Cristóbal Balenciaga — Master Couturier
Cristóbal Balenciaga is known by many as the greatest couturier ever. Even his peers — iconic designers like Gabielle Chanel and Christian Dior — praised Balenciaga and considered him the best at his craft. As Coco Chanel said, “Balenciaga alone is a couturier in the truest sense of the word. Only he is capable of cutting material, assembling a creation and sewing it by hand, the others are simply fashion designers,” via Victoria and Albert Museum.
Born in the small town of Getaria, Spain just before the 20th century in 1895, Balenciaga’s exposed her son to fashion at an early age. See, she worked as a seamstress and her clients reportedly included “the most fashionable and glamorous women in the village,” according to Victoria and Albert Museum. Balenciaga was a natural, picking up the love and skill to make dresses and in 1917 he founded the Balenciaga house in Spain. He actually developed quite a strong reputation and even expanded to Barcelona and Madrid over the next 20 years. But, due to the Spanish Civil War, the couturier had to move. Onto bigger and better things in the fashion capital of the world — in 1937, Balenciaga opened his Paris couture house at 10 Avenue George V. “Ever since, he was considered the master of Haute Couture,” via Balenciaga. The house was one of the few to stay open during the second World War, proving his creativity even during a historical fabric shortage.
Balenciaga’s style seems difficult to describe at first glance, but there are several common threads that run through his creations. One important element is the sculptural nature to his dresses. Balenciaga seemed to not care about the human body, but rather thought of it there to support his dresses. He preferred an autonomy of shape against the client instead of accentuating the body’s natural curves. In fact, he was after a type of elegance that could be seen as rather asexual — almost the opposite of the “New Look” that Dior produced around the same time. Balenciaga’s creations were against glamor and can be seen as the foundation for avant-garde fashion houses later in fashion history. His deconstruction of the human body showed his brilliant imagination and his technical skills with fabric were unmatched. Balenciaga put a great amount of time and care into his work even if the end product was less extravagant than his peers. “In the designer’s own words, a creed of his was to eliminate the extraneous — that the secret to ‘elegance is elimination,’” Vanity Fair summarized.
The Spainiard’s often monochrome looks were instantly recognizable and the most famous dresses so many times were black. An exhibit on the createur held at Musée Bourdelle talked about black as an inspiration in his work and as for heritage, “the spiritual underpinnings of his work were the folklore and traditions of his Spanish childhood.” Balenciaga was also the “designer’s designer,” that is, the man whom other couturiers admired. Christian Dior said of the man, “clothes were his religion” and famously called Balenciaga, “the master of us all,” via Financial Times. For a logo, Balenciaga simply wanted his signature on creation much like an artist. According to Icon, “The logo included on the tag showed only the designer’s last name and ‘Maison de Paris’. On a white background, he used black for the printing.
One of his goals seemed to be escaping the classic representation of women’s silhouette. Instead, he was in search of creating a new body — making a new shape that could almost shield the woman wearing the design. His garments had the “transformative power to turn even his predominantly middle-aged clientele into wonders of the world. In fact he was so confident in the metamorphic power of his clothes that he preferred models who were short-limbed and plump, like the women of his Spanish hometown,” according to Business of Fashion. Balenciaga’s models were also typically middle-aged women and seldom pretty by traditional standards. For shoots and demonstrations, he instructed these models to “never to make eye contact or pirouette or smile.” Even during fashion shows, photographers would take pictures from unique angles — often from behind — to conceal their faces. Thus, his models earned the nickname “monsters.”
He also aspired to technical perfection and kept advancing his techniques. Balenciaga was so good at his craft that he mentored other famous designers like Hubert De Givenchy and Oscar de la Renta, as told by AnOther Magazine. Perhaps his most famous pursuit was to make an entire dress with only one seam. With his technical prowess, he took parts of the body not normally emphasized and would emphasize them. And by contrast, he would also hide normally visible parts of the body. His designs constantly played with what is shown and what is hidden — going against the traditional rules of haute couture. These contradictions were integral to Balenciaga’s style, “austerity and pomp, extravagance and reserve, humility and intolerance,” as told by Business of Fashion. Using his “mastery of pattern cutting, draping and manipulation of fabrics,” Balenciaga created several iconic designs throughout his career. These include the babydoll/lampshade dress, Sack dress, Envelope dress, and Tulip dress. As a culmination of his career — and a rumored reason he stopped making dresses — he achieved his technical goal in 1967 with a single seam wedding dress including a gorgeous hood (see Figure 1, courtesy of Fashion Game Changers: Reinventing the 20th-Century Silhouette by Van Godtsenhoven, Arzalluz, and Debocourtesy).
Balenciaga was extremely dedicated and because of that, he was highly selective in his clients. As one of the most famous couturiers in the world, he of course had many wealthy women try to work with him. But according to Victoria and Albert Museum, he only would dress women with what he considered a strong sense of style. It was almost more of a case where he could choose the clients and not the clients who could choose him. Among his most famous clients, he notably dressed “Hollywood actress Ava Gardener, fashion icon Gloria Guinness and Mona von Bismarck, one of the world’s wealthiest women, who commissioned everything from ball-gowns to gardening shorts from the couturier.” Unsurprisingly, he also had royal clients including the Duchess of Windsor, Monaco’s Princess Grace, and the Queens of Spain and Belgium. Throughout his fame and even with all these high profile clients, Balenciaga was very reserved in terms of publicity. In fact, he reportedly gave just one single interview during his entire 50-year career, according to Victoria and Albert Museum.
With the rapid rise of ready-to-wear, and the decline in couture, Balenciaga decided to leave the industry on his own terms. He claimed, “There is no one left for me to dress,” and in 1968 he closed the house of Balenciaga. Four years after he shuttered his house, Balenciaga passed away. Wall Street International shared a quote the famous designer once said, in a phrase that so beautifully summarizes his legacy, “A couturier must be an architect for design, a sculptor for shape, a painter for color, a musician for harmony, and a philosopher for temperance”.
Recurring elements — DNA
- Geometrical, abstract volumes
- Sculptural silhouettes
- Techniques of handling fabrics and tailoring
- Transformative capability of human body
- Use of color — monochrome (black, white and red)
- Progressive
- Avant-Garde style
Intangible elements:
- Roots/heritage — “Balenciaga’s inspiration: the spiritual underpinnings of his work were the folklore and traditions of his Spanish childhood” and other art from the country like Spanish paintings.
- Vision — use the human body as the foundation on which to construct dresses through the understanding of textiles’ natural tendencies
- Mission — continually progress the silhouette and chase perfection in tailoring techniques through cutting assembling, sewing, and finishing garments by hand.
- Values — “Elegance is elimination”
- Promise — a unique, avant-garde silhouette, constructed with most exquisite quality
- Personality — audacious, meticulous, let the clothes do the talking
- Character traits — ingenious, masterly
Tangible elements:
- Visual identity — simple signature, black and white, signed like an artist
- Brand Ambassador — royalty at the time had the highest clout — like Princess Grace of Monaco
- Product — avant-garde women’s dresses
- Image — limited communication — only salon demonstrations, défilés, and fashion photoshoots, many times with his models called “monsters”
- Positioning — strictly haute couture, competing and creating alongside Chanel, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and Schiaparelli — even his mentee Givenchy.
