The invitation alone makes it clear that the Balenciaga brand fashion show is not just about a fashion show.

There is no perfumed package, no candy, no gilded cardboard card, as is usually the case before the Prêt-à-Porter presentations.

It's coming: a cell phone with a cracked screen.

According to the accompanying letter, the splinters were not “artificially created”, but stemmed from years of actual use or abuse.

E-waste as an invitation to a fashion event – ​​Paris has never seen that before.

Alphonse Kaiser

Responsible editor for the department "Germany and the World" and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Magazin.

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It was high time that on this Sunday afternoon in a huge hall at Le Bourget airport the innocent beauty was not once again conjured up, not once again pretended that the Russian attack on Ukraine was very far away.

So far, the fashion houses have excelled above all in not letting on that there is a war going on.

A major fashion brand said it was “deeply concerned about the current situation in Europe”.

Criticism was not long in coming: Why not just talk about the war, but only about "the situation"?

Demna Gvasalia is known for clear statements

Not so the Balenciaga chief designer.

Demna Gvasalia is known for clear statements and extreme design.

And, perhaps more importantly, he's from Georgia, he knows what war and violence can mean in a former Soviet state.

At the age of twelve, Gvasalia, who was born into a Georgian Orthodox family in 1981, had to flee the civil war in his homeland.

He mostly grew up in Düsseldorf before building up the avant-garde brand Vetements in Paris – and because of its enormous success he was finally allowed to take over the traditional company Balenciaga, which he alienated with oversized, edgy and often wacky designs, making it the big hit of the made in recent years - and a profit maker for the luxury group Kering, to which the brand belongs.

On Sunday he will once again resort to striking means.

The models walk in a huge circle through artificial snow.

It's freezing in the hall.

The spectators don't notice because they are sitting behind a pane of glass.

But they see the models fighting the freezing wind and the upcoming blizzard.

And you can also see it afterwards backstage: The models who come from their round are immediately wrapped in emergency blankets made of heat-insulating aluminum foil so that they don't get even more hypothermic.

That could easily happen, as some wear little but a vague sweater.

Others don't get ahead because they're stuck in boots with forever long stiletto heels.

Or they carry thick black garbage bags with them like refugees who could only collect their things together in a makeshift manner.

Ice cold also runs through the audience at the sight of the visibly suffering models - because even aloof fashion fans are reminded of the misery pictures of the refugees.

The intensity of the music can only be interpreted like this: the "bass drum" sounds like the thunder of artillery cannon, the "snare drum" like whipping gunfire.

Some in the audience are so upset they start crying.

Immediately after the show ended, actress Salma Hayek, wife of Kering CEO François-Henri Pinault, said: "For the first time in my life I cried in a fashion show.

It moved me a lot.

Not only did it make me think, but you feel pity for people.

And at the same time it was poetic.

A lot for a fashion show.”

And really: Some of the designs of this refugee collection can be called beautiful.

For example, the idea of ​​a shoulder bag, which consists of two boots sewn together and which, unlike other handbags, can also be placed on the floor, is original.

But is that even allowed?

Add war associations to a fashion show with 2,000-euro bags?

"For me it was like going back 30 years when I was in a shelter like other boys and girls are now with their parents," says Demna Gvasalia after the show.

"If I had to depict my past visually, it would be precisely these half-naked people walking through the wind." You wouldn't believe a collection like this from any other fashion designer.

But for him, who has made anti-aesthetics a trend, a different collection would have seemed strange, especially in these times.

Looking at the fetish dresses made of tape wrapped around the body, Gvasalia brings another dimension to the collection: “When I was a little gay Georgian boy I used to put curtains around my neck and put on my mother's boots – and I was punished for it .

That was my revenge, so to speak.” These looks also show that fashion in all its dimensions can only be lived out when freedom prevails, as in Paris – and not a dictatorship of false morality.