When the Joke Stops Being Funny

Cristóbal Balenciaga was called the master by the other couturiers of his era, which is not a phrase people in fashion hand out casually. He worked with a technical seriousness that made him a designer's designer: pattern, volume, the architecture of a garment around a body.

His line about the job is worth reading slowly. That a good designer must be an architect for the pattern, a sculptor for the shape, a painter for the colour. Every one of those is a craft, and every one takes years.

Decades after his death, the house was pointed at irony.

Under Demna it produced a deliberately clumsy sneaker, a bag shaped like a supermarket carrier, and clothing that quite openly made fun of the industry buying it. It was extremely successful. It was also, for a while, genuinely funny in a way fashion rarely permits itself.

Irony is a real strategy and it is worth being clear about what it sells, which is membership in the group that gets the joke. If you understand why the sneaker is deliberately awful, you are inside. If you think it is simply awful, you are outside, and your being outside is part of what the people inside are buying.

The ugly sneaker worked for a related reason. It was legible at a distance and hard to like, so wearing it announced a specific taste loudly. When everything easy to like is already saturated, difficulty becomes one of the few remaining ways to say something with an object.

Then in 2022 an advertising campaign caused a serious backlash, the company apologised publicly, and the strategy's bill arrived.

The lesson is not about that particular campaign. It is about the structure underneath, which is that provocation is a strategy with an interest rate.

It buys attention very cheaply and it spends goodwill invisibly. A brand that has spent years signalling that nothing it does should be taken at face value has trained its audience not to extend the benefit of the doubt. So when it needs to be taken seriously, the reserve it needs has already been spent, and it is spent in a currency nobody was tracking.

Hold the two men at either end of this house side by side, because the comparison is the whole lesson.

Cristóbal's authority came from doing something almost nobody could do. That is owned. No controversy removes it, no shift in taste dissolves it, and it does not require anybody to keep finding him interesting.

Authority built on being ahead of the joke is rented. The rent is payable continuously, in the form of needing a newer joke, and the lease can be terminated by the audience at a moment they choose rather than one you do.