TEMPLE OF SHADOWS – SARA DAL MONTE

BALENCIAGA ss26 IN PARIS

I watched Pierpaolo Piccioli’s first Balenciaga show from Los Angeles, far from the noise of Paris and the flash of the photographers, and maybe that distance helped me see it for what it really is: not a revolution, but a gentle correction. Piccioli promised to bring grace, warmth, and poetry back into the house of Cristóbal Balenciaga — a beautiful and, at the same time, risky intention, because when you touch a monument, every gesture carries twice the weight, and every trace of softness risks disappearing under the pressure of its own legacy.

There were moments that truly caught me: the green balloon skirt, light and sculptural at once; the long red feather skirt moving like a living flame; the white dress covered with petals, almost breathing on its own. These are the kind of pieces that make you say, I’d wear that — or at least, I’d like to try it on — and that’s something Balenciaga hadn’t made me feel in a long time. Still, there’s a visible tension between two worlds: the tenderness of Piccioli and the cold monumentality left behind by Demna. It’s a subtle but constant difference that you can feel in the volumes, in the bold colors, in the way the fabric meets the body without apology. It’s elegant, yes — but still searching for a voice that’s truly its own.

From here, from Los Angeles, the collection felt like an act of mediation rather than a declaration. It’s as if Piccioli were trying to find a human heartbeat inside a digital skeleton — and that, honestly, I deeply respect. Because fashion, even when it wants to be conceptual, must always come back to desire: that intimate spark that makes you look twice, that curiosity that draws you in, that impulse to imagine yourself inside a garment, not just in front of it.

In the end, what I saw on that runway wasn’t perfection but potential — a whisper of warmth in a house built on coolness, a fragile, feminine, slightly uncertain whisper, but perhaps for that very reason, real. And it’s from that quiet voice, vibrating more from intuition than force, that something new might be born — something worth waiting for.

GALLERY