The Flood

On March 1, 2020, at the Cité du Cinéma — Luc Besson’s film studio complex in Saint-Denis, north of Paris — Demna presented Balenciaga’s Fall/Winter 2020 collection on a runway that was entirely submerged in water, and the timing of the gesture, which could not have been planned, rendered it prophetic: within two weeks the world would shut down, fashion weeks would be canceled indefinitely, and this would be remembered as one of the last major physical fashion shows before the pandemic erased the format that the industry had depended on for a century. Some editors and retailers had already gone home early or stayed away entirely, coronavirus concerns filtering through the audience like the water filtering through the first three rows of seating that Demna had deliberately submerged, forcing the remaining attendees to sit further back and watch from a distance that was both practical and allegorical.

The auditorium was pitch black. A vast LED screen suspended from the ceiling displayed crashing waves, churning clouds, swarming crows, bright red glowing lava, burning skies, total eclipses — apocalyptic imagery that alternated from blissful blues to burning reds and reflected in the water below, doubling every catastrophe into its own mirror. The soundtrack, an original score by BFRND — the musician Loïk Gomez — opened with a string quartet peppered with powerful electronic beats, alternating between ominous classical melodies and dark, aggressive techno to create an atmosphere so oppressive that the first model’s appearance felt less like a fashion entrance than like a figure emerging from wreckage. Demna stated afterward that he “just wanted something quite emotionally triggering and quite sad,” and that the flood was “metaphoric about the consequences of our lifestyle” — a reference to climate change and rising sea levels that was simultaneously heavy-handed and, given what was about to happen to the world, inadequate to the scale of the actual catastrophe approaching.

The collection opened with more than thirty all-black looks that emphasized tailoring, shape, and silhouette — priest-like cloaks and clerical garb, Neo-gothic floor-length skirts and caped coats, Matrix-era leather trenches, full-length scuba uniforms with form-fitting footwear — before expanding into the eclecticism that had defined Demna’s tenure: football jerseys with triple branding and a player number ten, spiked rubber jackets, exaggerated pagoda shoulders achieved through technical processes that pushed the garment’s structure beyond the body’s natural line, and what the house called “gala dresses” — all-inclusive one-piece designs that integrated shoes, gloves, leggings, and gowns into a single garment, the body-as-second-skin concept that Demna had been developing since the Pantashoes of Spring/Summer 2017. The total count was a hundred and five looks — excessive by most standards, disciplined by Demna’s — and the sheer volume of the collection, combined with the water and the darkness and the apocalyptic projections, produced a sensory environment in which individual garments mattered less than the cumulative atmosphere of civilizational dread.

The collection fused sportswear, erotica, goth, and religious vestments using techniques borrowed from motocross, hockey, and scuba engineering — a material vocabulary that treated fashion not as an aesthetic category but as a branch of industrial design that happened to concern itself with the human body. Thigh-high boots appeared on male models. Androgynous silhouettes collapsed the remaining distance between menswear and womenswear that Demna had been eroding since his arrival at the house. The football jerseys — priced at seven hundred and eighty dollars — carried the triple branding and numerical insignia of professional sportswear recast as luxury artifact, a gesture that was either satirical or sincere and that Demna, characteristically, refused to clarify.

The environmental credentials were real, if modest: the water was planned to be returned to the city of Paris as graywater, the chairs were to be donated to a children’s sports center, and the show fell under the umbrella of the Kering Fashion Pact — launched by French President Emmanuel Macron and co-founded by François-Henri Pinault — which committed signatory brands to measurable sustainability targets. Whether the theatrical spectacle of flooding a runway to protest flooding was coherent or contradictory depended entirely on whether you believed fashion could critique the systems it participates in, a question that Demna — who had taken Balenciaga’s revenues from an estimated three hundred and ninety million dollars to close to two billion during his tenure — was uniquely positioned to pose but not to answer. What the show accomplished, beyond the spectacle, was a demonstration that the fashion show itself could function as a medium — an environment in which garments, staging, sound, and concept produced something closer to installation art than to commerce, and that the last great physical show before the pandemic would be remembered not for any single garment but for the water, the darkness, and the feeling that what was ending was larger than a season.