All about clothes: after the scandal, Balenciaga makes it simple in Paris

For a brand that made a lot of noise last fall, the walkway under the Louvre was eerily quiet on Sunday morning. "There will be nothing to see but clothes," Balenciaga artistic director Demna said before the show. "I need to be the radical antidote - to not be in this conversation at all. That's what Cristóbal Balenciaga would do."

Cristóbal quit Balenciaga in 1968, but Demna's Balenciaga couldn't afford to be silent forever. It's still a business, and it's the brand's first collection since November's controversial ad campaign that saw sales plummet from dramatically, where children were photographed holding teddy bears in bondage gear.

Today the show was indeed all about the clothes. It all started with tailored suits - except jackets were made of trousers, cut open and turned inside out, so the hem was actually a belt. dissected chino trench coat followed. Some were perfectly suited to retail viability, albeit for the 1%. Demna began working on the collection before the scandal and says it has changed very little since.

Demna and Cristóbal Balenciaga were both driven by the relationship between the body and what covered it, and with a silhouette. Leather jackets looked like jackets until you saw them from behind, where they looked puffy. Form-fitting tracksuits featured exaggerated tennis ball-shaped shoulders. A handful of puff-shouldered floral dresses — similar to her 2017 collection — were worn with her signature “sock boots.” The shoulder pads referenced “the ones Cristóbal Balenciaga made in the 1960s,” he said.

The collection ended with seven shimmering dresses in high collar and touching the floor. with the same swollen shoulders. Some of the dresses looked pretty on the red carpet, assuming people will still be wearing the brand. Unsurprisingly, there were very few bags.

True to his word, there was nothing else to see: no Kardashians in the front row and no of Hadid on the podium. There was no external branding, in an effort to prevent protests. Anna Wintour was there, but other faces were missing. Nobody knew what to expect, except that the brand probably hopes to redeem itself through beautiful, harmless clothes. But even as we sat silently beneath Paris' most well-known building, it was surprising that Demna was still there.

< p class="dcr-1b64dqh">Since joining Balenciaga in 2015, Demna's penchant for thought-provoking ideas about taste and beauty - for selling 1,500 trash bags £ and cut-off clothes he says are "hard to digest" - were starting to rub people the wrong way. Then, in November, he upped the ante by launching an ad campaign featuring a teddy bear...