Pierpaolo Piccioli walked his first Balenciaga couture down a flight of stone steps in the July sun. The models came out in electric pink, mint green and orange. The house has not looked like this in years.
Balenciaga showed its couture on 8 July, the fifty-fifth collection in the house's couture history and the first that Piccioli has signed. He took the job at the end of May 2025 and spent the months since inside the atelier and the archive. Fifty-two looks came out in front of clients, students and a wall of cameras.
He moved the show away from the historic salons at 10 Avenue George V. The setting was the courtyard of the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, its broad steps turned into a runway. The audience sat in full daylight. The final walk drew a standing ovation that ran long.
The archive
Piccioli built the collection on Cristóbal Balenciaga's shapes. The sack, the balloon, the trapeze, the cut he called the peacock tail. Hooded cloaks dropped to the floor. Hourglass dresses were sculpted close to the body and finished with long leather opera gloves. Feathers ran through look after look.
One coat carried the point. It began as the line of a 1961 Cristóbal evening gown and arrived as white cashmere lined with lace, six months of atelier work in a single piece. Piccioli has spoken of Cristóbal as the couturier who set the terms for how clothes are cut today, and he treated the archive as something to study rather than to copy.
Colour
Colour is the thing Piccioli is known for, after thirteen years at Valentino, and he brought it back to a house that had spent the past decade in black, grey and logo. Neon pink, brilliant mint, hot orange. Silk gazar, the crisp cloth Cristóbal invented, held the volume; tulle and muslin did the rest. A balloon dress in curled fluorescent-pink organza, embroidered with feathers, closed the argument.
The opening look was quieter, a pair of extra-large beige trousers with an attitude to them. The collection climbed from there toward the gowns. Gigi Hadid made her couture-week debut in one of the hooded feather cocoons.
Piccioli did not reinvent Balenciaga. He reached back past the last decade and picked up a thread the house had dropped.
The Splendid EditThe making
The craft came with new tools. Piccioli's team 3-D scanned the body to build a mannequin for stretching some of the leathers. The house introduced Amsilk, a bioengineered silk grown through protein engineering rather than pumped from oil, and reportedly far stronger than steel by weight. The show notes framed couture as the work of the people who make it, and Piccioli walked the whole atelier down the steps at the close.
In the window
The couture is a turn away from the Balenciaga most shoppers know. The house that Demna built ran on denim, sneakers, provocation and the City bag, and Demna has since gone to Gucci. That commercial face still fills the shop windows. The current campaign is the case in point, a model stretched across a white bed with a scuffed City bag and a pair of oversized jeans, styled bare and offhand.
Balenciaga, current house campaign. Courtesy of Balenciaga
Piccioli is not tearing that down. Couture and the shop floor have always run on separate clocks, and the bag pays for the feathers. The debut sets a marker all the same. Balenciaga can still sell the City bag. It has also remembered that it was, before anything else, a couture house.
One collection does not settle a new era. It does show the direction. Piccioli has pointed Balenciaga back toward the body, the archive and the colour, and away from the joke. The clothes on the steps looked sure of it.