Angela Merkel’s very particular sense of style got some major catwalk cred Sunday on the day the German chancellor was guaranteed her fourth term in office. Fashion’s hottest designer Demna Gvasalia sent out more than a dozen jackets and coats with Merkel hips in his Paris fashion week show for Balenciaga. The Georgian-born wunderkind, who grew up as a refugee in Germany after fleeing his war-torn homeland, channelled the prudent bourgeois hausfrau look so beloved of the German leader.
One orange houndstooth coat, worn with a tight 1950s-style scarf, would have particularly pleased the thrifty Swabian housewives whose fiscal rectitude Merkel is so fond of quoting. The designer price tag, however, might make them blanch. Gvasalia — the hippest creator in the world right now for his designs for Balenciaga and his own Vetements label — has not officially acknowledged the chancellor as his muse.
Stasi meets hausfrau
But two stern suits in his autumn-winter collection last year also had Merkelesque attributes, although they conjured up more the Stasi secret police of her youth in the old East Germany than the chancellor herself. Sam Hine, of US GQ magazine, tweeted at the time that the “last pillar of liberal democracy in Europe” was now Balenciaga’s inspiration — though doubted the link. Now there is little doubt.