Disguise — TICS Magazine

Boys in the City

The Gangsters

July, 2025

In the language of street culture, the term gangsters often conjures images of rebellion, confrontation, and survival on the fringes. But in contemporary fashion—particularly through Demna’s transformative vision at Balenciaga—it has come to symbolize something far more nuanced: a collective emblem of style, attitude, and cultural defiance. It is a totem of strength grown from the periphery, a symbol that challenges the authority of the dominant narrative.

Demna bestowed upon Balenciaga a raw, street-inflected aesthetic unlike any the house had seen before. Through deconstructed silhouettes, exaggerated volumes, and deliberately twisted tailoring, he launched a bold assault on conventional definitions of beauty and ugliness. In doing so, he built a visual order that stood in defiance of authority and trend. Those who gravitated toward this language formed a new kind of gangsters: not a traditional fashion crowd, but a renegade clan, uniting through style and declaring resistance through dress.

These gangsters have no desire to be understood by the mainstream. If anything, they revel in misinterpretation. They drift between cities like shadows, unmoved by the ebb and flow of seasonal trends. Their language is visual—boxy coats, layered and ravaged hoodies, grotesquely exaggerated footwear—symbols of both selfhood and mutual recognition. Their aesthetic is a provocation: a refusal to conform, and an invitation to rethink power, rules, and beauty itself. They are not followers—they are practitioners of a chosen lifestyle, cloaked in fashion as shield, territory, and attitude. Together, they form a near-covert yet unmistakably coherent aesthetic community.

Balenciaga’s runway under Demna was never just a stage for fashion—it was a theatre of societal reflection. Simulated apocalypse, displaced identity, hyperreality, resistance to the system—these were not themes, but living metaphors. They spoke to the collective experience of this tribe. For the gangsters, the fashion show became something closer to a mirror: a distorted, critical image of the world they moved through.

Now, with Demna’s departure, the future of this gang hangs in uncertainty. They may disperse, dissolve, or evolve into a new kind of underground movement. This cover story becomes both a farewell and a calling—more than just a visual tale, it is a letter to the Demna era, a memoir of aesthetic rebellion, and a quiet, tender tribute to a community forged in defiance.

They are still out there—walking the streets, silent and resolute, carrying the silhouettes and sharpness of that time. Like a manifesto never truly concluded, they endure—an echo of a subversive age, still burning quietly beneath the surface.