Balenciaga unveiled its 55th couture collection at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris this week, the first under creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli. Drawing on the rudimentary principles and essence of Balenciaga couture, Piccioli offers a reimagining calibrated for the present moment. Lining the gardens, the front row comprised creative figures from recent and longstanding influence, including Lily Collins, Demi Moore, Rachel Sennott, Anna Wintour, and Teyana Taylor.

As a fundamentalist collection—most informed by Balenciaga’s intrinsic rules and identity—there is also an acute awareness of geometric, aesthetic, and philosophical fundamentals in each piece. Every color, line, shape, and composition demonstrates immense precision, shifting from highly saturated to achromatic, in gargantuan sizes one second and petite, dainty iterations the next.

There is a charming quality to the collection, which, despite its undeniable sophistication, evokes the color-coded cardstock and scissors of a kindergarten classroom learning to differentiate between circles, squares, and triangles. “We built our own language, full of new words and timeless ones,” says Piccioli, explaining that despite its technical foundation, the collection was truly born of feeling—for the history and humanity behind each piece—and of a tempered attunement to the past and the present: “We searched. We tried. We remembered.” Piccioli’s vision embodies the belief that endless ingenuity is possible through an understanding of what came before: the countless hues derived from three primary colors, the innumerable shapes formed by lines.

Beyond his geometric sensibility, Piccioli also considers what the wardrobe holds, paying particular attention to form and physicality, recognizing the substance and potential of the bodies within. Accordingly, each piece in the collection appears perfectly proportioned, impressing an ineffable kismet between the wearer and the wardrobe. This is not the result of fate, but of careful construction: cashmere coats and dresses tailored from three-dimensional digital scans of the individuals who wear them.

The emphasis on dimension requires a 360-degree vantage point to be fully appreciated, as even a single piece’s appearance can change entirely from when it enters to when it leaves. Piccioli stirs experimentation, probing how history informs the present informs the future. Accordingly, in the show’s procession, looks appear as close reimaginings and reiterations of one another: an added pop of color here, a shrunken waistline there, with the all-black looks serving almost as palette cleansers, refocusing the eye on the rudimentary shapes and forms at the collection’s core.

Although eccentric, it remains a fundamentalist wardrobe at heart, concerned with belief systems rather than superficiality, embodying Cristóbal Balenciaga’s consideration of the body, its form, and its relationship with the garment, creating something profoundly familiar, but entirely new.