Balenciaga Autumn Winter 2017 - Now Available in UrlfreezeShops Stores

Since his appointment to the house in 2015, taking the reigns from Alexander Wang, Demna Gvasalia's presence as Creative Director at Balenciaga has indisputably been felt most strongly through the label's menswear collections. Partly because Gvasalia introduced the label's menswear offering in 2016, leaving the waters of this category completely unmuddied by a slew of creative predecessors, and partly because you need only look at Demna's own flourishing label Vetements to see that Gvasalia understands how to perfectly balance contemporary culture references with high-brow design.

This ability to achieve a sense of confederacy between high and low culture references has become a crucial factor in the success of contemporary menswear labels and, although the intention is to make the output appear effortless and off the cuff, the creative process required to get there is anything but.

For AW17, Balenciaga's collection was littered with a post-millennial sense of irony, sitting in interminable flux between naive optimism and 21st-century despair. Gvasalia declared support for failed US Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (the indisputable choice of American youth) with his appropriation of 'The Bern's' campaign logo. This satirical exploration of corporate branding continues as products are furnished with the Kering logo - the corporate parent company which bankrolls a plethora of the world's leading luxury houses including Balenciaga, Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Alexander McQueen.

Taking one of the key trends of the season - the revival of the audacious logo - and shining it through a corporate-drone lens, is central to Balenciaga's agenda of recooling the completely uncool. Between their Kering-branded merchandise and the now infamous luxury iteration of the Ikea bag, Balenciaga demonstrates a deft understanding of meme culture marketing, an invaluable communication tool for luxury brands looking to build a cult following in the premium streetwear arena. And who better to adopt as the contemporary style icon of a disenfranchised generation of streetwear buffs than a 76-year-old senator from Vermont? It's European fashion-irony at its finest.

Aplomb with louche, untoward, and dishevelled silhouettes, all underpinned with a premium streetwear finesse that's hard to match, Balenciaga are using their newfound menswear platform to reposition the loser art-dad as a cutting-edge streetwear icon, to appoint the stuffy politician as the latest Gen-Z aspiration, and to insist that the banality of normcore is the arcane style statement of a generation. Rebellion is dead; the best way to annoy your dad is to tell him he's cool and borrow his clothes.

UrlfreezeShops is proud to introduce Balenciaga to its brand roster - available now exclusively in-store in Newcastle and Glasgow.