balenciaga - spring 2007

When it comes to the latest generation of fashion designers, NO ONE is cooler than Nicolas Ghesquière, the designer for Balenciaga. The things that he does are so far beyond everyone else - that he is in a category completely by himself. Recently Ghesquière was fêted by Barneys for the release of the Balenciaga Paris book, a copy of which I am expecting shortly. His last collection, Fall 2006 was more of a nod to Cristobal - with the iconic Balenciaga voluminous silhouettes.

Everything that this man does, receives rave reviews, and his Ready-to-Wear collection for Spring 2007, which was shown yesterday in Paris, is absolutely no exception.

"I was thinking of robotic articulation. Car parts. Droids. A boyish silhouette…" said Nicolas Ghesquière before he was dragged off to sort out a last-minute glitch. Moments later, his incredible futuristic vision was out of the gate: elongated black jackets with a double-layered shoulder line; cyber-goddess dresses jigsawed from patent leather; space-crew shirts with high white collars. Within seconds, the message in these refined, precision-judged looks was sending chills through an audience that five minutes earlier had been on the point of meltdown from heat. Was it worth the wait? Without a doubt. Like last season's Balenciaga retrospective triumph, this is a collection that will reset the fashion agenda, but in a different way.

Ghesquière said he'd been watching The Terminator, and 1982's Tron, the first blockbuster to combine computer animation with real actors, but that's by-the-by. What's special about these clothes is the way the designer brings his distinctively Parisian, perfectionist genius for cut and exceptional fabric into the consciousness of high-tech culture. It's not one monolithic look, easily captured in a comic-strip subtitle. Ghesquière's intense shows work through a half-dozen separate ideas linked in sequence. This time he moved from tailoring to shiny "nylon" silk-swathed dresses, to patent-edged shirtdresses, heavily-hewn sculpted leather and crocodile, metallic pantsuits, and finally to the coup de grâce: astonishing combinations of drapey silk-print tunics and gleaming bronze or gold metal robot-leggings, embroidered with futuristic paillettes.

If last season's vastly influential Balenciaga collection looked back, this one projects forward into a new era for the house Ghesquière is fast defining as his own. There is no sense of a lurch, because these ideas of space-age fantasy have always been on a slow burn in his work—along with the attenuated line and his deftness with technique. With this collection, he leapt ahead. It's true that thoughts of space-age robo-women have been circulating already this season, as well as reminders that the likes of Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier went there in the eighties, but it takes a major talent like Nicolas Ghesquière to turn a literal reference into something that is light years from pastiche.

There is something very Fritz Lang's Metropolis about this collection - the goggle sunglasses, the liquid metal fabrics, the armor-like embroidered metal leggings. The whole sci-fi futuristic andriod theme is clearly attained with each piece that went down the runway. It's also a much harder look than people are accustomed to seeing from Balenciaga - yet it somehow fits the Ghesquière aesthetic.

Ba da ba ba ba - I'm lovin' it!