Balenciaga Will Introduce Couture for Men

2015, made headlines back in January when he announced that Balenciaga would launch a couture salon in July. When the pandemic put the kibosh on physical couture shows this past summer, Balenciaga delayed the debut until January of 2020, and now, in an interview in WWD on Monday, Gvasalia says couture will instead debut next July, then show a seasonless collection every July moving forward.

But the most important news for Gvasalia’s legions of menswear fans is something else he confirmed in the interview: that the house will produce couture for men. “I think men came to the point that they want to wear couture as well, and I know that we have some customers that will love that,” Gvasalia said. “I want to kind of erase the gender identification of couture being only for women, or only for older women who have money to afford it.”

Gvasalia in fact joins a bustling, if not crowded, market. At Dior Men’s, Kim Jones has made the house’s couture heritage a keystone of every collection, with his last three collections in particular—a pre-fall linkup with Shawn Stussy, the fall 2020 tribute to Judy Blame, and the spring 2021 collaboration with Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo—blending his love of artists, subcultural icons, and the streetwear canon with haute couture savoir faire. During her too-short tenure at Givenchy, Clare Waight Keller was emphatic that her well-received couture offerings include menswear: “I felt that was missing: that approach of doing really extraordinary, fabulous clothes for men to dress up in too,” Waight Keller told GQ last year. “The couture customer is really looking for that extraordinary piece.” At Maison Margiela, John Galliano has largely shifted to gender-fluid designs, with his pieces shown on male, female, and nonbinary models. (One has to wonder what the men of Savile Row are making of all this made-to-order suiting, but that’s a story for another time.)

Still, Gvasalia isn’t exactly playing catchup when it comes to what’s often called “the highest form of dressmaking.” Though he first cut his teeth as a founder of the Vetements collective, with incredible oversized sweatshirts and big, mean T-shirts, he’s both wildly elevated the streetwear look he first brought to Balenciaga and pushed the house far in its technical abilities, especially in the past year or so. Back in 2018, he produced those awe-inspiring layers of outerwear by making 3-D body scans and then 3-D printing molds to which fabrics were bonded, an electrifying, modern dressmaking; his last collection, with its semi-submerged runway, had some of the season’s best and most forward-looking suits.

Gvasalia told WWD he was attracted to couture because it represents the highest form of creative liberation in fashion. Accordingly, he’s shown himself to be one of the industry’s most original minds when it comes to fabrics, silhouettes, and construction. Couture, of course, was the metier of Cristobal Balenciaga, who is largely considered the greatest couturier of all time. Gvasalia has perhaps only begun experimenting with how to propel Balenciaga’s legacy into the 21st century.