Few modern designers have drawn more hostility than Demna Gvasalia (now just “Demna”). Over the past decade Demna has reshaped Balenciaga into one of the most culturally dominant brands in fashion, and now steps into a new era at Gucci, debuting in Fall/Winter 2026/27.
For his fierce supporters, Demna forced luxury fashion to confront contemporary culture — internet aesthetics, banal consumerism, and the absurdity of status. For critics, those are all gimmicks with which he replaced craftsmanship and seduction.
The hostility toward Demna did not emerge overnight. It developed across years of runway shows, controversies, and debates among fashion audiences. When you step back from those arguments, the reasons behind the backlash become remarkably consistent.
Here are seven of the most common criticisms.
1. He‘s a one-trick-pony.
When Demna arrived at Balenciaga in 2015, his aesthetic felt genuinely new and even disruptive. His oversized tailoring, hyper-structured shoulders, exaggerated proportions, and deliberately awkward silhouettes challenged the polished codes of traditional luxury.
But those ideas very quickly became a formulaic cliche.
His Balenciaga Fall/Winter 2018/19 collection, for example showcased the towering padded coats, distorted tailoring, and corporate archetypes that would become one of Demna’s signatures.
By Spring/Summer 2019, the same exaggerated office silhouettes and elongated outerwear returned almost unchanged, presented in another immersive runway environment.
Years later and we find his design vocabulary is still completely static. Balenciaga Fall/Winter 2024/25 again relied heavily on hulking outerwear, cartoonish proportions, and dystopian character styling, reinforcing the perception that the designer really lacked the range and versatility to do anything more than one thing.
What seemed like a potential revolution quickly fizzled into Alexander Wang 2.0
2. His fashion often feels cynical rather than desirable
The luxury fashion machine sells the masses fantasy and aspiration. And while I’m always interested when a designer challenges glamour, Demna rarely replaces it with anything more compelling. In fact, Demna has become the posterchild for this approach. He is very concerned with letting the world know how much he rejects those ideals. Instead of glamor, his collections frequently present exhaustion, alienation, and deliberate ugliness. The models rarely project seduction or elegance; they appear detached, and even miserable.
And yet, he never seems to have much to say with any of it other than “Look mom, no glamor!”
His Balenciaga Spring/Summer 2025 pushed this aesthetic to extremes with hyper-aggressive styling, exaggerated sunglasses, and a parade of confrontational silhouettes that many describe as abrasive.
His Spring/Summer 2026 show continued the mood with oversized tailoring, forceful accessories, and characters that felt more like caricatures than aspirational figures.
Even Cathy Horyn argued at the time (although the article seems to have been taken down) that while Demna’s real strength lies in his ability to translate contemporary culture into desirable fashion imagery, that very same fluency tends to produce overthought collections.
For many viewers, that leaves the clothes intellectually and emotionally uninspiring.
3. He’s gimmicks-first and clothes-second.
Demna loves himself a spectacle. The staging often dominates the conversation before the clothing even appears.
We have to talk about the bizarre Balenciaga Fall/Winter 2021–22 show, which took place in a simulated snowstorm, complete with an immersive blizzard environment. Supposedly, Demna was making a “political statement” about war…a message delivered, somewhat awkwardly, from a Paris runway to a room filled with celebrities, luxury buyers, and the fashion elite. Social media and industry pundits ate it up like a ham roast on Christmas day of course — but beneath the spectacle, the collection was an embarrassing cocktail of streetwear hoodies, denim, and oversized coats.
A similar dynamic appeared in Spring/Summer 2026, where theatrical presentation again framed clothing that frequently resembled amplified everyday garments.
The result is a collection upstaged by its own stage. Or more aptly put, Demna is not afraid to use set design to conceal flawed collection. His staging doesn’t supplement his collection, the staging IS the collection. When the spectacle fades, it’s become custom for Demna’s clothes to emerge completely unremarkable.
4. He‘s unable to marry satire with luxury.
One of Demna’s defining gestures has been the elevation of deliberately banal objects into luxury products. Balenciaga’s Spring/Summer 2017 menswear collections featured the now-famous oversized IKEA-esque blue shopping tote — another moment that went viral online. Later collections only expanded this strategy further. Balenciaga Fall/Winter 2022 introduced accessories styled like trash bags, turning disposable objects into high-priced luxury items. Distressed sneakers and deliberately worn-looking garments appeared routinely from him across seasons.
But what exactly is any of this supposed to say? In his mind, Demna may imagine himself as a ‘social critic’, but very rarely do his collections ever make any serious anthropological proposition. This dilemma is very reminiscent of what 20th Century Dadaism struggled with: mocking the establishment is easy, providing a superior alternative is not. Mockery without resolution is nothing more than cheap talk.
Some have claimed that he offers us a commentary on consumer culture. But this is farce at best because not only is Balenciaga not the right platform to deliver that message, but there’s also something incredibly hypocritical about trying to critique consumerism while working for a company that caters to the wealthy and gaslights the poor. As the kids say: right message, wrong messenger.
When irony becomes your dominant design language, the risk is that both fashion and designer start to feel like a joke.
5. He’s overly referential
Oh the internet. An endless supply of sociopolitical references. Demna is arguably the first major luxury designer whose visual language fully reflects the internet era. Memes, online irony, social media virality, and the collapse of high-low cultural boundaries all shape his work. His Balenciaga collections often circulate online as striking images rather than garments.
Balenciaga Spring/Summer 2019 already demonstrated this dynamic, with exaggerated silhouettes and meme-ready accessories spreading rapidly across social media. By Spring/Summer 2025, the collections felt designed for viral screenshots: logos galore, enormous sunglasses, surreal proportions, and characters that read instantly on a phone screen.
This connection helped make Balenciaga one of the most discussed brands online. But it also means the work is constantly flattened into memes, amplifying its most controversial aspects while obscuring subtler design details. It shows Demna’s readiness to overrely on lowest-common-denominator pastiche rather than push for original design.
6. His controversies have intensified criticism.
I know by now this has become fodder, but there’s no way I was going to skip over this.
The backlash surrounding Balenciaga campaigns in 2022 dramatically shifted how many people perceived the brand. Images from the brand’s holiday campaign featuring children holding bondage soft-toys triggered widespread outrage online and beyond. The company later apologized, and Demna described the campaign as a mistake and “the wrong artistic choice.”
The story caused such a storm that Reuters noted the controversy became one of the defining crises of his tenure at Balenciaga.
The scandal reframed earlier provocations. It confirmed what people had been saying about Demna all along: he’s a shock-jock with nothing very interesting to say. What once seemed like edgy commentary now appeared as part of a pattern of shock-driven branding and nothing else.
I think this was also the point he began to lose much of his most loyal supporters.
7. He’s diluted the spirit of historic luxury houses.
This brings us to Demna’s debut at Gucci this season (F/W 26/27). Demna’s appointment at Gucci only intensified the existing debate.
Gucci’s past creative eras — from Tom Ford in the 1990s to Alessandro Michele in the 2010s — were radically different but shared a key element: aspiration.
Say what you want about Michele, but his eccentric maximalism still felt lush, romantic, and luxurious. It always felt like an evolution to the brand. Demna’s Gucci Fall/Winter 2026–27 debut, on the other hand, was little more than a continuation of his Balenciaga years. He reintroduced the same codes into the house: viral pastiche accessories, exaggerated staging and stylized characters.
His debut confirmed what we knew all along: Demna is an inflexible designer. Rather than work with the identity and heritage of his host house, he simply hammers his same identifiers regardless of where he is. He is not interested in interpreting the legacy of a fashion house – only coercing it to fit the one thing he knows how to do.
The Paradox of Demna
Despite the hostility, Demna remains one of the most influential designers of the last decade.
His work reshaped how luxury fashion engages with streetwear, internet culture, and contemporary social imagery. Even critics who dislike his collections acknowledge that his influence is everywhere.
That paradox explains why the debates around him are so intense.
Demna did not merely design clothes. He changed the visual language of contemporary fashion.
The question now — especially as he begins his new chapter at Gucci — is whether that language has anything new to say.
