Balenciaga Fall 24 Collection....

For out-of-towners, Los Angeles has the quality of the surreal. The palm trees, canyons, and golden light, the Facetuned faces and super-toned bodies, the cult of Erewhon, the Hollywood sign. Demna, Balenciaga’s Georgian creative director, is not immune to its allure. After his pre-fall show in LA today, he called it “my favorite city in the world,” saying, “all my cultural evolution, when I was a teenager growing up in this kind of post-Soviet vacuum, it really came from here, through movies, music—I mean, everything that I kind of absorbed, that later on started to kind of become my fashion references.”

There was certainly something surreal about Balenciaga’s gothy black clad guests turning up en masse on a well manicured stretch of Windsor Boulevard in Hancock Park, with that famous Hollywood sign presiding in the distance. “It feels like we’re going to a funeral in sunny Transylvania,” a fellow editor cracked. Or like stepping into a Tim Burton movie shot in Technicolor.