Cristóbal Balenciaga was a Spanish fashion designer who produced elegant ball gowns and other timeless styles. He was born on January 21, 1895, in Guetaria, Spain, and passed away on March 23, 1972, in Valencia. At the age of 10, when his mother had to start sewing to support the family after the loss of his sea captain father, Balenciaga started taking dressmaking seriously. At the age of 15, his first trip to Paris motivated him to pursue a career in fashion, and by the time he was 20, he owned his own dressmaking business in the posh Spanish holiday destination of San Sebastián.
In the following 15 years, Balenciaga rose to prominence as Spain’s top fashion house. He relocated to Paris in 1937 after the Spanish Civil War hampered his company. His designs included lavishly exquisite gowns and outfits over the next 30 years. The use of plastic for rainwear in the middle of the 1960s and the tendency toward capes and flowing clothing without waistlines were both popularized by Balenciaga. Balenciaga’s mansion closed in 1968, and he retired.
In the little fishing community of Guetaria in Spain's Basque Country, Balenciaga was born. He spent a lot of time at his mother's side while she worked as a seamstress, starting in his early years. In his teens, the Marquesa de Casa Torres, the most prominent woman in his town, became his patron and client. She sent him to Madrid for formal training in tailoring and proudly wore the results. Although he kept his sexuality a secret throughout his life, Balenciaga was homosexual. The rich Franco-Polish Wadzio Jaworowski d'Attainville, who had assisted in funding and setting him up, was the love of his life and his longtime lover. Balenciaga was so devastated by d'Attainville's passing in 1948 that he contemplated shutting down the company. After d'Attainville passed away, he created his next collection exclusively in black as a way to express his sorrow.
His prestige as a couturier of unwavering standards led Christian Dior to refer to him as "the master of us all" and Coco Chanel to refer to him as "the only couturier in the purest meaning of the word," adding that "The others are merely fashion designers." He is still regarded as the top god in European salons. The Women's Wear Daily carried the headline "The King is Dead" on the day of his passing in 1972. (No one in the fashion world had any doubt as to whom it referred to). Cristóbal Balenciaga passed away on March 23, 1972.
Later in his career, in the 1950s, Balenciaga introduced new forms to women's fashion that had never been seen before. As he improved and revamped the same concepts from season to season, these unconventional designs eventually developed. Volume was used at the back of his "semi-fit" lines in the middle of the 1950s—dresses and jackets that were fitted at the front but had loose, voluminous backs. Volume filled the "balloon hems" of his early 1950s dresses. With the invention of the "sack dress," a shift dress that was straight up and down and utterly lacked a waist, he stunned the fashion industry in 1957. The "sack" was first received with disdain from both customers and the press at a period when Christian Dior's hourglass-shaped New Look was still in vogue.
Like many of Balenciaga's most avant-garde creations, this style finally became popular. The 1960s' ubiquitous mini-dress was foreshadowed by the sack dress, which is still in style today. The baby doll dress, another piece from the late 1950s that abstracted the body, skimmed the waist with a trapeze-like form. The dramatic four-pointed "envelope dress," displayed the year before he closed the home, exemplifies how this abstraction peaked in his late 1960s designs. His favorite fabric, rigid yet lightweight silk gazar, was molded into a sculpture. Only two were sold, and one was returned because the customer couldn't figure out how to use the washroom, despite being a major hit with the fashion press.
Ava Gardener, Gloria Guinness, and Mona von Bismarck, one of the richest women in the world, were just a few of the glitziest women that Balenciaga dressed in the 1950s and 1960s. Mona von Bismarck ordered everything from ball gowns to gardening shorts from the couturier. He preferred dressing women with a great sense of style, and he frequently had really devoted customers. In 1968, when his design firm shut down, Mona von Bismarck allegedly locked herself in her room for three straight days out of shock and genuine grief.
Balenciaga was a fairly private person, in contrast to several other well-known designers of the time. Throughout his 50-year career, he resisted courting the media, conducting just one interview. Despite being elusive, Balenciaga sparked a revolution in fashion and continues to be admired by both his contemporaries—people like Christian Dior and Coco Chanel—and today's top designers. Balenciaga was credited with "laying the foundations of modernism" in the fashion industry, according to French designer Emanuel Ungaro, and both Ungaro and another Balenciaga protégé, Andre Courrèges, carried their mentor's minimalistic style forward into the 1960s' space-age elegance. Balenciaga's designs have continued to inspire the next generation of fashion designers and are now among the most frequently examined in the V & A Fashion collections.
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