Balenciaga pays tribute to refugees from Ukraine

The creative director, Demna, who fled Georgia as a refugee, recited a poem in Ukrainian while the models walked during the Balenciaga show. And for Balenciaga’s creative director, Demna, it was personal. “The war in Ukraine had triggered the pain of a past trauma I carried in me since 1993 when the same thing happened in my home country,” wrote the designer. As a 12-year-old, he was one of 250,000 Georgians forced from their homes by Abkhazian separatists during the civil war in his country, crossing the Caucasus mountains with his family.

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