Grime, Gloss, and the Death of Post-Sovietism

The energy in the cavernous, glossy presentation for Balenciaga’s Fall/Winter 2025 show was unfamiliar; there were no expected trash bags, no shredded denim, and no grotesque sneakers that were deliberately distressed and soiled. Creatively restrained silhouettes, engineered to the millimeter, were donned by stoic models ordered by Balenciaga’s creative director Demna Gvasalia, who has turned his creative volume down to a murmur, marking the suffocation of post-Sovietism.

Post-Soviet fashion, coined by Western media in the early 2000s, was never self-defined or declared by its creators. Rather, it was a label that stuck to a wave of rebellious designers from former Soviet nations whose work was raw, unsanitized, and a defiant rejection of European design conventions. The clothes were chaotic, industrial, and, at times, intentionally ugly, ironically prodding at generations of fashion defined by European royalty, whose ruins visibly made way for the Adidas stripes worn like medals that dominated post-war culture.

Gvasalia, along with many other European fashion designers, became denizens of this aesthetic, transforming it into an international spectacle. At its peak, post-Soviet fashion wasn’t just edgy—it was loaded with heritage and history. While historical societies used fashion as an artistic vehicle to connect to immortality and the divine, post-Soviet fashion channeled the bare chaos of economic instability, civil war, and the beauty of survival into its gritty aesthetics.

At the core of the post-war aesthetic was gopnik, which roughly translates to delinquency, a working-class style. The blue-collar antihero was born in the 1990s, slouched in stairwells in Adidas tracksuits and wrapped in knock-off sneakers—a look assembled through the scarcity that plagued the era and the defiance that rejuvenated it. When economic chaos unfolded after 1991, where luxury was inaccessible, sportswear stepped in. The accessible tracksuit became a second skin for people to express themselves. The three stripes weren’t worn to be fashionable; they were proof of survival. People wore what was left, stolen, or handed down, and in doing so, gave those pieces value. Worth wasn’t created through trends but through necessity, wear, and repetition.

Balenciaga’s gopnik spell under Gvasalia thrived in chaos, consumed with creativity and injected with irony. Oversized hoodies printed with Cyrillic, jackets made from Scotch tape, and $2,000 sneakers that seemed to have been fished out of a forest swamp and immediately shipped to the store took over. Gvasalia’s Balenciaga represented a luxury mutation of gopnik style, a signal to the elite that irony had replaced aspiration, and degradation, once a marker of class, had become a commodity. Balenciaga partnered with Adidas, recalling decades of revolutionary attire to create a modern-day costume: trash-bag purses, skewed shoulders, and haunted expressions. This style relayed rebellion, toughness, and a refusal to assimilate to the ever-changing world of fashion back to the West. The post-Soviet look was a lived experience, resonating beyond borders, where vivid hardship and a makeshift identity spoke to the youth across the globe with an honesty that wore its damage openly. Western fashion, hungry for the next big hit, consumed it while Gvasalia fed the flames—his most successful stunt yet. 

The Fall/Winter 2025 show is an exorcism of gopnik. Gone is the claustrophobic asylum; in its place stands perfect velvet silence—soft, yet suffocating. Models seem inhuman, gliding, ethereal, and distant. Look Four of the show displays a model in a jet-black suit, dust surgically removed, lapels glassy, and punitive tailoring ever precise. The blazer echoes medieval armor, with slightly pointed shoulders, yet the shape obeys gravity; the model is framed by the deep plunge of the jacket. A square leather briefcase lies along the right hip like a relic, managing a couple of glances from the audience, only to be replaced by thin-lens sunglasses, fitting perfectly into place, without friction.

In Balenciaga’s Fall/Winter 2024 show, post-Sovietism was sharper than ever, thriving in an audience submerged in a bunkered aesthetic; the runway twisted through dull, claustrophobic walls, like a padded asylum. Models pushed through in oversized silhouettes, heads low, eyes glazed. Look 60 featured a model dressed in oversized “clown-esque” shoes, completely engulfed in baggy black sweatpants, and donning the Adidas-style stripes. A navy suit with shoulder pads that magnify was fitted with clear Scotch tape, which violently mummified the suit, leaving only the silhouette of the body. The model carried a black bag, styled with gopnik metal trinkets that added flair, and a black hat’s severely undersized brim—whose jolting purple text was too small and faded to be legible—seemed to fit right into place, surrounded by TV static, which reverberated around the room and on massive screens.

In a glaring contrast, the newest Fall/Winter 2025 is not a continuation of a revolution, but a retreat. The tailoring is sharp, and the dystopia vanishes. In the place of grime and graffiti is a new lexicon: minimalism and constraint. Whether strategy or assimilation, the chaos is over, and Balenciaga has fallen victim to the same corporate reinvention that satisfies never-ending consumerism. Gvasalia hasn’t chosen to outgrow post-Soviet culture; he’s ended it on his own terms. In a world chasing rebirth, rebellion has an expiration date. If everything becomes a trend, authenticity is replaced by a sales pitch, and history is lost in time.