Balenciaga

The Couturier of Couturiers, The Master of Us All

History

Master of tailoring and precision, Cristobal Balenciaga was able to create soft and elegant lines on the human body.

Spanish by birth, he managed to bring elements from his country like lace, the bolero and the contrasting colors, red and black, to Paris in the 1950s. Balenciaga dedicated his life to designing dresses and managed to go beyond the boundaries of fashion. For this reason, he is considered a true artist.

Intuition and innovation, combined with a maniacal precision, are the basis for all of his creationslike collarless shirts, flat necklines, and balloon, tunic, sack and sleeveless dresses.

He was born in 1895 in Getaria to a seamstress mother and fisherman father. He inherited his mother’s passion for tailoring and opened his first haute couture boutique in San Sebastian at only 20 years old. His great success in those years led him to open two more boutiques in Madrid and Barcelona.

When the Civil War in Spain broke out in 1937, Balenciaga decided to move to Paris where he opened his first boutique on Avenue George V, on the third floor of the Palazzo Borghese. Official Couturier for the Spanish royal family, and valued by Europe’s most beautiful and powerful women of that time, Balenciaga created dresses for a small group of elite women whose status made tribute to his art.

His creations were not flashy or spectacular. On the contrary, they were an expression of inner elegance, and were refined and unpretentious. In the fifties, Balenciaga clashed with the philosophy of the famous fashion designer Christian Dior. Unlike Dior, the Spanish Couturier needed physical contact with the dress and wanted to give a woman’s body freedom. He therefore, eliminated boning, padding, stiff bodices, and thus, deviated from the tailoring techniques of the nineteenth century.

He also knew fabrics and their potential very well and even drew inspiration from them. So much so, that he invented a perfect fabric for creating volume which was suitable for evening wear: Gazar. The pieces he created were so well cut that they didn’t need a body to take shape. Coco Chanel said of him: "Only Balenciaga is a true couturier. Only he is able to cut the fabric, sew it and assemble it with his own hands. The others are just designers."

In 1951, a period in which the femininity of a woman was determined by the smallness of her size, he introduced the semi-fitted suit. In 1955, he created the tunic dress and finally the sack dress in 1957, which gave the woman’s body total freedom. He was patient, honest, accurate, and obsessed with achieving perfection.

He personally followed every step in the creation of every outfit. In the sixties, with social unrest and the beginning of the Women’s Movement, women’s needs changed. Ready-to-Wear lines hit the stores: pieces that were packaged and sold in predefined sizes to customers, often in department stores.

This process was not in line with Balenciaga’s ideas. He didn’t think it was honest to lose contact with the customer because you couldn’t give special attention to the details that would render the dress perfect for a particular body.

At the height of his fame in 1968, foreseeing an inevitable decline as a result of the changes that were taking place, he preferred to withdraw from the scene.

The desires of customers had changed and stylists had the upper hand. However, Cristóbal Balenciaga, will always remain an undeniable symbol of style and elegance. Christian Dior said, "The couturier of couturiers, the master of us all." On June 10, 2011 a museum dedicated to him was inaugurated by Queen Sofia in Getaria, Spain.

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