Editor’s note: Danielle Slavik, one of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s original muses, passed away on July 13, 2025. She was 81. Here, look back at the time the model returned to the Balenciaga fold wearing a recreation of one of her favorite dresses by the couturier.
“I remember that dress perfectly, I remembered everything.”
Earlier this week in Paris, Demna unveiled his third Balenciaga couture collection at the house’s recreation of its original couture salon, which the designer unveiled back in 2021 when he presented his first-ever couture collection. As if the space was not enough to hark back to the golden days of Balenciaga couture—when the label’s founder, Cristóbal Balenciaga, was still alive and running his now legendary couture business—Demna also asked one of the master’s last in-house models to feature in his show. Danielle Slavik, who worked alongside Mr. Balenciaga from 1964 until he closed his salon for good in 1968, opened the runway presentation wearing a replica of a dress she first wore in 1966.
“Couture to me is specifically about clothes,” said Demna backstage after the show, as reported by Vogue Runway’s Sarah Mower. “There was a narrative that somehow happened by itself. It was kind of making a bridge between the past and now, which is the reason I wanted to do it from the beginning.” Slavik is the clear bridge between the past and present here, offering not only a living embodiment (and a valuable treasure trove of memories) of Mr. Balenciaga’s hand as a couturier to the house’s current team, but also a touching connection between the past and the present of the label to those of us looking in from the outside.
But breathing life into a design from over 50 years ago is no easy feat. “It was very complex,” says Peter Copping, the former Nina Ricci and Oscar de la Renta designer who is now head of special projects and VIP dressing at Balenciaga, in a new video about the look released here exclusively. “We had archival photographs from our own archive, but that was the only reference we had,” said the designer, explaining that, since the house did not have archival patterns from this specific gown, they had to rely on Slavik’s recollections of the piece.
The black viscose velvet gown, which Slavik said is her favorite dress from her modeling career (which also includes credits like Chanel and Hubert de Givenchy), was first worn by the model when Mr. Balenciaga himself created it for the first time. It was then ordered by none other than Grace Kelly to wear at The Scorpion Ball in 1969, her horoscope-themed 40th birthday party. She wore it sans the double string of pearls that figure on the original and recreation.
“I might have said one or two little things,” said Slavik about the making of the dress, “such as the flowers might have been like this or like that, but no, it was right and they made it the same.” Last year, when Demna invited Slavik to come out of retirement to walk his couture show—in look 52—he gifted her a replica of the dress. That very same piece is the one Slavik wore to open the show—how special it is to have a Balenciaga couture dress made for you not once, but twice in your lifetime.
“When the dress came down from the studio with the same flowers, identical to before,” recollected Slavik touchingly of the velvet roses made by the storied Maison Lemarié, “for a moment I wondered what era I was in.”
Watch the video below for more on the behind-the-scenes of this Balenciaga fall 2023 couture dress.
