The making of the haute couture master
Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion V&A
Think of high fashion in the post-war years, and we tend to picture the wasp waists and sweeping skirts of Christian Dior’s New Look. Glamorous it may have been, but the New Look was essentially backward-looking, returning women to the constricted corsets and crinolines of the 19th century. As the V&A’S latest exhibition
Shaping Fashion suggests, for true innovation we should look instead to Cristóbal Balenciaga. To the latest generation of fashion followers, Balenciaga is the audacious brand with the pricey tote inspired by an Ikea carrier bag. Their parents may fondly recall the sensual feistiness of Nicolas Ghesquèire’s 15-year tenure at the house. In their grandparents’ day, however, Balenciaga was acknowledged as the master of haute couture. Out of reach to all but American heiresses, European royalty and other denizens of the beau monde, his groundbreaking designs had a huge influence on the fashion of his own time and the decades that followed.
Balenciaga was born in 1895 in the Basque region of northern Spain. It is now nearly a century since he founded his fashion house in San Sebastián, and 80 years since his move to Paris. Rather than a full retrospective, Shaping Fashion focuses on the
designer’s last decades, a period during which he knocked out an astonishing series of innovations: the sack-dress, trapeze-hemmed babydoll frocks, a one-seam coat, a tie-on skirt that could be worn as a cape, long puffball evening dresses that billowed like clouds. We tend to read fashion as an endless series of repetitions, references and rehashes – Balenciaga’s output in the Fifties and Sixties was a rare instance of a designer creating something completely new, and then doing it all over again the next season.
Shaping Fashion is divided into three sections, covering the milieu, making and legacy of Balenciaga’s designs. Of these, the segment dedicated to the clothes themselves and the women who wore them is comparatively discreet – confined, alas, as always, by the V&A’S rather stern little glass display cases and the low lighting demanded by shows of delicate textiles.
In the legacy section, we see the work of Balenciaga’s assistants and mentees, among them space-age mini dresses by André Courrèges, and glamorous eveningwear by Hubert de Givenchy – and those that followed.
The heart of this exhibition, however, is the section dedicated to the making of the works, and here, design nerds are in for a real treat. Drawing on the V&A’S extensive collection of Balenciaga silhouettes as well as the Balenciaga Archive in Paris, the displays show historic pieces alongside technical drawings, design sketches, fabric swatches and photographs taken by the house of each piece worn by its fitting model.
Two fresh elements make this aspect of the show particularly insightful. One is a series of toiles that allow the designs to be displayed half open and in ways that reveal the ingenuity of their construction.
The other is a set of short animated videos that show how Balenciaga’s two-dimensional patterns resolve themselves so satisfyingly into three-dimensional garments. The X-ray technique that V&A used to gruesome effect in Undressed: A Brief
History of Underwear here reveals the garments’ underlying framework.
Many of Balenciaga’s designs were deceptively simple: this investigation of structure and making will be a revelation for anyone interested in the technical aspect of dress-making. From Saturday.
Tickets and details: vam.ac.uk