Viva Balenciaga Couture! 31 Masterworks by the House Founder
Editor’s Note: Pierpaolo Piccioli is headed to Balenciaga, becoming the fifth designer to lead the house that Cristóbal built. At this juncture, we look back at the house founder’s work as it appeared in Vogue.
“The master of us all,” is how Christian Dior described Cristóbal Balenciaga. Before he became a posthumous legend he was a living one. Even the prickly Coco Chanel was a fan, in advance of their inevitable falling out. Given that the “Catholic imagination” was so alive in Balenciaga’s work, it might be most accurate to say that the fashion industry canonized the Spanish couturier.
Vogue was among the designer’s accoyltes. “Balenciaga began a way of life,” stated the magazine in a piece titled “Balenciaga—The Drama, The Discipline.” The text read thus: “The woman who owns a single Balenciaga, the woman who has never owned an original—both have been converted to the enduring greatness of The Idea. The informed cutting, the superb construction inside and out. The colors of the bull ring. … His serene loyalty to established themes with the subtlest variations. The use of tonality..... Balenciaga combines with drama—for which he has a Spaniard’s quick sensitivity—a worldly sense of discretion. His high standards have created a new level of excellence that reaches everyone.”
The so-called “Balenciaga Mystique” was compelling, not least because of the way the designer reconciled opposites. In Balenciaga’s case those extremes were asceticism, expressed both through his use of “Spanish black” and the rigorous purity of his pattern-cutting (Balenciaga engineered a one-seam coat), and a sort of religious ecstasy, expressed through dramatic draping and bold dashes of color.
Last year’s exhibition at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, “Balenciaga and Spanish Painting,” made clear the influence of painters like Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and El Greco on the designer. Balenciaga, who was raised in the small seaside village of Getaria, the son of a fisherman and a seamstress, first encountered these works at the homes of the wealthy and aristocratic women for whom his mother worked and who would later become his clients.
The “locals” also influenced the designer’s eye. His famous single-seam wedding dress of 1967— a “marvel of form,” according to Vogue—took partial inspiration from workwear. The hat has been likened to that worn by fishermen and is also referred to as having a “coal-scuttle” shape. Similarly, the delicate aprons Balenciaga sometimes used on evening dresses might be traced back to those of fisher women. Easier to identify are the broader Spanish influences in the designer’s work: his love of capes, his toreador hats; and preferences for fringed tassels and black jet beading. His palette, too, was influenced by his origins. As much as Balenciaga liked the ecclesiastical combination of black and white, he had a taste, too, for electrifying pops of color—scarlet, ochre, turquoise—that could have been pulled from a painting by Francisco de Zurbarán.
Balenciaga is very much a Spanish designer, but it would be a mistake to only see his work within that framework. He came to fame in Paris, the birthplace of the couture, and was, arguably, its purest practitioner. “Balenciaga alone is a couturier in the truest sense of the word,” Chanel once said. “Only he is capable of cutting material, assembling a creation and sewing it by hand, the others are simply fashion designers.” A gifted craftsman, his work became sublime through his abstraction both of patternmaking and personal memories into something new.
Here, highlights of his work in Vogue.
Photographed by Horst P. Horst, Vogue, October 1, 19381/31“Balenciaga makes a wedding-dress that’s as demure as a Mid-Victorian’s—of white ottoman, corset-slim through the waist, buttoned decorously to the throat. The head-dress—lilies-of-the- valley-white ottoman bow. Lilies-of-the-valley nosegay.”
Photographed by André Durst, Vogue, November 1, 19382/31“Borrowed from the Bretons: The dress-up sailor worn by the sons of Brittany has long since found its niche in fashion. Here’s Agnes’ new edition of it, of black felt—with an open crown, a large felt buckle, velvet streamers. On Balenciaga’s black jersey dress, a hand-crocheted white peasant frill.”
