The first snow hasn’t fallen on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, but you wouldn’t know it from the way Balenciaga has turned Paris into an alpine training ground. For its latest Skiwear 2025 campaign, the house leans into a language of performance—thermoregulated shells, safety tech, mirrored composites—then dislocates it from the expected glacier backdrop, tracing commutes, coffee stops, and evening errands in kit that looks ready for a whiteout. The message is blunt in that elegant Balenciaga way: ski is no longer a place; it’s an attitude, and it follows you from summit to sidewalk. Shot by Aidan Zamiri, the campaign reframes après-ski as everyday choreography, letting technical garments accumulate the patina of normal life—turnstiles, Métro tiles, wet pavement—while holding their mountain-grade promise.

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Balenciaga has been edging into snow sports for several seasons, but 2025 is the most fully realized articulation of that push. The capsule spans menswear, womenswear, accessories, and hard goods, and it’s positioned explicitly as “slope-to-street”: silhouettes that read alpine up close but settle into the brand’s wider urban armor when you pan out. Zamiri’s stills and video underline that duality—models move through Paris with boards underarm, goggles half-raised, and hoods trimmed in plush, as if the city itself were an extension of a lift line. It’s a studied displacement, an echo of earlier Balenciaga campaigns that set performance gear in unexpected contexts to heighten its cultural drag.

This is also a campaign about switching registers: reversible constructions flip color and texture narratives; detachable elements let a look dial between severity and coziness; and reflective laminations catch headlight glare like snow-blind sun. In editorial shorthand, it’s Demna’s displaced luxury filtered through a technical brief. In retail language, it means wearing a puffer that handles sleet on the Grande Rue and fresh powder in Verbier without breaking stride.

the kit: membranes, mirrors, and a safety ping you hope you never use

The garments speak in materials and features. Outerwear is built on water-repellent fabrics, taped or Aquazip-sealed openings, and thermoregulating membranes designed to balance heat retention with breathability when you’re hauling a board up a staircase or boot-packing to a ridgeline. Several pieces integrate RECCO rescue reflectors—the passive transponders that help search teams locate missing skiers in avalanche terrain—folding a piece of mountain common sense into fashion’s current obsession with utility. The campaign notes and press coverage call out reversible puffers and gilets, high-collar parkas, nylon and fleece zip-ups, and trousers built with the room and articulation to edge or sprint.

Accessories land with the same intent. There are limited-edition mirrored snowboards and skis; impact-absorbent helmets; featherweight poles; black, sheen-finish mask goggles that feel more sci-fi visor than chalet staple; and bags—Explorer, Rodeo, Le City—reimagined in bomber-style shearling-lined calfskin or fleece-lined suede. The hardware reads like a Balenciaga glossary—oversized, industrial, sharply graphic—but the ergonomics are sober and use-driven. The board deck branding is stark enough to double as street signage; the goggles’ curve and coating smack of lab testing. It’s a fluency with equipment that feels less costume and more competence.

 

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aidan zamiri’s

Zamiri’s lens is pivotal. Rather than puncture the fiction with postcard slopes, he doubles down on a new social geography: the city as base lodge. Scenes move from tiled corridors to Haussmann interiors, from curbside bouquets to high-ceilinged foyers. Grain, flash, and close framing produce a 90s-adjacent immediacy, while the garments themselves provide the futuristic note—the membranes and mirrored composites read like sci-tech intruders in a warm, lived-in world. It’s not just pretty; it’s clever semiotics. When alpine gear looks normal under sodium streetlights, you expand what counts as “appropriate” winter dress anywhere.

The official channels reinforce that premise. Balenciaga’s own skiwear hub and social posts headline the capsule amid its Winter 25 communications, while fashion media—from V Magazine to The Impression and Hypebae—emphasize the city-set campaign and the collection’s technical bona fides. The composite of those voices creates a consensus: this isn’t novelty merch; it’s a serious, high-spec wardrobe and a visual argument for wearing it beyond the chairlift.

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Balenciaga’s snow grammar isn’t a one-off dialect; it’s an extension of house codes. The macro-puffer volumes echo the brand’s cathedral-scale outerwear. The logo work—athleticized type, arced insignia—threads into Balenciaga Sport without sacrificing the couture lineage. Shoulders slope; hems drop; silhouettes balloon and cinch with a sculptural logic the house has been refining since it revived Le City and iterated on moto and motocross tropes across leather goods. Even the mirrored boards are essentially a rigidity study—flat planes catching light like the brand’s polished metallic accessories, now writ large enough to carve.

Color plays a strategic role. Much of the capsule is black—practical, stealthy, urbane—but flashes of saturated blues and optic whites interrupt the darkness like ice flares. In motion, the palette behaves like safety gear, throwing contrast against grey skies and wet asphalt. And when the hoods are fur-lined or the fleece piles high, there’s a note of plush hedonism, a wink to après decadence that never tips into parody.

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Ski and snowboard communities have become cautious custodians of their aesthetics—skeptical of luxury’s forays into their kit. What Balenciaga gets right in 2025 is the ratio of charisma to credibility. The RECCO detail isn’t a mere flourish; it’s a safety baseline in many mountain regions. The water-repellent shells and sealed closures are table stakes for real weather. Helmets and goggles are designed, not disguised. Even the boards, for all their mirror swagger, signal rideable intent. That equilibrium matters: it lets fashion audiences trust the performance story while giving mountain audiences permission to enjoy the theater.

There’s also the broader momentum of sport as fashion’s bloodstream. From track spike silhouettes to cycling jerseys, technical attire has been seeding the runway for years. Ski occupies a special corner of that map: it’s both functional and mythic, tied to ideas of risk, altitude, and leisure. Balenciaga’s campaign exploits that mythology, then domesticates it—carrying a board through a subway turnstile is both absurd and irresistibly aspirational. If you can normalize a helmet under a chandelier, you’ve shifted the fashion field of play.

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The 2025 skiwear capsule is available via Balenciaga’s site and select boutiques, integrated into its Winter 25 storytelling alongside other marquee projects. That positioning—neither a tiny micro-drop nor a runaway mainline—suggests the house expects the line to serve both as campaign engine and wardrobe builder. It’s meant to be worn, not just collected. Coverage across Hypebeast, Hypebae, and Design Scene notes the immediate availability and the mix of apparel and gear, framing the drop as a complete ecosystem rather than a branded flourish.

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Three ideas braid together here. First, displacement: by refusing the cliché snowfield, the images allow the clothes to live where most people actually are. Second, credibility: the kit reads technical enough to justify the category, with safety tech and sealing to back up the narrative. Third, charisma: the line satisfies Balenciaga’s appetite for big shapes and bigger gestures—the mirrored boards, the fur rims, the mask goggles—without stranding wearers in costume land. The result is something you can imagine on a lift and at a late-night brasserie, which is precisely the brand’s target: a wardrobe that doesn’t ask you to choose between performance and persona.

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Picture a model in a cobalt fleece, fingers hooked around a board edge, coffee steaming in the other hand as a train blurs past. It’s the campaign’s best kind of fiction: the mountain is implied, the day is ordinary, and the outfit binds both worlds. You don’t need snowfall to justify the hood; you need weather, movement, and the will to look ready. Balenciaga’s Skiwear 2025 campaign captures that tension and sells it, not with alpine grandiosity but with the hum of a city morning. It’s an argument for winter as a sport you play everywhere.

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