For Spring 2026, Demna presents Balenciaga by Demna: Exactitudes, a collection that reflects on a decade of creative direction at the house. Rather than introducing a new concept, he builds the season around an accumulation of past collections, combining pieces from 35 previous seasons with newly designed garments and items from his own wardrobe.
Demna uses the format of this collection to explore ideas he’s returned to often: how people dress, how clothing functions, and where fashion meets luxury. He focuses less on reinventing and more on distilling what has defined his process at Balenciaga, revisiting signature silhouettes, textures, and proportions that have become identifiers of his tenure.
The collection doesn’t stand apart as a final performance. Instead, it reads as a structured reflection. By pulling specific looks from three and a half dozen collections, Demna reasserts the visual codes he helped build. Oversized tailoring, sharp contrasts in volume, elongated torsos, padded outerwear, experimental denim, these elements resurface alongside more personal pieces from his closet, grounding the collection in both memory and authorship.
Demna also turns to longtime influences in his presentation method. To capture the looks, he works with artists Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek, whose Exactitudes photography series has informed his approach to casting, styling, and conceptual framing for years. Their collaborative visual language, grouping people by dress codes and shared attitude, fits into the collection’s thesis.
In his words, the project became a homecoming. It allowed him to reflect on fashion not just as a form of expression, but as a living anthropology, one shaped by codes, references, and the passage of time. That view has informed much of his work, both at Balenciaga and beyond. With Exactitudes, he turns that research inward, assembling an image of the wearer who has emerged from his decade-long design experiment.
Though the collection offers a personal retrospective, Demna keeps his focus forward. He sees Exactitudes not as a farewell, but as a record, a curated archive presented with new energy. In the lead-up to his final couture show at the house, he will open Balenciaga by Demna, an exhibition that surveys the most significant aspects of his work from the past ten years. As with the Spring 2026 collection, Demna curates the exhibition himself.
