Balenciaga’s Mistresses and Commanders
October 05, 2004 - Paris
If they ever remake Master & Commander, stage it on a spaceship and turn the all make cast into beautiful women, then forget about hiring a costume director, Balenciaga has produced everything you’d need for the film.
In a tour de force of rifling through the old to invent the new, Balenciaga’s designer Nicolas Ghesquiere created easily the most authentically original collection we have seen so far in the spring-summer 2005 season in London, Milan, New York or Paris.
“I wanted to dress the crew of a ship, but one in a science fiction movie,” explained Ghesquiere, as the Gotha of the industry’s fashion editors waited patiently to compliment the designer after Tuesday’s show.
Access to Balenciaga’s shows, which of late are staged in a sparse St Germain studio, is restricted to around 200 people, though the designer could easily fill a hall with ten times that number.
Though greatly inspired by navy officers uniforms, the collection opened with a series of impeccably cut dresses, with flared frilly hems worn with Japanese style wide belts. The designer gradually introduced the naval elements with gold buttons or braid and turned lapels, interspersed with modern details like open horizontal zips from which peeked ruffles and filigrees of fabric.
He showed two superb midshipman’s coats in herringbone made from tiny beads, an excellent series of strikingly cut blazers and some impeccable sailors pants with padded waistbands and intriguingly placed buttons.
“I wanted things a little more dressed up, Nicolas told FWD. So, while impressively different, the clothes shouted out quality and class, of the sort one associates with gilt edge labels like, say, Chanel.
Ghesquiere, the most important French designer to emerge in a decade, has long had a sterling reputation among the avant garde, though a question mark has hung over his ultimate commercial appeal. This collection will erase any doubts about his future prospects. No wonder Francois Henri Pinault, whose family controls the Gucci Group, the owner of 90% of Balenciaga (Ghesquiere has the rest), left the show with a smile as broad as a Cheshire cat.