Denma's Farewell to Fashion Irony
With the Balenciaga x PUMA drop, Demna steps away from the tracksuit he made iconic and sets the tone for his next legacy at Gucci; It will be one built not on irony, but emotional clarity. It's Demna Gvasalia, aka Demna, closing ceremony. The Georgian fashion designer, having served for a decade as the creative director of Balenciaga and the co-founder of Vetements will join Gucci in July.
The PUMA capsule, which landed in stores this June, draws a line under a decade of fashion-as-satire, with Demna’s trademark sportswear at the centre. But unlike earlier riffs, this one doesn’t provoke. It reflects.
First seen during Balenciaga’s FW25 show in Paris held within a maze-like structure of black curtains at the Cour du Dôme des Invalides. The collaboration resurrected Speedcat trainers, nylon warm-ups, and windbreakers cut from 90s nostalgia. All familiar ground for Demna, who once made the bootleg aspirational. But this time, there’s no visual punchline. The styling is muted. The silhouettes are straight. The irony? Left behind.
Demna's Instagram Drop Says It All
Demna himself confirmed the shift in tone via Instagram: “The Balenciaga | PUMA collaboration is out now, accompanied by a campaign by Ari Versluis featuring model Yav performing high-intensity gabber choreography in a look from the collaboration, set against the serene soundtrack of Françoise Hardy’s ‘Tous les garçons et les filles’.”
The campaign, like the collection, is a contradiction by design, gabber energy paired with gentle French pop. The contrast doesn’t scream. It simmers. It’s subversion in soft focus.
This isn’t Demna’s first PUMA partnership, but it might be his most self-aware. Viewed alongside recent interviews with Die Zeit and Vogue it reads as a pivot: from oversized silhouettes and spectacle to something closer to restraint. He’s even gone on record saying he’s “uninterested in oversized fashion” and has “done that already.” After years of fashion designed to go viral, this feels more like closure.
What It Means for Demna's Gucci Tenure
After the show, Demna told Vogue: “It’s easy to put a chair on the head and say, oh, that’s wearable art… but I felt like maybe I had enough of that.” In other words, there’s a limit to irony. And for a house like Gucci where myth, heritage, and global scale collide, that limit matters.
The PUMA drop isn’t about product. It’s a departure for Demna. A quiet statement that he is ready to move on from the codes he created. The oversized, the ironic, the logo-heavy, distilled, if not discarded. The tracksuit may not be gone entirely, but its symbolic power as a Demna archetype is being retired.
At Balenciaga, he had licence to disrupt. At Gucci, he’ll need precision. And if this latest PUMA release is any indication, he’s sharpening his tools.
Luxury Retail Restraint
The collaboration also taps into a broader mood across fashion: fatigue. Spectacle no longer lands the way it used to. As Vogue Business noted post-PFW25, more houses are shifting towards wearability, intimacy, and emotional presence. Shoppers aren’t asking to be shocked. They want to feel something.
This evolution is also transforming how collections show up in retail.
In cities like London, store design is moving away from maximalist displays and Instagrammable stunts. On Bond Street, restraint sells. Theatre now comes from storytelling, tactility, and spatial mood, not gimmicks.
If Demna’s first decade was about subverting what luxury looks like, the next might be about deepening what it means.
The Balenciaga x PUMA drop won’t break the internet. But it marks the close of an era and hints at what comes next.
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