“The time has come for fashion to have a point of view.” That was the straightforward message Demna delivered backstage today at Balenciaga.

The show we had just witnessed played out in a darkened room, on a polished dining table lined on both sides with editors in chief, celebrities from Nicole Kidman to Katy Perry, and Balenciaga and Kering management. His grandmother’s table is where Demna discovered he was interested in clothes as a young boy in Georgia. “My earliest memories of fashion start with me drawing looks on cardboard, cutting them out, and making ‘fashion shows,’” he wrote in a note that was distributed to the press.

Demna may have been trying to reconnect with his inner child, but there was nothing guileless about this collection. A significant portion of it was dedicated to the cocoon silhouette, one of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s icons. It’s a shape Demna said he finds too retro if done literally, so he applied it to the cropped puffers and bombers of the under-25 set and teamed them with jeans that barely clung to jutting hip bones. A pair of pieces that came later also hewed to Cristóbal’s striking sculptural lines but pushed the experimentation further. Built to be ingeniously multipurpose, the men’s featured a “Medici collar from the 17th century” that was actually a corset “engineered into the neckline”; the women’s starred the same jacket, only it was worn as a leather bustier top. And, yes, on look 49 and 50 those were jeans starched stiff and standing in for turned-up lapels.

Riffing on an evening dress made entirely from bras shown for fall, Demna created assemblages that looked thrown together. “I like the mess,” he said. “I think the fashion world is trying to be so perfect and polished, and impeccable in everything… But that’s not how fashion is for me. Fashion needs to get messed up. It needs to get fucked up… It needs to not be based on fear.” It was the most unambiguous précis of the industry we heard all season.

Walking the talk, Demna opened the show with lingerie, a trending category for spring 2025 (“it’s a no-clothes season,” a fellow runway watcher weighed in post-show), but one that he’s never really explored. “My aesthetic is not based on that kind of very direct sex appeal, or that kind of fragility,” he said. And so, of course, he turned the proposition on its head by layering or embroidering the bras and teddies and garters on flesh-colored body-stockings. “It’s trompe l’oeil,” he said. You can see the idea catching on.

On a parallel track, together with his team he came up with a clever hinging mechanism that allowed them to make barely-there tops that clicked on around the ribcage, leaving the whole expanse of the back exposed. Talking about that innovation backstage, Demna genuinely did sound as charged up and enthusiastic as a little kid.