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Suzy weighs in... Balenciaga = show of the season. Duh! I can't even look at anything else anymore. Dior, Westwood, Miyake... whatever! Nicolas has rendered pretty much every piece of sh*t from New York and Milan meaningless.
Stellar Balenciaga
By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2005
The Balenciaga show was so powerful, so clear in its message, so faithful to the heritage of the legendary couturier and so opulently un-copyable that it may turn out to be the major statement of the spring summer 2006 season.
The designer Nicolas Ghesquière has a vision that is as crystal clear as his embellishment was deep and dense. Encrustations of blond lace, high pleated collars, pearl pins, crests topped with a royal crown - and that was almost within one outfit - made Tuesday's exceptional show an ode to embellishment.
Yet it was at the same time rigorous in its silhouettes, whether they were the ultra-narrow pants that paired tiny jackets or the stand-alone dresses, whipped up like a meringue from stiff fabrics with the minimum of seaming. These light-handed clothes were grounded by hefty sandals, some set with beach pebbles as just one of the many decorative flourishes.
"I was trying to do a collection that was scissor sharp, bur ornamental, decorative and embellished - even putting in the mix baroque swirls and Louis XIV," said Ghesquière backstage.
This audacious mix of construction and decoration was one of those shocks that set fashion on a different course. Just when a reprise of minimalism was on the agenda, the influential Ghesquière found another approach - and one that seemed to throw down a decorated gauntlet at the fast-fashion copyists. Sure they can edge the hipline of drainpipe jeans with lace and print baroque patterns on pants suits, where the jacket could have belonged to a Spanish courtier but the pants taken from the jeans generation. Yet who but a star designer and a luxury house could engulf a puff sleeve in a froth of lace or trace lace around a skinny frock coat that had the French actress Emmanuelle Seigner sighing and dying for it in the front row?
The Balenciaga show was exceptional among the many attempts to revive a brand, because Ghesquière keeps the integrity of the Spanish master yet makes it modern. The great divide between old and new is the sense of a body in motion, as the models strode out in pants or in dresses that held their sculpted shape, yet revealed the body's silhouette underneath. Lace evening dresses that might have looked like honeymoon nightgowns were so beautifully worked that you felt the inspiration had come from a mantilla in a Velásquez painting or from the archives that Ghesquière is now using with an easy confidence.
"He keeps the integrity of the house in such a modern way," said the stylist L'Wren Scott, whose long, lean legs seemed fashioned for Ghesquière's skinny pants or even the loose, playful page-boy knickers. "Balenciaga's heritage is so admirable," she said. "And in the cut and attention to detail, everything has the spirit of Balenciaga."
Although this collection had the detailed workmanship (and probably the high price tags) of haute couture, the only way a luxury house can survive today is to reach for fashion's summit. François Henri Pinault and Robert Polet, Balenciaga's parents from PPR and Gucci Group, both said that their lips were sealed on figures but that "Balenciaga is performing even better than we expected."