Mario Testino & Carine Roitfeld standing at Balenciaga. From WWD's Twitter feed.

About half of this morning’s Balenciaga-centric Tweets were dedicated to the “mind bending beauty” of Nicolas Ghesquière’s spring collection, but the other half were more concerned with the breaking benches. It sounds like one bench after the other started collapsing under the weight of the attendees (which, to be honest, isn’t much). After about three benches broke, workers started bringing in replacements, but even that wasn’t enough. The crowd was asked to stand to watch the show—a crowd including Catherine Deneuve and Salma Hayek. Our own Anne Slowey said, “If anyone deserves a preemptive ovation it is Ghesquière!” while Style.com’s Meenal Mistry quoted an unnamed editor, “Tom Ford could have used some faulty benches to get his standing ovation…” And Paris starts off with a bang!