Does the provocative designer have to hold back now?

As a child, Demna Gvasalia fled before the war. He saw the fashion as a “battlefield” and was not afraid to put back and provoke it. But the Georgian, who is now moving from Balenciaga to Gucci, had to rein.

“Imagination to fashion, Balenciaga and the success of the group is immense. His creative force is exactly what Gucci needs,” praised François-Henri Pinault, CEO of the parent company Kering, in the press release that announced this unexpected change in mid-March.

His last show for the French fashion house in Paris on Wednesday – during the Haute -Couture week – is one of the mostly expected and undoubtedly attracts numerous stars that are close to the designer. The next day he will switch to the Italian brand.

Since June 26, the exhibition “Balenciaga Par Demna” in the Kering headquarters is attracting the masses. She traces his ten-year creative time based on about a hundred pieces, from Haute-Couture dress to the sneaker XXL to the famous leather bag inspired by the Ikea bag. Without resentment, Gvasalia even reveals an email from 2007 in which Balenciaga rejected his application.

Success story and stumbling blocks

Almost twenty years later, the 44-year-old Georgian made the brand a coveted fire with sales of over one billion euros. The keys to this success are his iconoclastic style, which ranges from t-shirts to haute couture, his ability to make the “ugly” desirable-from plateau crocs to garbage bags-as well as his connections to celebrities, from American rapper Cardi B to French actress Isabelle. But this path was not without stumbling blocks.

In October 2022, Balenciaga had to end the collaboration with rapper Kanye West, a friend of Gvasalias who opened his show in Paris three weeks earlier, according to its anti -Semitic failures.

In November, the designer, who was one of the 100 most influential personalities in the world by the US magazine Time, himself got at the center of a storm after an advertising campaign had shown children with sado-masochist accessories. Demna admitted a “wrong artistic decision” and promised to change his “provocative approach” to the design and presentation of his clothing.

“You can make mistakes in a group like Kering. But you shouldn’t make the same mistake twice,” warned him François-Henri Pinault.

From then on, the designer presented his collections on an XXL kitchen furniture, inspired by the table of his grandmother, or in a tight corridor in a black cube instead of in the mud. However, his collections remained very street-heavy. He gave up something, but kept his characteristic features.

Is that enough to give Gucci new swing again? The Kering share fell after the announcement of its appointment, since the investor: according to analysts, an external heavyweight was expected.

Trauma

Demna Gvasalia, who took his last name for his work in the fashion world, was born on March 25, 1981 in Sukhumi, Abkhazia, a region of Georgia that was a Soviet republic at the time. In the 1990s, according to the case of the USSR, he fled with his family from the “ethnic cleansing” of the Georgians: inside through the Prorussian Abkhazic separatists.

“The war in Ukraine has recovered the pain and the trauma that I wore in me,” he said, when in March 2022 he dedicated a show to the country recently invaded by Russia. In this show, half -naked “refugees” ran with garbage bags through a snowstorm that was later sold for over 1,500 euros.

Demna, graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (Belgium), worked for Maison Margiela and Louis Vuitton before founding the Vetements brand with his brother in 2014 and was appointed artistic director of Balenciaga in 2015.

In an interview with the Vanity Fair magazine in 2021, he said that fashion was “a struggle” for him, so “aggressiveness and the darkness” stirred his creations.