Balenciaga, Demna's masterful and necessary farewell. New and convincing start for Maison Margiela

Concluding is an art that is hardly practised in fashion. Many of the final collections of a creative direction are only a posteriori, after the announcement of the separation, whether consensual and planned or sudden and belligerent.

That the one presented by Demna on Wednesday morning in the Balenciaga couture salons on Avenue George V would be the last collection for the venerable maison - which Demna himself has brought to stellar heights and profits with a unique amalgam of talent and cynicism - had been known since last March, when he was appointed creative director of Gucci. This gave it a whole other context and a whole other spirit: at once lyrical and recapitulatory, while at the same time highlighting how necessary and timely the conclusion was.

Demna's journey into the severe language and perfectionism of the form of the inimitable Cristobal had come to an end a few seasons ago, sclerotizing into a powerful, abrasive, shining formula, but like all formulas destined to create addiction and from there boredom. It is Demna himself who says this between the lines, emotionally, at the end of the show, in some way handing over the not easy inheritance to Pierpaolo Piccioli, his successor: "One of my difficulties, here, was moving within a code that was too narrow for what the business has become: that's why I had to put so much of myself into it".

Farewell is an essay in Fashion - with a strictly capitalised M, a rarity - that adds nothing to what has already been done but which seals the folder with wax for the archives of history. Everything is there Demna: the extreme constructions, the relentless taste for tailoring, the distortion of the everyday, the struggle between dress and body, the trash and the glamour. All his characters are there, too, who have now become mannered. Hungry again with insatiable bulimia, the system now awaits him at the next exam in Italian clothes. As well as necessary, change is inevitable.

At Viktor & Rolf the darkness is pitch black, the blackness is absolute, the conceptuality maximum. All of this, however, is diluted by a good dose of humour: cold, very cold, Nordic, but still so. The idea is effective: the clothes, identical, come out in pairs: one is inflated to the extreme with coloured feathers, while the other is floppy, empty and deflated. Interpretation is free: a reflection on the ubiquity of down? Or perhaps a thought on the pre- and post-Ozempic body? On eating to protect oneself and starving to disappear? Difficult to decide - the duo speaks of a homage to feathers as a topos of couture, but one appreciates the expertise in the execution, although this is only an exercise in style.