“Today’s customer does gaming. It’s an important luxury customer base. They project so much onto their character. It’s a parallel world,” Balenciaga creative director Demna Gvasalia says.
Balenciaga’s fall 2021 theme is human destiny. Per the brand, Afterworld is inspired by mythological pasts—at one point, a character actually pulls a sword out of a stone—and “projected futures with timeless archetypes and speculative imagery.”
Afterworld is allegedly the “largest volumetric video project ever undertaken,” and features environments and characters created with “cutting-edge photogrammetry.” It maintains the style Gvasalia established in the fashion house’s summer 2020 campaign, which featured a canned-news doomsday loop, and the music video that followed it, “Sunglasses at Night.”
Avatars, which appear throughout the five zones, are dressed in Balenciaga’s latest, including oversized suits composed of T-shirt jersey materials, designed to look worn. One outfit is inspired by 400-year-old knight’s armor, composed to illustrate fashion as “a type of armor worn to protect against the elements of judgment.”
Israeli designer Shahar Livne designed the jewelry and other accessories, including sneakers with alternative leather inserts made of the wasted fat, bones and animal blood.