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THURSDAY NEWSLETTER FROM ANDREA BATILLA

HUMAN COMPLEXITY

PARIS FASHION WEEK FALL WINTER 25/26

The fact that fashion is struggling to produce relevant content is clear to everyone. The phrase “Fashion is dead” gets tossed around by different people in different contexts, and besides being incredibly comforting, it has the ability—like a TikTok tutorial—to make everything seem simple.

Fashion isn’t dead. It’s alive, but it’s not in good health. Not so much because of the economic crisis and declining consumption, but because it’s been torn apart, stripped down, liquefied, and vaporized by people who don’t even know what fashion really is.

The Paris shows, even more than Milan’s, have made it clear how complexity is becoming less and less interesting to the masses. The fact that Coperni’s show at the Adidas Arena with 200 video gamers received the same media coverage as Balenciaga’s show, which happened just an hour earlier, says a lot. Coperni is a contemporary brand with no real history and no ambition to say anything meaningful, while Balenciaga is still one of the most relevant fashion houses out there.

It’s easy to blame the social media meat grinder, which flattens rather than deepens. And it’s just as easy to say that the great designers, CEOs, photographers, and stylists of the past are all gone.

But the issue is much more complex. While all these factors play a role, none of them explain the full picture. It’s better to start with an example: Balenciaga’s runway show.

Demna is a designer who engages in deep reflection, and for a long time, his insights seemed extremely popular. Then, all of a sudden, they became very unpopular—starting with the infamous sadomasochistic teddy bear scandal. That was the precise moment when things got confusing, often intentionally so, to stir chaos. It was September 2022, and the first exit at Balenciaga’s show was Kanye West, who the very next day made antisemitic remarks. The brand removed all images of Kanye from their official channels. Then, in November, a campaign shot by Gabriele Galimberti came out featuring children holding stuffed bears dressed in fetish gear, referencing the BDSM world. It sparked one of the biggest media scandals in fashion history, followed by another controversy over a document in the background of another campaign for summer 2023, which mentioned child pornography in a court ruling.

The brand was nearly destroyed by all of this, even though it’s hard to understand why a leather teddy bear was deemed so morally outrageous while the practice of “sharenting”—parents exploiting their kids’ images on social media, often for money—is not only legal but widely practiced and accepted.

Interpreting complexity is hard. But when difficult issues come up in fashion, people simply refuse to engage with them. Maybe the teddy bears were problematic but very few took the time to understand where they came from, what the real motivations behind those choices were, or why media lynchings lead nowhere.

Over the past two years, Demna, the brand’s creative director, has held his position, taken the hit, and started using his extraordinary ability to capture the contradictions of the present again. Meanwhile, the rest of the fashion world, scared, has retreated to conservative, safe, and uninspired ground. Without messages. Because that’s what fear does—it silences.