1895-1972 Cristobal Balenciaga

[kitty87kat]

Love this thread. Thanks to everyone for posting those beautiful images. I love Cristobal Balenciaga, he's such a huge inspiration to me.

[JJohnson]

Wow his work is inspiring! Is there any work from during the Andre Courreges timeperiod?

[*Happiness*]

This thread is AMAZING!!!!

I it!!! Thanks to EllaH for starting this thread...and karma to you!!!

so inspiring!!!

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!!

[JJohnson]

Is there any more pics from Cristobal himself? like more pics of dresses he has made..

[esile]

great thread...his phenomenal! i love the dresses that have volume and still appear minimal. genuis!

[liberty33r1b]

thanks a lot for the pics, stilettogirl84!!

[DosViolines]

Balenciaga: Then & Now
US Harper's Bazaar
July 2006
Scanned by Avant Garde


source

[Pastry]

^ i'm surprised ghesquiere said he'll never draw on the archives so extensively again...i was put off by it at first, but it seems good now..

[*sayan]

hehe, of course we are..

[JuiceMajor]

wow....

[Miss Dalloway]

Thanks a million for tihs thread and beautiful images.
I love Balenciaga!

[Piewi]

I´ve just discovered this thread and old balenciaga couture was simply amazing. Really beautiful. Thanks!

[Monmonde]

So in love with this thread. Completely beautiful.

[DosViolines]

source:nytimes.com

July 6, 2006
When Paris Was all That Mattered


Owen Franken for The New York Times
Works by Cristobal Balenciaga, including evening wear, are part of a new museum show.

By CATHY HORYN


Paris


IN 1958, in a time when everything seemed light, Art Buchwald wrote an editorial in The New York Herald Tribune decrying the decision by the couturier Cristobal Balenciaga to ban the paper's fashion editor, Lucie Noel, from his showings. "Mme. Noel has been covering the collections in Paris for the last 22 years," Mr. Buchwald wrote. "She was always the first one to jump out of her gilt-edged chair and shout 'Arriba Balenciaga!' How could this happen?"


Mr. Buchwald went on to say that the survival of Western civilization depended on Mme. Noel's reports. "The public has a right to know what is happening in the salons of the fashion dictators for it is the public who will eventually be forced to wear what they have concocted," he wrote, adding, "Without a vigilant and honest fashion press there cannot be honest designing. Everybody's waist and bodice is at stake."



Ministère de la Culture/Associated Press
Fashions by Nicolas Ghesquiere, Balenciaga's current designer, are also at the Musée de la Mode et du Textile in Paris.


Ministère de la Culture/Associated Press
Cristobal Balenciaga


It is doubtful that Balenciaga found the editorial amusing, if he read it all. Did the Basque designer, whom Christian Dior called the "master of us all," read newspapers? Did he go to the movies? Around the time that he imposed the ban on journalists, making them wait a month after private clients had seen the clothes, Women's Wear Daily reported that Balenciaga was the richest fashion house in Paris, with net profits of $1.5 million.


Yet he had no imagination where money was concerned. Told he could make a killing in America by licensing his name, he replied, "What would I buy? I have a car and too many houses."


All his imagination, all his sense of pleasure, and, yes, even his sly humor, was concentrated on fashion, as a new retrospective, which opens here today, makes clear. "Balenciaga Paris," at the Musée de la Mode et du Textile (through Jan. 28, 2007), is the largest of several Balenciaga exhibitions planned for the next year, and the first in Paris since his death in 1972. It is also the only exhibition that will include work from the house's current designer, Nicolas Ghesquiere, the curator, with Pamela Golbin of the museum.


ONE of the reasons that Balenciaga makes a good subject for a show — another exhibition was put together earlier this year by his friend and former assistant Hubert de Givenchy at the Mona Bismarck Foundation — is that he was, as Mr. Buchwald surmised, an absolute tyrant.


He ruled the Paris roost, and even the tart-tongued Chanel conceded he was the better designer. Schiaparelli, when she stopped designing, went to Balenciaga for her clothes. So did Vionnet. How many designers today get such respect? And, watching them scurry after celebrities or slap their names on hotels, you may well ask why they deserve it. They demean themselves by such efforts, and it's a reason that the public is less and less interested in what they have to say.


In his 41 years in Paris, until he closed his house in 1968, Balenciaga never gave a single press interview. Thanks to films made by the photographer Tom Kublin, and which are on view in the new exhibition, we at least get to see him working. But whatever Balenciaga had to say about himself was confined to his clothes, although in this respect he was voluble: more than 300 originals a year came out of his ateliers at 10 Avenue George V. From the austere lines and plastered bodices of the late 1930's you can deduce piety; from the sameness of his round shoulders, rigor; from a pale blue taffeta dress gathered in front by a simple bow, pragmatism; from bloomer hems and bell-shaped sleeves of the 50's, a streak of flamboyance.


Judith Thurman, in an article in The New Yorker last week, noted that "woman as flower" was a recurring motif of Balenciaga's work, and it's surprising to see not just the number of flower prints but also the ways in which he abstracted the shapes of petals and seed pods. Despite his rages, and almost miserly sense of thrift (at the end of each day the pins dropped on the floor were gathered up with magnets), the women on his staff were happy to refer to him as god.


"They actually told me that," Ms. Golbin said. "They said, 'First my master, then it was my husband.' " She smiled. "I thought, 'Wait a minute, did they really say that?' "


There is a kind of "take it or leave it" quality in many of the coats and dresses, a rigor that could harden his followers, flowerlike or not, into stone. Here you feel that Chanel was ultimately the more modern designer. She was unburdened of conventions and moral rules, and so were her clothes. Fortunately, for Balenciaga, many women were willing to take what he offered, and at the highest prices in Paris. Fashion writers couldn't give names to the trends he started fast enough: the Cocoon, the Sack, the Semi-fitted, the Baby Doll, the Tube.


As Ms. Golbin points out, though, most of Balenciaga's notions about construction and elegance were already formed when he opened his house in 1937, at the age of 42. He spent the next 40 years refining those ideas. That quality has made the deepest impression on Mr. Ghesquiere, who arrived at the house nine years ago. Recalling some patchwork clothes he made a few years ago, Mr. Ghesquiere says that by relying more on Balenciaga's sense of balance and proportion, he could have achieved the same effect with five pieces of fabric instead of 15.


Though contemporary writers have often commented on how Mr. Ghesquiere has taken elements from Balenciaga's style, especially from the 60's, and modernized them, it's a pleasure to see the two eras joined in the exhibition. Mr. Ghesquiere says that after working on the exhibition, he now wants to think more about Balenciaga's clothes from the 30's. "There was so much modernity, and also a little bit of kitsch," he said.


And he likes the fact that Balenciaga never tried to seduce anyone with his fashion. You either felt its supreme authority or you didn't. That's a lesson for any designer.

[esile]

dos, thanks for the article. enjoyed it!