The perception of Demna as a culturally omnivorous expert is boosted by Demna’s own autobiographical details, including his upbringing in Soviet Georgia and his experience of communism:
Up until 1991, Georgia was part of the ex-Soviet Union, so I had a Soviet childhood. I was brought up with Stalinist, Leninist, and, Communist ideas and deprived of any kind of real information.
(Demna quoted in SSENSE, 2016, emphasis added)
In a statement that can be easily accommodated in the milieus of creative industries, similarly to the Athens Biennale, the “Soviet childhood” and communist ideas here are blamed for depriving Demna of true information. Yet, at the same time, these conditions shaped his vision as a designer; for instance, the embracing of military aesthetics and police uniforms in his design practices are justified by his experience of war and life in the Soviet Union. Or, for instance, the “scandalous” late 2022 mud runaway designed by the artist Santiago Sierra at Balenciaga’s show in Paris Fashion Week, who Demna recruited because he is an artist “against capitalism”, was a metaphor “for digging for truth and being down to earth” (Demna quoted in Spiegler, 2022). A harsh childhood and the distinct upbringing endow the designer with a rare, penetrating vision, which binds him with a responsibility to be authentic to his experience:
I feel like my challenge and responsibility as a designer today is to question what beauty is. Why do we follow the rules from 50 years ago? I didn’t grow up in Versailles. I am a refugee. I needed to look for beauty in everything. Cristóbal [Balenciaga] did that when everybody was doing fitted silhouettes and he did what they called a “potato bag.” The most minimal thing. He was the father of minimalism in some ways. I read an article in an issue of French Vogue from the 1960s, and they ridiculed it and said it was ugly, and I suddenly felt so good, because I realized that when you want to do something like this, you always have to sufer not being understood right away. I went through that, too, and it gave me hope.
(Demna quoted in Talley and Iman, 2021, emphasis added)
Demna’s creative practice is here a calling that somehow appears consistent with Cristóbal Balenciaga’s original vision. By partaking in the authority of Cristóbal Balenciaga, Demna occupies the figure of the misfit who eventually made it to the top, a genius who, despite misfortunes and sufering, went from rags to riches.
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Cultures of Platform Capitalism