# balenciaga-post-2017 — Balenciaga (post-Demna era)

- **School**: Brutalist / Raw
- **Vibe**: Default browser styling weaponized, Helvetica at absurd scale, anti-luxury luxury
- **Best for**: Fashion / counter-culture / fragrance brands, "we're too cool to design this" positioning
- **Touchstone**: balenciaga.com (any 2018+ snapshot via Wayback), Vetements campaigns, post-2017 luxury anti-design

**Palette**
- Ink: `#000000`
- Ground: `#FFFFFF`
- One muted off-white surface: `#F5F4F0`
- No color. None. If a color appears it's in a single photograph and never as a UI element.

**Typography**
- Display & body: Helvetica or Arial — all weights, all sizes, *only this one family*
- Headlines often set in all-caps at hero scale (140px+)
- Body type small — 11–13px
- Mixing weight is fine; mixing family is not

**Spacing**: 8 / 16 / 24 / 40 — restrained, but not luxurious-spacious; more "we didn't bother to soften it"

**Radius**: 0

**Shadow**: none

**Motion**: none — pages don't animate. Hover at most changes underline.

**Signature moves**
- All-caps Helvetica headlines at extreme scale, tightly tracked, often left-aligned hard against the page edge
- Product photography is editorial / fashion-style — model + product, harsh lighting, awkward poses; never the smiling-stock-model pattern
- Navigation is plain text links, sometimes just a vertical list at the top of the page
- Captions and metadata stripped to minimum (model name, designer, location)
- No buttons styled as buttons — CTAs are underlined text links

**Avoid**
- Any font other than Helvetica / Arial
- Color
- Polished UI affordances (rounded buttons, drop shadows, hover effects)
- Decorative anything

**AI prompt seed**
> Fashion editorial photograph, single model against a plain off-white #F5F4F0 backdrop, harsh direct flash, awkward static pose, deadpan expression, 4:5.

**Don't use when**
- The brand has no fashion / counter-culture claim — recipe will read as cosplay
- The audience expects to be "sold to" — Balenciaga's recipe ignores the audience on purpose
- Conversion is critical — this recipe converts the in-group, not the casual visitor

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> **Same school — Brutalist / Raw**: [`are-na`](./are-na.md) · [`bloomberg-businessweek-turley`](./bloomberg-businessweek-turley.md)  
> **Browse all 25 recipes**: [INDEX.md](./INDEX.md)