Balenciaga Spring 2025: Demna Explains His Shanghai-Size Wardrobe
Photographs: Balenciaga; Collage: Armando Zaragoza
This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the global fashion week circuit. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
On Thursday afternoon in Shanghai, Balenciaga creative director Demna was sitting in a hotel room, discussing his magnum opus of gargantuan footwear. “Oh my god, my sneaker team is pretty amazing,” he said. “These are craftspeople.” He was referring to the technical know-how required to engineer the Balenciaga Platform Sneaker, a monstrosity of rubber and mesh that resembles a running shoe pancaked on top of a half-dozen other sneakers. A previous Show Notes column asked if the titanic Balenciaga 10XL represented the apogee of huge sneaker design. I’m happy to report that we have not: when he could no longer build out, Demna built up, to the tune of over six inches of lift.
The online chatter around Demna’s latest mind-melting design was well underway by the time it was officially unveiled on Thursday evening, in a stormy Spring 2025 runway show in front of Shanghai’s jaw-dropping skyline. A few days before, Balenciaga started teasing the sneakers and other surprises, like Under Armour logo earrings, on Instagram. In his nine years at the brand, Demna has rewritten many of high fashion’s holiest rules, and this was a small but important break with tradition, which is that you don’t give away internet-breaking silhouettes or polarizing collabs before they hit the runway. “When I proposed this idea to my team, they were like, ‘Are you sure?’” Demna said with a laugh. “I’m like, ‘Okay, we're not in the 1960s.’”
Demna is a master tailor and also a skillful entertainer. His work appeals to the huge audience of people who follow fashion like it’s football, and he’s launched countless products, like leather Ikea bags and towel skirts, that have sparked endless cycles of online debate. His hardcore fans go bananas for a luxury mind-fuck, while the uninitiated gnash their teeth, season in and season out. A towel that you can wear as a skirt? Fashion is dead!
Demna shrugs off the predictable reactions. Of the Platform, he says, “It's not for everyone, but we have enough sneakers that are different.” Though the mega-shoe was trending on Weibo in the days leading up to his China debut, to Demna the previews serve a different purpose: to focus his audience on the ideas and design elements that go into each collection’s key products, and emphasize the details that are often lost in the viral vortex.
Which is smart, because the longer I’ve covered Demna and Balenciaga the more I’ve realized that the best way to understand Demna’s world is to cut through the complex layers of commentary and dig into the product itself. And often the most extreme and unconventional designs are the ones that most clearly reflect his ideas, many of which spring from his personal experiences and obsessions. (The platform footwear? Demna needed a shoe to wear for a better view at concerts.) In our sit-down several hours before the show, Demna was eager to chat about the many new designs in his Shanghai-sized Spring 2025 collection, one that continues a streak of extraordinarily confident presentations. We got into the (often misunderstood) motivations and ideas behind a collection full of the kind of product he loves to make—products that people love to talk about.
But first, we discussed his years-long dream to hold a runway show in China, where Demna’s most hardcore fans reside. In Shanghai, where he was visiting for the first time, he discovered he was a bona fide celebrity. All week, his visits to Balenciaga retail stores and local pet shops alike were well documented across Chinese social media. Demna told me that the admiration is mutual. He had long been blown away by the innovative ways Chinese customers combine and recombine his work across seasons and categories to create their own distinct styles—DIY versions of his own readymade aesthetic. “I believe in bringing what I do, my vision, to people who appreciate it and consume it, and China is that place for me,” he said following the show Thursday night.
The riverside production was a tribute to the place that has long fascinated him. As the skyline blinked on and buckets of rain began to fall, the Demna-philes—Michelle Yeoh among them—pulled up to the Museum of Art Pudong in their most advanced Balenciaga regalia. The rain didn’t appear to dampen any spirits, even if some clients soaked their Balenciaga Couture tuxedos and gowns.
From under umbrellas and through the driving rain and eyeball-vibrating BRFND-composed techno soundtrack, it was still possible to pick out some of Demna’s boldest new propositions, which the designer exclusively previewed for GQ. As for the Instagram teaser? According to Demna, it didn't just drive conversation. Well before the rain even hit the forecast, eager customers had already been calling Balenciaga stores asking to place orders for the new gear. “Which is good, because I feel fashion has to create desire,” he said. “That's my job really.”
GIANT BOOT
“I wanted something quite vertical,” Demna said of his Shanghai show. His starting point was another innovation in mondo footwear, an aptly-named sky-high platform combat boot that launched over a dozen models (including Thai superstar PP Krit) nearly a foot off the ground. To fully stretch their silhouettes, Demna elongated their loosely-tailored hourglass overcoats and trenches until the models looked something like “human skyscrapers,” as Demna put it.
“With the platform, I wanted something extreme, but that you could still walk in,” he said. Mission accomplished: even on the slick runway, the models pumped along with ease.
Demna continued, "A lot of platform shoes I own from when I was in my twenties, they're very ugly. There’s something about them that is absolutely irrelevant to me today. I tried them on recently and I was like, ‘I could never wear this now.’ And I wanted to do something that is wearable now. Because platform is not a very current type of shoe in general, I find. So that's why when you do it, it has to be translated into the moment.
“A shoe is such a tricky product I find, much trickier than a bag, for example. Because you have to have your own perception of it, but then also the wearability because it's on your feet. And it defines the silhouette. I mean the beginning 10 or 12 looks, they're basically defined by that shoe. We had to elongate all the coats, 20 centimeters so it covers it, and then it became very monumental, almost like a sculpture silhouette.
“They're walkable. They're actually much lighter than any platform shoe I own, so I'm happy about that. I can't wait to go to a concert with this shoe. I went all the way to London to see to Thom York, and I couldn't see him. And I'm not short, but I could not. So next time I go somewhere, whatever it is, I'm going to wear this boot.”
Which didn't take long. Later that night, Demna showed up to the afterparty at a crowded Shanghai nightclub with a pair strapped to his feet.
SHOPPER SNEAKER BOX CLUTCH
Several models carried Balenciaga sneaker box clutches made of soft moldable leather, the latest in a line of ready-made accessories that Demna fans can’t seem to get enough of. In the crowd, the most popular accessory might have been the leather potato chip clutch. All flavors were represented, and I lost count of how many I saw at around two dozen. (The most advanced stuffed multiple chip bags into their slick Rodeo totes.)
Said Demna, “A lot of people who love sneakers, they have a relationship with Balenciaga obviously. So we have a bit of, I would say, authority aesthetically with this category of product.
“And I love the idea of a sneaker head and people who just buy them and never wear them. I don't do that, but I know quite a few people who do that obsessively, and they keep everything, including the boxes and all of that.
“I have to say that I got the sample and I was like, ‘Oh, for me, it's useful. I can put a lot of stuff in here going to work.’ I also like the idea of grabbing something and not always having something to hang on your shoulder. I'm struggling with the idea of how we can find a way of carrying things without it being just a shoulder bag.”
GARDE ROBE BAGS
On that note, Demna introduced a new category of handbags that look like… clothes! There was a hoodie handbag, as well as bags that resembled a puffer jacket, a button-up shirt, a few parkas, a leather jacket, and a full-sized trench coat. Essentially, Demna had his ready-to-wear team tailor actual garments that they then handed off to the handbag team who surgeoned leather-lined pouches into the clothes. Which means all of the zippers, pockets, and buttons are functional, even if the bags will be most practical at the next Balenciaga show.
“There is this whole wardrobe with bags,” said Demna. “You can use it as a bag, but it looks like you're carrying your puffer jacket. I wanted it to be a trompe l'oeil, so it's a bag, but it doesn't look like a bag. I have some good bags in it there as well in the show, but these ones were the kind of bags I would wear.”
BALENCIAGA X UNDER ARMOUR
One of Demna’s goals for the collection was to strike a fresh balance between tailoring and what you might call streetwear. The casual side of the collection was carried by a new collaboration with Under Armour, which includes archetypal Balenciaga staples like zip-up hoodies and oversized sweatpants, as well as hats, sunglasses, jewelry, bags, a new sneaker boot, and a version of the 3XL sneaker made with UA fabric. I asked Demna to explain his obsession with the American sportswear brand.
“I have to say that they have really amazing products for actual athletics,” he said. “They have very technical know-how, and I try to incorporate it. It's not only to go to gym, it's also to wear on the street, this vibe. But it's very technical. As always when we do collabs, I try to bring in the Balenciaga shaping and tailoring, even if it's a T-shirt.
“It's really a fusion of two—what we are good at and what they're good at into one. And I think it's a cool brand, I mean among sports brands I really like it. Personally, if ever I go to the gym, I have my Under Armour with me. I have a lot of pieces and I ended up thinking, why don't we do something with them? People around me who don't usually consume luxury fashion, they wear Under Armour. To me, Under Armour is very fashion, actually, more than other sports brand. So that's why I felt like it made sense for us to do it with them. It was very smooth. They were very, very open-minded. It was very fluid and a cool collaboration.”
REGULAR ZIP-UP HOODIE
As with any Balenciaga show, some pieces reflected Demna’s fascination with the harsh realities of the way people dress today, including a truly diabolical zip-up hoodie covered in layers of mall-brand graphics and rhinestones, many of which had been painstakingly removed by hand, leaving only the dots of glue behind.
“Oh my god, there is a crazy hoodie look that really questions the taste situation,” Demna said with a laugh as our chat drew to a close. He pulled up an image of the hoodie on his phone. “You know what I mean? I don’t have to explain it to you.”
Originally Appeared on GQ
