{"product_id":"show-sample-winter-19-balenciaga-paris-embroidered-eiffel-tower-drapy-sandals","title":"SHOW SAMPLE Winter 19 Balenciaga \"Paris\" Embroidered Eiffel Tower Drapy Sandals","description":"\u003cp\u003e“There is no Balenciaga without Paris.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBalenciaga’s Winter 19 collection, shown on 3 March 2019 at the Cité du Cinéma outside Paris, was one of Demna Gvasalia’s clearest attempts to reconcile with the historical language of Cristóbal Balenciaga with contemporary urban life. By then, Demna had been living in Switzerland since relocating Vetements to Zurich in 2017, seeking distance from the Paris fashion scene he had begun to find suffocating. Zurich offered him distance, anonymity, stability, quietness and a degree of separation from the industry, allowing him to return to ordinary routines, nature and people outside fashion before coming back to Paris for work with a clearer perspective. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter the show, he explained that moving away had made him fall in love with the city again and describing Winter 19 as a modern vision of Parisian style rather than a nostalgic return to the 1950s or 1960s. Instead of the romantic Paris of postcards and old fashion photography, Balenciaga centered the collection on the \"real Parisian of today\": someone grocery shopping, commuting, working and going out at night. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe show environment reflected this everyday city. Around 600 guests sat inside a vast, almost empty space covered in freshly laid asphalt, beneath a low illuminated ceiling, while models passed unusually close to the audience. With the normal bank of runway photographers removed, the smell of tarmac, strobing lights and BFRND’s soundtrack transformed the venue into recreation of a Paris street.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAcross 109 menswear and womenswear looks, Demna shifted attention back towards tailoring and silhouette. The show opened with four black suits before moving into raised shoulders, cocooned coats, displaced sleeve heads, wrapped outerwear and high “Incognito” collars that partially concealed the face. These constructions continued the technological research of Winter 18 and Summer 19, where Balenciaga had used body scanning, digital pattern development and internal moulding to reinterpret Cristóbal Balenciaga’s architectural approach to clothing. By Winter 19, however, the technology had become subtler, functioning invisibly inside the garment to control volume and structure.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDemna also designed around the way people actually wore clothes. Closures were hidden or removed because he observed that Parisians often wrapped coats around themselves rather than properly fastening them, while trench coats and double-breasted jackets were transformed into dresses. This loosened the boundaries between different categories of clothing and developed into two ideas Balenciaga called \"Easy Eveningwear\" and \"At-home Outerwear\": clothes designed to work continuously between work, nightlife, home and the street. Robes, kimono-like garments and slippers therefore became legitimate forms of outerwear rather than purely domestic clothing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt the same time, Winter 19 filled this supposedly authentic Parisian wardrobe with the most cliche motifs of Paris imaginable. Eiffel Towers, souvenir-style graphics, tourist keyrings and shopping bags appeared throughout the collection, continuing what was already explored in Summer 19. Balenciaga described this as bringing the \"oversaturated symbols of tourism\" into a more intimate context. Cheap, mass-produced objects were translated into luxury: models carried Eiffel Tower souvenirs and shopping bags, while paper and grocery bags were reproduced in leather. The collection eventually moved from everyday dressing into exaggerated eveningwear, including deconstructed babydoll dresses, enormous silk pieces and hand-worked paillette gowns.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSeen in Look 86, these SHOW SAMPLE open-toe sandals feature soft, padded textile uppers gathered into an oversized central knot above a thin leather sole. Silver embroidery spells Paris across the uppers, intersected by a gold embroidered Eiffel Tower. The silhouette was developed further in Spring 20, eventually evolving into the Drapy sandal commercially.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTagged size 40, fits up to EU42. Sample, no box nothing!\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Upstairs Garments","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53716066631956,"sku":null,"price":712.0,"currency_code":"SGD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1022\/3124\/files\/IMG_5193.jpg?v=1787647898","url":"https:\/\/upstairsgarments.com\/products\/show-sample-winter-19-balenciaga-paris-embroidered-eiffel-tower-drapy-sandals","provider":"Upstairs Garments","version":"1.0","type":"link"}