Today in Paris, Demna unveiled his second couture collection for Balenciaga—and not only were there plenty of celebrities sitting in the front row, but walking the runway too. As showgoers including Kris Jenner, Offset, North West, Alexa Demie, and Tracee Ellis Ross looked on, the likes of Kim Kardashian, Nicole Kidman, Dua Lipa, Selling Sunset’s Christine Quinn, Bella Hadid, and Naomi Campbell walked through the historic Balenciaga salons wearing the house’s latest couture collection. The group was eclectic, a little bit unexpected, unbelievably glam, and as always, purely Balenciaga.
It’s not the first time that Demna has dipped his toe into the celeb-verse for his runway shows. Back for spring 2022, Balenciaga created a red carpet-meets-step-and-repeat runway where among models and familiar faces for the brand, celebrities like rapper Offset and actor Isabelle Huppert posed for the paparazzi cameras and ended up in the Balenciaga lookbook. (This was also the same show in which Demna streamed his own version of an all-American The Simpsons episode, featuring his killer looks touching down in Springfield and housewife Marge even being transformed into the belle of the Balenciaga ball.)
And the cult of celebrity goes beyond Balenciaga’s runway too. They’ve had the likes of Justin Bieber, Cardi B, and Kim Kardashian star in their campaigns, and have even taken the latter to the Met Gala. Balenciaga’s approach to harnessing star power is different from the more traditional methods of other houses that tap famous faces to become ambassadors.
Instead, the Demna effect is more meta; a comment on the cult of celebrity itself. The celebrity doesn’t make Balenciaga, but rather the opposite—the brand molds celebrities into their universe.
Bieber might be dressed in Balenciaga’s artful yet non-descript baggy, everyday clothes, while Kardashian can arrive at the Met Gala in a custom head-to-toe black catsuit that covers her instantly recognizable body, metamorphosing one of the most recognizable faces in the world into a Balenciaga-clad tabula rasa.
As for today? Balenciaga dressing all these celebrities up for their runway show is another moment for the brand to prove that they are truly the ones calling the shots. We’re seeing Demna flex his muscles both in terms of design and in terms of sheer celebrity clout—Balenciaga really is that sought-after.
Who else can have the brilliantly bizarre combination of reality TV’s most Haute villain Quinn, an Oscar-winning actor like Kidman, and modeling royalty like Campbell in their show, while maintaining a sense of breezy effortlessness? It seems that being inducted into the Balenciaga club is the ultimate marker of cool in our current era of fashion, whether you’re a celeb or not–and that’s priceless.
