WHAT WOULD BALENCIAGA DO?

NOT WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR Toyota is slowly evolving from a traditional car manufacturer into a mobility service platform. To explore this new development they build the Woven City, a prototype smart city and living laboratory, designed to test and develop future technologies like autonomy, robotics, and sustainable energy in a real-world environment.

 In this prototype city citizens (so-called weavers) and innovators come together to co-create, test and bring to life products and services that address everyday societal challenges around the movement of people, goods, information and energy. The project features a unique mesh-shaped street network for different types of vehicles and pedestrians, utilizes hydrogen power for its ecosystem, and integrates traditional and advanced building techniques.

CULTURE-FIRST, OUTSIDE-IN THINKING

Balenciaga’s approach is rooted in staying culturally relevant by looking outward rather than inward. Instead of starting from traditional luxury rules or runway forecasts, the brand draws insight from street culture, online communities, memes, gaming, and subcultures. It treats the internet as its primary trend laboratory, where meaning shifts faster than aesthetics. Balenciaga does not ask what trend is coming next; it asks how ideas about luxury, irony, ugliness, and status are changing right now.

PROVOCATION AS TREND RESEARCH

Rather than predicting trends, Balenciaga actively provokes them. Shock-driven products—such as trash-bag handbags, exaggerated silhouettes, or intentionally “unwearable” items—function as cultural probes. Rejection, outrage, confusion, and meme spread are not failures but valuable signals. By releasing friction-filled collaborations (like Crocs and Ikea) and pricing objects to test symbolic value rather than demand, Balenciaga gathers insight into how far cultural boundaries can be pushed before meaning collapses or transforms.

VIRAL FEEDBACK LOOPS AND CULTURAL VALIDATION

Balenciaga treats trend research as a live feedback loop: design tease → social reaction → production or withdrawal. Hypebeasts and early adopters act as boundary testers, revealing whether irony can become aspiration and whether “ugly” can function as status. The brand closely observes resale behavior, copying into fast fashion, meme velocity, and backlash with uptake. When controversy leads to adoption, Balenciaga reads it as evidence of a genuine cultural shift—and scales influence accordingly.

Ask yourself:

• Create the most luxurious version of your product or service.

• How to adopt a outside subculture and blend it in extreme with your product?

• Take a trend in your line of work and fully reverse it. What would that mean?