Fashion follows a calendar that bears little resemblance to the one hanging in your kitchen. With the first bikini-defrosting of the year, fall campaigns begin colonizing your feed. One minute you’re working on your first sunburn, the next you’re being sold coats the size of studio apartments. Not exactly what you want to see between horizontal sips of a martini and poor SPF decisions. Nobody respects time less than fashion. Except, of course, New York. A ten-minute errand becomes a five-minute errand, even in kitten heels. A run to the closest subway station takes three minutes, even when Google Maps insists on seven. Being late somehow requires arriving early. Even coffee brews faster. Balenciaga understands that rhythm.
But Chanel did too, staging its Métiers d’Art show in a subway station. A slightly bizarre choice, until you remember that Gucci took over Times Square. Too much New York? Try a museum. Louis Vuitton picked The Frick as a gentler alternative. Pick your fighter, just make sure it’s somewhere within Manhattan. The American luxury customer has been in a particularly good mood lately, and the pattern doesn’t really feel accidental. Balenciaga’s version of the city comes in a campaign of three one-minute clips, titled A New York Minute. At the center of it is Sarah Pidgeon, who recently introduced herself to a much larger audience as Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy in Love Story. Behind the scenes is Oscar-nominated filmmaker Celine Song, and Pierpaolo Piccioli’s vision for the label.
The shorts follow Pidgeon through a series of city moments. Taxi rides. Taxi drivers shouting that you forgot your bag. Dry-cleaning runs. Dry cleaners suggesting you’ve forgotten your ticket. Walks that somehow get interrupted by movie scenes. Naturally, there’s a common thread running through all of them. Besides the city’s accelerated sense of time, there’s always a Balenciaga bag in the frame. A Le City here. A Rodeo there. A Le 7 Bowling somewhere in between. Each clip ends with a peek behind the curtain, though there’s more of that over at @keeppprolling, where Pierpaolo Piccioli occasionally swaps creative direction for photography, joined by Monaris and Zora Sicher.
