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The fashion industry is united in acknowledging Cristóbal Balenciaga as a designer like no other. His technical prowess resulted in designs that became ever more flawless as time went on. Writing in 1967, the year the Spanish couturier retired, UPI reporter Aline Mosby put it this way: “The clothes of Balenciaga…looked like an ironing board headed into the wind. It was that smooth look, every seam a masterpiece, the flat surfaces with hardly a dent to show even the bosom, the faultless construction, the hunched-over curve, that made Balenciaga—without question—the world’s greatest living creator of women’s clothing.”
Pierpaolo Piccioli will be the fifth designer to pick up the great man’s mantle, following Michel Goma, Nicolas Ghesquière, Alexander Wang, and Demna. The pairings below, which place the Italian designer’s work next to that of Balenciaga, suggest he is well suited for the job. His joy in color is grounded in designs that have rigor.
In a conversation earlier today, Piccioli recalled that the very first image he posted on Instagram was Balenciaga’s famous wedding dress of 1967, a bias-cut oval of gazar and coal-scuttle hat that is a study in simple elegance and the manifestation of the couturier’s belief that “elegance is elimination.” Piccioli saw this marvel, which he describes as a “masterpiece of the history of fashion,” on display in the Costume Institute’s “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” exhibition at The Met. Balenciaga, he said, is “probably one of the first minimalists, and that dress, to me, is a manifesto of what Brancusi was saying: Simplicity is complexity resolved, which is also my manifesto when I work. So I resaw this post, and even if I’m not a fan of predestination, I felt there was something. Sometimes we have to go where, unaware, we are going already.” It certainly feels like Piccioli is embarking on a golden off-to-meet-the-Wizard moment.
