Visiting Balenciaga’s web store is always an eye-opening experience, especially when you land on a product page selling a wrap-around towel skirt for nearly $1,000.
Yup, the often-tendentious Balenciaga fashion house is finally selling its extremely un-avant-garde Towel Skirt on its site for the generous price of $925.
That's nearly ten bills for what is essentially a Balenciaga-branded bath towel.
The Towel Skirt, first showcased in creative director Demna’s Spring 2024 fashion show in Paris earlier this year, arrives in beautifully boring beige with Balenciaga’s logo embroidered tone-on-tone at the front. That's it.
Again — and I don’t wanna divide the entire room here — but Balenciaga’s Towel Skirt is, well, just a towel, isn’t it? Take away the adjustable belt on the inside and the two buttons at the waistline and you, my friend, have yourself a regular terry cotton bathroom towel, but with a Balenciaga logo or two.
I suppose the only difference with Balenciaga’s Towel Skirt is that instead of drying your post-showered self, it’ll instead exsiccate the linings of your purse.
As baffling as the Towel Skirt is, it really shouldn't be all that shocking. Balenciaga has made a habit of releasing disruptive products that could conceivably be made at home. Take its $1,800 Trash Bag, for instance, the potato chip bags, or — who can forget — those dirtied-up Paris sneakers.
So when it comes to Balenciaga's Towel Skirt — a garment that is intentionally giving a just-showered, off-to-get-the-mail vibe – we shouldn't be so shocked. And yet, we definitely are, as a society. Balenciaga did it again.
It's the same cycle of outrage that Balenciaga used to channel every few months. Given how quiet Balenciaga has been over the past year since it accidentally stoked the flames of controversy with a pair of ads, it's almost a refreshing return to form.
Well, as refreshing as a $1,000 towel can be, I suppose.
What’s funnier, though, for me anyway, is that as soon as you arrive onto Balenciaga’s webstore, a pop-up instantly appears asking: “Do you have any questions?” Because truthfully, I have an absolute ton of them, but we’d be here all day.
