admin Demna’s vision of subversive, raw, and grungy loveliness remains vivid, but his intentions in coming to Los Angeles are not so cynical. “Often people perceive my work as ironic—actually it’s the opposite. I was showing my love to the influence that I got from this city, it’s my favorite city in the world,” he told reporters after the show. “All my cultural evolution as a teenager, growing up in this kind of post-Soviet vacuum, it really came from here: movies, music, everything that I kind of absorbed that later on started to become my fashion references.”
Opened by a shirtless, six-packed dude in gym shorts, an iPhone pressed to his ear and a metal water bottle clutched in his hand, this collection made real the version of a perfect American life that Demna first discovered as a boy in the post-Soviet East. A life invented in Hollywood, a life that takes you from the gym to the health food store to Rodeo Drive and then to the red carpet. Over the course of 77 looks, he created the wardrobe for this idealized, sunkissed, and blessed existence. It may seem perverse in its idealism, but the freedom to indulge oneself in beauty is a freedom nonetheless—and perhaps a quintessentially Los Angeles one.
