Ye opened Balenciaga’s mud show 19 days before the house cut ties with him

Balenciaga’s Summer 23 show started in the dark, in mud, with Ye. He walked out as look 1 in Paris on 2 Oct 2022. Hood pulled over a black cap, a padded tactical jacket with SECURITY across the chest, leather trousers with reinforced knees and, Vogue noticed, a logo mouthguard. WWD called the jacket a hulking nylon parka. In Balenciaga’s own photo you barely see his face. It’s the hood, the cap and the mud.

Ye had worn Balenciaga for years, but Highsnobiety called this the first time in recent memory he’d walked a show as a model. He was the first thing anyone in the room saw.

275 cubic metres of peat bog

Demna didn’t build a runway. He had one dug. The Spanish artist Santiago Sierra piled mud up the sides of the hall and hollowed out craters down the middle. ARTnews, citing the New York Times, put it at 275 cubic metres, trucked in from a French peat bog. Sissel Tolaas made a scent for the room, wet earth after rain, i-D reported.

The invitation was a lost wallet: an ID, credit cards, coins and a crumpled receipt. The show notes called the mud “a metaphor for digging for truth and being down to earth.” Demna also wrote that he’d stopped explaining his collections. (He explained the mud anyway.)

A military supplier’s tag

At the re-see the jacket hung on a rail with the cap and gloves, and up close it’s all pouches, buckles and straps on a padded shell. Highsnobiety spotted a leather tag inside crediting MFH Int., a real military supplier. The shoes were harder to place. Highsnobiety thought they were a new runner, and they’re still not identified.

Nineteen days

The next day Ye showed YZY Season 9 in Paris. Within weeks his partnerships were falling away over his antisemitic remarks, and Balenciaga’s was the first to go. It didn’t wait long: on 21 Oct Kering told WWD the house had “no longer any relationship” with him.

Nineteen days earlier, Ye had opened its show dressed as security.