We have seen the future of fashion, or at the very least, next spring and summer, and its name is Balenciaga.
In a strikingly cool collection, the house's designer Nicolas Ghesquiere set a whole new direction for fashion – android chic. High-tech and hard-edged industrial, the collection transposed the models from familiar faces into the sexy knights of a fabulous round table.
“I wanted robotic and android, a beautiful future,” Ghesquiere told FWD backstage. He succeeded, banishing from our memories with one show the retro glut that was Milan.
Kicking off with re-worked tuxedos and dress shirts, cut close to the torso with power shoulders and priestess high collared white shirts, worn with cigarette pants and metallic belts – all of them looked chic, hot and thoroughly wearable.
Other great ideas included beautiful circuit board silk prints used in warrior robes, liquid gold and silver mesh pants, a Chinese dressing gown meets tuxedo coat and cosmic biker leather jackets with shoulder wings.
A trio of gold mesh dresses, each impeccably draped, evoked sighs from the carefully edited audience of just 150 people. A finale of woven strap Lucy Skywalker android pants garnered bursts of applause.
Ghesquiere's fancy front row of Janet Jackson (with an immense heavy for security), soccer star and Japan's biggest fashion victim, Hidetoshi Nakata, Parisian actresses Isabelle Huppert, Clemence Poesy and Joana Preiss and Amira Casar, appeared in awe by this beautiful collection.
The Olsen twins sat nearby open-mouthed throughout the show, as these pompous little munchkins got to see what a real, as opposed to celebrity, designer can do.
Ghesquiere also hit the mark with accessories which included a fantastic new high heel, composed of faux metallic straps and a machine tooled chain platform that everyone is going to want to wear. Plus, most models wore Balenciaga's excellent new eyewear – wraparounds or goggles with chrome semi-circular studs, as if ground control was monitoring their every move.
Remarkably, Ghesquiere, the champion of bigger volumes in the past two seasons, went pencil thin for spring, showing a bare handful of the bigger proportions.
Backed up by a great soundtrack – DJ Michel Gaubert brilliantly mixed the abstract Hip-hop group Cut Chemist with doses of Salt-N-Pepa – it made for an epochal show.
