as “high fashion houses” became a global institution after the world war, they began to be traded like bargaining chips amongst gigantic corporations. And every time one was bought or sold — as its particular aesthetics waxed and waned — a new designer was hired to try and put a fresh spin on it. They grew more and more detached from their origins. Until about 2010 or so, you could still buy an Egg Coat from Balenciaga, and I know that because my lovely wife almost did. But then Balenciaga’s new owner hired a new designer to reboot it, in the name of, what else, more profits.
The new designer they hired was a guy called Demna. Demna had a small fashion brand of his own, which…wasn’t about fashion at all. It was about something else. And because it was edgy and cool, Balenciaga’s new owners hired him to turn Balenciaga’s waning fortunes around. Did the world really want sophistication? Or…
So what was Demna’s Big Idea? If you grew up in the 90s, like me, you understood it intimately. Anti-fashion. The idea was to mock sophistication and precision tailoring and beautiful fabrics and so forth. Think back to the 90s. It was the heyday of a super-sophisticated kind of fashion — remember George Michael’s video with all the supermodels on the runway? Those were the days of figures like Alexander McQueen. His most visionary moment was to send supermodel Shalom Harlow out in a perfectly fitted virginal wedding-like dress, and as she stopped on the runway, and twirled, two industrial robotic arms sprayed her, violently, with paint. Now there’s a message, a moment, a comment, a thought. About many things — economics, politics, sexuality, all of it.
Demna’s Big Idea wasn’t about any of this. There weren’t any heart-stopping moments at shows. Anti-fashion was the ultimate 90s throwback, and like I said, if you were there, you remember it, because you lived it. Giant oversized stuff, almost as a middle finger to the Alexander McQueen and Shalom Harlow crowd. Jeans the size of a small car, jackets that looked like they came from grandpa, who was also a bear. But…in the 90s…we…meaning youth culture…turned anti-fashion into a thing…because we were…poor.
It was a statement of defiance and rebellion — the only one, really, that we had, aesthetically. I don’t have $5000 for an Alexander McQueen jacket. God, it’s beautiful, I wish I did. I’m going to pretend I don’t even care by wearing this oversize bowling shirt, because it’s ridiculous and funny and ugly. I don’t need beauty. See? Check out how ugly this stuff is! I’m going to flaunt it! It barely fits! The colors are clashing! Everything’s all wrong! I look practically homeless! Anti-fashion was born.
It was a new thing, you have to understand. The 60s were ultra modern, about Pierre Cardin, a great genius, the 70s, sleek in more earthy way, the 80s, the decade of excess, hit it with a splash of neon. And then along came the 90s and rejected it all, at least where it counts, in youth culture, which went massively anti-fashion. How massively? Oasis didn’t wear Alexander McQueen, they wore…dorky anoraks. Pulp was out there wearing stuff from thrift shops. Acid house which had become rave was warehouses of people in jeans so oversized that could have smuggled families of refugees. Anti-fashion was the fashion of the 90s.
And Demna’s Big Idea was to bring it back.
Remember, the question is: how do you get from Cristobal’s pursuit of beauty, to Demna’s obsession with…ugliness? I mean, nobody thinks a gigantic neon green faux fur coat is pleasing. You buy it because it’s ugly.
But to persuaded to buy it, something else has to happen. Anti-fashion happened because it was cheap. One day, I went to a thrift store, as we all did in those days, and I hit the jackpot. Someone — probably a 1970s p*mp — had sold off his wardrobe. I walked away with a neon green leisure suit, a hot pink one, a canary yellow one, and several silk shirts to go with them. They barely fit me, and that only made it even better. I paid the princely sum of…$25. Demna’s version is $5000.
To sell anti-fashion as high fashion, it had to be marketed as something dangerous, cool, edgy. Remember, you’re not buying because it fits well, or it’s made out of nice fabric, or it’s particularly beautiful, or anything remotely like that. So why are you buying it? Because it’s offensive, to put it bluntly.
Demna supercharged what he’d been doing at his little fashion label. Now, for Balenciaga, the outfits and garments went to another level. They began to…mock refugees. They mocked the EU. He’d sell you a sweatshirt for $2000 that was…what?….a dig at…Europe? Because it was something that a refugee had to wear, penniless, just what you’d get at some kind of souvenir shop? If that makes your head spin, then look and think about what it means to pay $1000 for a “Europa!” Hoodie that’s indistinguishable from the one some poor homeless person would have to wear as they stepped homeless onto its shores.
What does that even mean? Was this satire? Was Balenciaga making fun of the new European far right? Or was it making fun of refugees, of Europe, of modernity itself? Which one was it? Coy, Demna wouldn’t say. The mystery was the point.
Go ahead and look at the sneakers above. Tell me they aren’t meant to be reminiscent — to an extremely precise degree — of what homeless people and refugees have to wear.
One of Balenciaga’s latest shows sent models dressed as “refugees” clutching trash bags down a snowswept runway. The fashion industry swooned. Relevance!! Politics!! There’s something to be admired about that, perhaps. Demna calls himself a “forever refugee,” pointing out that his family was affected by Georgian civil war. And yet despite the context, the end result is something even more sinister than high fashion refugees stumbling in the snow. It’s refugee chic. The end result? $1500 “trash pouches” as handbags.
Something’s obviously very wrong with that. That’s not bringing attention to the plight of refugees so much as…exploiting it shamelessly and in a particularly vulgar way. And to the average person, all that’s lost, too. They just see a trash pouch handbag for $1500, and are scandalized, or titter. Refugees become jokes and objects of scorn this way, as do the poor. To really engage with social problems at the level of fashion isn’t about just sending models dressed as refugees down a runway to hawk $1500 “trash bag” handbags — it asks a designer to do something more like Vivienne Westwood does, and really think about social problems in an intelligent way.
When you’re selling $1500 “trash pouches” as handbags, surely something’s gone wrong. If it’s satire, who’s really the target? If it’s business…isn’t it exploitative at the most vulgar level?
What was this about? Was it satire, or was it serious? Did Demna really hate refugees? Was it OK to call this high fashion — and sell it to people for thousands of dollars. Who’d even be dumb enough to buy this kind of thing?
As it turned out, there was a social group that loved it. The world’s super-rich, or at least their kids. Especially the international ones. Hence, if you went to London or Paris, you’d see huge, huge amounts of Very Rich Asians, tooling around in this stuff.
And that was for a reason. It didn’t happen randomly. That reason went like this.
In terms of brand positioning, Balenciaga was doing something new. It was mocking the institutions of modernity. It’s brand was about contempt. Contempt, particularly, for the West.
That’s precisely why it became such a hit with the kids of the Chinese super rich, not to mention Russians. They might not have understood it explicitly — but this is what branding is, sending messages to people they don’t process consciously, but that work on them unconsciously — but the idea of contempt for the West spoke to them. It spoke volumes to them. It matched their attitudes with a kind of eerie precision.
So now you’d see super rich Chinese kids walking around London and Paris…in head to toe Balenciaga…looking like refugees. The point, in this context, was very clear. Demna might have meant it satirically — even critically, hey, Europe, look at how badly you treat these poor people — but to the class of people who were now buying Balenciaga in droves, it was funny. Edgy. Cool. It was “cool” to look like a refugee precisely because there was a shared contempt for the West — the coded message in all this, really — here.
The joke had turned into something else now. A monster, of a kind. Now you had super-rich kids in outfits that cost more than most people made in a month…looking like refugees…as a form of contempt for the West. Wandering through the heart of Western cities, sold to them by a Western “luxury” brand.
What had even happened here?
The point I want to make is this. Balenciaga was inevitable. It was a symptom of the global economy gone wrong. To sell stuff to a new class of rising super rich in places like China — the only people left, really, who power the luxury industry at all, with that much money — a brand would have to come along whose entire raison d’être was nothing but contempt for the West. Because that’s what they felt, too. Balenciaga was really a symptom of a global economy gone badly, badly wrong, in this sense.
What happened next, though, was even sadder and funnier. Celebs like Kim K started wearing it. They did it because now this unconscious contempt had become mainstream. It was cool to be contemptuous, even if you didn’t really know it — why would you care? You were just trying to fit in.
Anti-fashion was one thing when we were poor kids back in the 90s. But to sell a $5000 version of it to hapless suckers? You needed influencers. The kids of the Chinese super rich could afford it, and bought into the idea of contempt for the West — ha-ha, let’s look like refugees! But the average Westerner couldn’t afford it. They could only afford a taste of it — which is what modern “luxury” is all about. You don’t really get any luxury — you can only afford a pair of sunglasses, and those’ll cost you $800, thank you very much, but hey, at least now you’re branded, too. You’re part of the club.
It’s faux luxury, really — the game of selling accessories to the hapless masses, who think they’re now upper class, in the upper echelons of status, who get the rush of they first-class lounge they’ll never go to. And it works, when you’ve got influencers selling them that illusion. Hey — you’ll never be Kim K. But if you just buy those sunglasses…maybe you can have a small taste of that kind of glamour. Don’t you want that? Don’t you need that?
But Kim K was only buying into this vision because the super rich around the globe were. Contempt for the poor? The West? Sign me up! How funny is this, guys? We all look ridiculous, and we’ve spent more than these idiots earn in a year to do it! LOL! That’s how powerful we really are. We’re mocking them, and they don’t even know it.
But now Balenciaga had a Really Big Problem. Live by the Influencer, Die by the Influencer. You see, let’s go back to the beginning. Way back when Cristobal founded the fashion house with his name, the grandes dames who patronized it did it for a reason: they loved the clothes. They spent fortunes with him because there was substance there. They didn’t do it because he was selling contempt, but because he was selling a kind of radical, piercing beauty. You couldn’t come close to getting it anywhere else. They swooned, and a legend was born.
Image Credit: Vogue
But what happens when nobody’s buying into it…for the stuff? The actual stuff? When nobody loves your fashion brand for the clothes? The tailoring, the fabrics, the immaculate cuts — they’re just buying it to send a message of contempt, at the upper echelons, towards the West, refugees, the poor, and at the lower echelons, to have a taste of what life for the upper echelons is like, what it feels like to be that powerful, that you can mock an entire world with your clothes?
Of course, you can do that for nothing, too. Just like we did in the 90s. Want to look like a refugee? Just go to the nearest thrift store, not Balenciaga, LOL. You go to Balenciaga to send a message — contempt.
So what happens when nobody loves your brand for the thing itself? When it’s all just marketing? Smoke and mirrors? Hype? Just a message…of something as mean and ugly as contempt? Because of course to position anti-fashion as high-fashion, to persuade people to part with huge amounts of money for stuff that’s ugly and vulgar, there’s got to be a message far bigger than the stuff? Well, what happens is that your brand can come crashing down at any instant.
One small mistake, and it’s all over. Because in truth, nobody loves what you stand for. It’s just a club joined together by spite, really. And that doesn’t bond anyone, very well, for very long. Don’t be spiteful, mean, ugly, enough — or not in the right way — and they’ll turn on you, too. Contrast that with…well…Cristobal making beautiful coats. There was something real to love. Something with grandeur and elegance, of real power — remember how self-expression was the most modern of all freedoms. That’s why the original Balenciaga’s still around — that idea, making things people love, because they give them radical self-expression, had staying power.
But this one? Making things that are just coded ways of signaling how much contempt you have for everyone? Well, anyone can do that. It has no staying power at all. And because your only message is about contempt, well, you’d better not get on the wrong side of the contemptuous. You can’t do things like provocative photoshoots, really, unless they aim at the targets the contemptuous already hate, unless they express thinly veiled bigotry, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and so forth — because, remember, your entire shtick is making people feel better about themselves by hating someone less powerful than them.
But cross that line the wrong way — and the contemptuous will turn on you, too. This is what really happened to Balenciaga. Demna’s not a pedophile — well, I don’t know that, but I’m going to go way out on a limb and guess. But he is someone that did something ugly. He used contempt to turn anti-fashion into high-fashion.
Contempt by punching downwards. At democracy, the poor, refugees, kids, Europe, and so on. Contrast that with the 90s. We weren’t trying to be spiteful when we made anti-fashion a thing — at least not in a mean way, and especially not to anyone less powerful than us poor kids. Kurt Cobain? Remember him? He wore women’s fur coats and sunglasses and even skirts — a lot of us did back then — not to mock women, but to mock the straightness of macho male culture. We wore that stuff to punch upwards. Hey, George Michael and Alexander McQueen and Shalom Harlow — I can’t afford, LOL, $10k for a jacket. I’m going to be as ugly as I can. This warehouse? It belongs to us tonight, and we’re all just wearing $20 baggy jeans, and nobody cares what anyone looks like, because this about belonging, music, art, beauty, truth, togetherness.
See the difference?
Let me be very clear about what I’m saying, because some people will try to deliberately miss the point. Am I saying pedopilia’s just great? A photoshoot with kids and bondage bears is…just fine? Of course not. As an abused kid myself, let me assure, you, pedophilia is not OK. It’s sick and depraved.
The point I’m making here is very, very different. It goes like this.
When your brand is about contempt…you have to keep pushing it. That’s what people expect. Hey, who are we going to be mean to next, bully tomorrow, hate in the next collection, demean and belittle now? You have to keep on finding new targets — yesterday, it was democracy and refugees and the homeless, but tomorrow demands a newer, even edgier victim. So who’s it going to be? You can see how easy it to put a step wrong, and sooner or later, you have to cross a line that even the spiteful and contemptuous, your own fans, think goes too far.
In this sense, Balenciaga was the world’s first far-right high fashion brand. Not in a naive sense — that the dorky guys of America’s far right decked themselves out in $5000 neon green faux fur coats and refugee sneakers. In a far more real, pervasive, and ugly way than that: the average person was made to think that being contemptuous and spiteful and hateful was cool. Desirable, glamorous, fun. Balenciaga might not have even thought of itself as a far-right brand, and that’s only a sign of its own weak thinking — because that’s what it’s indistinguishable from, and to say in the world of branding is a dire thing to have to say. If the only people in the world who really deliciously enjoy making fun of democracy and refugees as something hilarious and edgy are you and the far right…what are you, really, but them?
But that itself is a contradiction in terms. A…far-right…luxury high fashion brand? Remember, the entire idea of fashion is about liberalism. It’s about self-expression as the most modern and sophisticated of freedoms, one that only emerged after the last war, and the world beat the fascists. The fascists don’t want anyone to express themselves, after all. Fashion only exists because democracy does — in fundamentalist, fanatical societies, like, say, Iran, it’s not allowed to really exist much at all. In that sense, the idea of high fashion as something that has contempt for democracy, for its values, of justice, truth, beauty, warmth, kindness — it’s incredibly perverse, and it was never going to work.
How can I say that Balenciaga’s something like a “far right” brand when Demna appears to be trying to sympathize with refugees? Well, there’s sympathy — and then there’s crass exploitation. Balenciaga’s exploiting them to sell stuff, at the end of the day. Hence, preposterous vulgarities like the $1500 trash handbag (hey, really sympathize with them? Maybe give them some of that money, I don’t know.) But when you’re exploiting refugees…just like the far right…then you have a problem of being indistinguishable from it. And that is a Very Big Problem indeed, which is at the heart of how Balenciaga ended up here.
Rest assured that the average person who buys a $1500 “trash pouch” is emphatically NOT doing it as an expression of solidarity, LOL, with refugees. But as a form of contempt against them, and everyone else, too. In that sense, Balenciaga’s aesthetics are worse than problematic — they’re self-defeating, and they make a mockery of us all, involving us in the spectacle of endless, omnipresent, omnivorous contempt, which is consuming the world a little more every day.
So when I point out that “Balenciaga’s far right,” I mean it in a subtle way. I don’t mean that Demna’s far right, or that he intended this to happen, or that its corporate owners are. I mean that this is how, in the real world, the brand is positioned, read, decoded. Want to show contempt for Western democracy and its institutions? Want to cosplay being a refugee with a $1500 trash pouch handbag? Want to show the world’s beaten and broken and dispossessed how indifferent you are to them, how little you care? Go and grab yourself some Balenciaga.
This is an amateur hour, grievous error of branding. Sure, they “made money.” You and I could do that much too if we were given rights to a legendary French fashion house’s name. But soiling that good name for decades to come? That requires real…incompetence. Ineptitude. An almost total lack of understanding of how hard it is to build a brand — yet how lethally easy it is to destroy one, too, doubly so when all it stands for is spite.
I wonder if Demna gets any of that. I really do. I wonder if Demna gets that satirizing democracy and being spiteful towards Europe and refugees and the poor and, eventually, kids — even as a joke, meant critically — was in bad taste. And when you build a fashion brand on bad taste — how long can it really last? Should you really be attacking democracy when it’s the thing that makes fashion, aesthetics, the most modern forms of self-expression, possible? Bad taste, though, as a cypher for being ultra far right, is a problem afflicting the world, just look at the Cheesy Twitter Billionaire. It’s a name for a larger set of issues: spite. I don’t know if Demna gets that selling spite is a bad idea. Because it’s basically what the far right does, too. I don’t know if Balenciaga’s corporate owners get that.
But they should. We all should. Because by now, my friends, all of should have understood one lesson. This way of thinking, being, acting, feeling — it gets us nowhere. Contempt, spite, hate, division. Punching down, instead of lifting up. They lead to nothing, except a vicious spiral of implosion, at the hands of the far right. That’s what Balenciaga’s living now, and I can’t imagine it’s much fun.
Umair December 2022
