Balenciaga Domestic Studies

Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

At the start of his career at Balenciaga, in the late ’90s, Nicolas Ghesquiere was often fascinated by sports and science fiction, childhood hobbies. Then he explored the couture traditions of the house’s founder, Cristóbal Balenciaga. In recent years, older and more mature, he has been captivated by images of the future, sometimes blending them with the past. Along the way he established separate lines, for knits, silks and limited editions, that helped to make Balenciaga profitable, but when it comes to the collections he presents in Paris, there has almost always been a sense of a designer free to create. That was again the invigorating experience this morning at the Hôtel de Crillon, on a specially installed white laboratory floor, where Mr. Ghesquiere showed a highly textured collection that looked well beyond the fall of 2010.

Although the silhouette was essentially a square on stilts — square-cut jackets or tops with skinny pants or miniskirts — the materials, and the shapes within shapes, were hard to identify. Certainly there were squares formed by the overlapping flaps of jackets or the dense patches of white fur on the back jackets. But there were also circles and raised bars, like neon tubes, concentrated down the front of belted jersey tops, and a three-dimensional composition of black scribbled lines on crumbled white fabric. Some textures suggested packing materials.

Harder still to describe are jackets that resembled standard airy down vests that were somehow incorporated into what appeared to be a zippered jumpsuit. That’s the best I can do, honestly. Mr. Ghesquiere made the pieces seem a unit, not unlike a ski suit, but they could well have been separate. The other dazzling effect — stunningly simple — was the random text that appeared on jackets and tops. The words were done in primary colors, in contrast to some of the cool blues and greens earlier in the show cheap sports jerseys, and while you could clearly make out words, the meaning was fragmented.

Afterward, Mr. Ghesquiere said his aim was “to ennoble everyday domestic objects.” Among his reference points were the photography of Irving Penn and the installation art of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, a friend of Mr. Ghesquiere’s, whose work has used books conceptually. She recently had an exhibition at the Hispanic Society of America, in New York, called “chronotopes & dioramas.”