One thing you know about the Balmain woman: she’s a bit of an animal. In fact, in the hands of Antonin Tron, incumbent creative director of the house, she’s a lot of animals, an abattoir of big-cat print and pattern overlaid, a leather ruched to resemble the tonsured hide of a crocodile or snake, maybe, a lace skirt patterned like alligator but actually, on closer inspection, embroidered with sequins to replicate ocelot hide.
His Spring/Summer 2027 collection, though, was about Death Valley. Well, in part – he found images of Michel Foucault in California in the 1960s. “It sounds pretentious,” Tron allowed – but Foucault was on a LSD trip, “mind expansion in the American desert”. Which maybe led to those chimerical cross-pollinated animals, and a sun-dazed palette of odd, bleached bone colour popped with slightly mouldering, trippy brights, as well as jewel-like sliced-open minerals. “It’s a space for experimentation.”
Of course, humans are animals too – primordial, sexual. On Tron’s moodboard there was a suite of images of models in the Balmain cabine on rue François 1er, in 1954, half undressed in their elaborate finery, juxtaposed with a leather-trousered Jim Morrison, who was hauled off to jail after a chaotic 1969 concert in Miami for lewd behaviour. There’s a sexual tension there that also connects with the 21st-century reinvention of Balmain as prototypical postmodern result wear. The cabine fever translated to satin microskirts styled like girdles with dangling garters, to exposed brassières slipping out of structured cocktail dresses – “lingerie building a dress,” he said. The interiors of some, criss-crossed with grosgrain, felt like archival pieces – even if the exterior conveyed a modern, predatory sexuality. There was also a general feel of the undone, amplified by superb styling – slicked hair, unfastened buttons. Which, for the perennially polished Balmain woman, was something different.
Last season, Tron was finding his footing at Balmain. Not so much in the style – that was there right out of the gate, a body consciousness through trussed fabric that connected 1946 to today, but in the work with the ateliers. Back then, Tron was green – he’s now seasoned and pushing. That space for experimentation translated to a feel for fabric, chintz cottons, eelskin and slithery fluid viscoses that seemed damp with sweat against the body. There was also technique atop of technique, bugle-beaded animal patterns re-embroidered with sequins, appliqués and embellishment.
This season too, the work was interior. Tron said the house was working on engineering an undulating, cresting shoulderline that threw back to Balmain’s first revitalisation, now almost 20 years ago (yikes). So did the decorated denims, shredded and inlaid with glittering crystal chains like unravelling threads. Tron seems to be gently pulling at those – not unravelling the house, but loosening it up. He’s expanding what he’s mined.