FASHION
Balenciaga Appoints Pierpaolo Piccioli
The Balenciaga Appointment of Pierpaolo Piccioli Is a Moment to Watch
By Teneshia Carr, Editor-in-Chief
n an industry that cycles through creative directors like seasonal trends, stopping fashion in its tracks takes something rare and resonant. Pierpaolo Piccioli's appointment as the new artistic director of Balenciaga does just that.
This is not just about legacy or aesthetics. It's about the opportunity for Balenciaga and maybe for fashion itself to recalibrate.
Piccioli is, first and foremost, a humanist. His tenure at Valentino redefined modern romanticism, grounding it not in fragility but in strength, in identity, in humanity. When he sent Black models down the runway in full couture afros, when he cast real people in ad campaigns that felt like art installations, and when he dared to celebrate softness as power, he wasn't pandering. He was building a new language. And fashion, for once, listened.
Now, he steps into a house that has long thrived on provocation. Demna's Balenciaga was confrontational, self-aware, and intentionally destabilizing. In its most compelling moments, it acted like a mirror, forcing the industry to look at its own excesses, its obsessions with irony and digital distortion. But that mirror eventually became a maze. In the wake of controversy and confusion, Balenciaga found itself in need of not just a new voice, but a new vocabulary.
Enter Piccioli. Not a reactionary, but a reinterpreter. A designer who believes that fashion has soul.
The question on everyone's mind is: can a designer known for velvet poetry and radical elegance thrive inside a brand built on dystopia and edge? I think the better question is: what happens when radical empathy meets radical architecture?
Balenciaga has always been about structure, Cristóbal's volumes, Nicolas Ghesquière's futurism, Demna's conceptual tension. Piccioli has structure too, but his comes with breath. With emotion. With a point of view that doesn't demand the audience be shocked, but seen.
I believe this is what fashion needs now: not another performance but a reckoning with beauty, not another digital stunt but a return to craft, and maybe, most critically, a return to meaning.
For years, fashion has been obsessed with "going viral." Piccioli makes clothes that go deep.
As someone who has spent the past decade telling the stories fashion often skips Black designers, queer creatives, movements that begin in the margins, I'm interested in what this moment could signal. If Piccioli brings his inclusive eye, poetic discipline, and collaborative spirit to Balenciaga, we may see a shift in what power looks like on the runway. A softening of spectacle. A reframing of status. A broadening of who luxury speaks to.
Because what Pierpaolo represents isn't nostalgia, it's possibility.
Balenciaga doesn't need reinvention. It needs reconnection.
If Piccioli can create work that reconnects us to grace, precision, and beauty with purpose, then this next era of Balenciaga may not be the loudest, but it might be the most important.
And if fashion is, as I believe, a reflection of who we are and who we hope to become, then now is exactly the right time for Pierpaolo Piccioli to step forward.
We don't just need new clothes. We need new context. We need new courage. We need fashion that feels again.
