Demna's Final Balenciaga Exhibition Proves That Rejection Is Just Redirection
Before he exits the house, the Georgian designer shares a powerful sentiment.
Demna is finishing up a 10-year tenure at Balenciaga next month in anticipation of a Kering-wide shift of creative directors; soon, he will take the helm of Gucci, with his first collection debuting in September. Before the move, the designer is looking back at a decade at Balenciaga with a retrospective exhibition in Kering’s Paris headquarters, open to the public by appointment from now.
The first thing to see at the exhibition is a blown-up rejection letter. In 2007, Demna was a young, recent graduate from Antwerp Academy who was looking to secure an internship at a luxury fashion house to formally begin his career in fashion. After applying for a role at Balenciaga in the menswear team, the Georgian designer received an impersonal rejection email instead.
The email reads: "Dear Demna, Thank you for your interest in an internship at the Menswear Design Team at BALENCIAGA. We've carefully reviewed your application and, after consideration, we will not be moving forward with you candidacy at this time. Your profile will remain on file should future opportunities come up."
"My professional journey would have turned out completely different if I’d been accepted," he told Sarah Mower in a new Vogue interview.
Two years after the designer's internship application was rejected, Demna joined Maison Margiela, where he was responsible for women’s collections until 2013 before he moved to work at Louis Vuitton under Marc Jacobs, overseeing women's ready-to-wear collections.
In 2014, together with his brother Guram Gvasalia, Demna launched Vetements with a small group of their friends, before getting the call from Balenciaga in 2015 to head up the brand's creative direction. He would spend the next decade there, and solidify a new legacy for the house.
The email serves as a sweet reminder that sometimes, rejection is just redirection for something better that might be waiting in the future—which, in Demna's case, was the creative director role instead of an internship.
