Demna Gvasalia has spent much time poring through the Balenciaga archives since he joined the house last October. Under his direction, the Pre-Fall lookbook was apparently shot there, while his first womenswear collection reinterpreted the attitudes found in Cristóbal Balenciaga’s haute couture for everyday clothes of today. While pawing through the shrouded racks of gazar, cocoon-backs, and three-quarter sleeves for her, Gvasalia found a coat. It was Cristóbal’s own, made by his own hands. He never finished it. So his latest heir decided it was his job to complete it—and it opened this show.

That coat was not only the basis for the tailoring of the unfitted jackets that made up half of this show; it was also a fitting metaphor for its entirety. No pun on fitting, although fit was what the collection was all about. In every breast pocket sat a small piece of card you’d be forgiven for thinking was a pocket square. Gvasalia asserted they were the fitting cards used to record the measurements of clients in bespoke tailoring. That’s the closest menswear ever gets to haute couture, and Gvasalia chose to use it as his jumping-off point for this, the house of Balenciaga’s first-ever men’s runway show.

What Gvasalia tailored, forcefully, was a pair of silhouettes, either expanded to gargantuan, David Byrne’s Talking Heads proportions, or shrunken so close to the body that each jacket rever appeared to cross under the arm. Trousers were voluminous and necessarily cinched with belts, or tourniquet-tight. Essentially, nothing looked like it fit in the true sense of the word, which was absolutely intentional.

Like Cristóbal himself, Gvasalia is fascinated with the architecture of clothes. His garments this season were all about shoulders—either expanded a foot sideways to dwarf the models’ own or tugged so tight the swell of the human shoulder distorted the sleeve head. Hench versus wench. If the henchmen had the most immediate impact, pairs of models shoulder-barging each other as their American football–size pads clashed like Claude Montana models of old, the latter was quietly ingenious. Look at the back of any of those bandage-tight Balenciaga coats and they’re perfectly fitted to the body, a tailoring master class. “I wanted to push it,” said Gvasalia.