Balenciaga's industrial journey into space
By Hilary Alexander
With lights reflecting under the floor, in the manner of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyessy”, and clothing inspired by modern art, industrial packaging and bubble-wrap, Balenciaga’s Nicolas Ghesquière, launched a vision of fashion’s future at the Paris prêt-à-porter season.
The young creative director of the famous house has consistently pushed the boundaries of modern clothing, since he made his debut in 1998. This sci-fi collection, however, with its eye-jolting collision of man-made materials, hi-tech colour, and luxury fabrics was his most exploratory and advanced yet.
New machinery and lasers had to be sourced and installed at the Balenciaga atelier in order to construct the technically-complex designs. Plastic, polyamide, neoprene, and nylon met cashmere, camel-hair, and silk, in a series of ingenious designs which Ghesquière called “sleeping bag, camping clothes”; part ski-wear, part space-suits. Quilted and padded, zippered jackets, were worn back-to-front, with salopettes, the bib-and-braces dangling down.
Dresses came in graphic, primary-coloured collages of what looked like newspaper headlines in different type-faces: “fairy tales”, “disaster”.
Baby-pink and green knits were hand-crafted with rows of padded dots, and worn with perforated leather skirts. Neoprene 3-D dresses were embellished with hand-painted, black-and-white appliqués, like scrunched-up paper.
The shoes resembled some futuristic sculpture, hand-crafted from plywood, crocodile-skin, foam and resin, and balanced on heels resembling children’s building blocks, in multi-coloured Bakelite.
Speaking backstage, Ghesquière said he had been influenced by the work of photographers, such as Irving Penn and Cindy Sherman, the French artist, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, who has exhibited at Tate Modern, and basic, everyday commercial packaging.
“You know, when you rip open the box and inside the cardboard there is this plastic and foam,” he said. “It’s all about the technique. I’m always intrigued to explore the contrast between the normal and the noble.”
No, I did not fully understand, either. But when you have a unique vision and can express it in clothes which, quite simply, have never been seen before, like Ghesquière can, you really do not need to have a way with words.
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