Balenciaga channels ‘light through darkness’ of Euphoria in Paris show

Collaboration with HBO hit is gen Z mashup of glossy blacks and harsh neons, while Celine gives preppy added ‘bite’

The anxiety-spiked, drug-fuelled, hyperstylised technicolour online messiness of generation Z was not on anyone’s bingo card for Balenciaga’s Paris fashion week show. Cristóbal Balenciaga dressed Ingrid Bergman and Jackie Kennedy; its current designer, Pierpaolo Piccioli, is revered as one fashion’s great romantics, the master of colour and poetry on the modern red carpet.

The Balenciaga show was a collaboration with Euphoria, HBO’s divisive teen drama. In a dark, cavernous venue on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, the lights were low, the music (Rosalía, Labrinth) was loud. On flickering video screens, harlequinade images of nocturnal cityscapes segued into preview images from the long-awaited third series of Euphoria, which returns in April. A sweater was printed with a screen still of new cast member Danielle Deadwyler, smoking a cigarette in a low-cut blood-red top.

Backstage afterwards, Picciolo said he had collaborated with his friend Sam Levinson, Euphoria’s showrunner, because he wanted “to take a picture of this generation. What I love about his show is that he doesn’t criticise, or celebrate, or judge. He shows us the humanity of the characters.”

Levinson designed the installation and cinematography for the Balenciaga set, while Piccioli worked to channel the mood of Euphoria – the mashup of raw and stylised, the sliver of madness and menace that runs through adolescent life – in glossy blacks and harsh neons, bare legs and ab-revealing dresses, scrunched leather jackets and inscrutable dark glasses.

Backstage, the Euphoria actor Chloe Cherry and TV’s hottest new pinup, Heated Rivalry’s Hudson Williams, posed close to a moodboard that also featured Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew. The connection, to Piccioli, was about “light and darkness”. Euphoria, he said, showed light through darkness; the deep shadows in Caravaggio’s art brought edge and a sense of jeopardy. From a business angle, the logic of the collaboration is in its bold play for the younger audience that every fashion house is desperate to target.

Cristóbal Balenciaga, himself a disruptive force in fashion, would not necessarily have disapproved. In postwar Paris, his cocoon coats and sack dresses used architectural tailoring to lift fabric proud of the body, presenting a radical alternative to the restrictive hourglass of Dior’s New Look. The Balenciaga label has seen avant-garde sci-fi radicalism under Nicolas Ghesquière, and sullen, doomy streetwear under Demna.

The fashion week moment likely to be most impactful on real-life wardrobes came at Celine, where the designer Michael Rider, whose collections at the French house and in his previous role at Polo Ralph Lauren have spearheaded a resurgence of neat colourful sportswear, distanced himself from the preppy look. “I don’t feel that preppy is all there is – either for me, or for Celine. There is more to the story,” he said backstage. “I think the most stylish people often have something slightly incorrect about what they are wearing.”

So there was a more abbreviated silhouette, with flood-length kick flares and shorter, sharper jackets, often in layers of black. “We were talking about ‘bite’,” said Rider. “There’s been a lot of fabric around, recently, and I felt like controlling it more this season. I wanted something less swaddled, and more zippy.”