January 15, 2026 |
Balenciaga’s pre-fall 2026 campaign arrives with a quiet confidence that feels almost disarming. Shot by Robin Galiegue across Paris, it is Pierpaolo Piccioli’s first pre-season collectionn for the house, and it unfolds less like a declaration than an observation – an attentive study of bodies moving through the city, inhabiting it rather than performing for it. There is no single stage, no cinematic sweep. Instead, the images drift between the street and the gym, the commute and the living room, echoing the same lived-in intimacy that defined the SS26 show presented last September.
That show marked a pivot: a return to the human figure as the starting point for everything. Pre-fall 2026 extends that thinking outward, translating the runway’s ideas into moments that feel almost casually encountered. A figure pauses mid-step on a pavement slick with winter light; another leans into a stretch, muscles and fabric responding in tandem. The camera never dominates. It follows, listens, allows space for gestures to surface on their own terms. This is Balenciaga not as spectacle, but as environment.
The cast – actors, musicians, artists, models – reads like a cross-section of contemporary culture rather than a hierarchy of faces. They appear alone and together, connected less by narrative than by a shared physical awareness. There is an elasticity to the way they occupy space, a sense that the clothes are secondary to the posture, the movement, the breath. Luxury here is not announced; it is felt, embedded in ease.
The clothes themselves operate as quiet accomplices to the body rather than headline acts. Tailoring is softened and subtly reworked, sports references filtered through a classical restraint so garments move instinctively with their wearer. Tech-inflected pieces sit alongside everyday silhouettes without hierarchy, collapsing distinctions between formal, functional and casual. Moments of ceremony – elongated lines, fluid volumes, controlled exaggeration – are deliberately grounded, worn where clothes are usually expected to behave, as opposed to perform. That dialogue extends into the collaborations: an NBA capsule that folds athletic culture directly into the collection’s lived reality, and footwear created with Manolo Blahnik that introduces a refined counterpoint without tipping into preciousness.
Piccioli’s visual language has always thrived on tension, and pre-fall 2026 finds it in the overlap between control and release. The body is framed as both protected and exposed, disciplined and at rest. You see it in the way silhouettes skim rather than constrain, in how formality dissolves into something almost tender when placed against the banality of everyday settings. The city becomes a backdrop not for aspiration, but for being.
Piccioli’s renewed focus on humanity, on clothing as a second skin now settles into real life. His’s first campaign for Balenciaga doesn’t ask to be decoded. It simply invites you to look, to notice how fashion lives once it leaves the show space and returns to the body, where it has always belonged.
Photography by Robin Galiegue, courtesy of Balenciaga.
