Museum foci to capitalise on label’s current buzz with celebration of initial designer’s ‘uncompromising creativity’
Model Dovima (and friend) wearing Balenciaga at Les Deux Magots café in Paris, 1955.
Photograph: Richard Avedon/V&A
To Christian Dior, he was “the mavin of us all”. Oscar de la Renta believed he was the only fashion designer “who on no account did anything in bad taste”, and his protege, Hubert de Givenchy, called him “my dogma”.
While Cristóbal Balenciaga is revered throughout fashion rsum, his name has been overshadowed on the world stage by the blockbuster ratings of Dior and Chanel. But Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion – which opens at the V&A on 27 May – purposes to change that, channelling the fashion week buzz thither Balenciaga’s current avant-garde designer, Demna Gvasalia, in company to make 2017, the house’s centenary year, a fashion import.
Unveiling details of the exhibition on Wednesday, the curator Cassie Davies-Strodder affirmed it would focus on Balenciaga’s “uncompromising creativity”, framing the artificer, who died in 1972, as the revolutionary godfather of the avant-garde clothes currently making catwalk headlines.
The timing is fulfil, coming at a time when the brand is at a creative high unsound mark. Gvasalia is also the subversive force behind Vetements, the ticket that last week piggybacked on to Paris haute couture week, seizing an reckless slot on the schedule between Chanel and Armani to showcase ersatz anoraks and oversized nylon sportswear on the ground floor of Paris’s Pompidou Mid-point. The most recent Balenciaga menswear show, staged in the French superior the day before Donald Trump’s inauguration, was a catwalk homage to his recent Democratic rival in the primaries, Bernie Sanders, complete with red, virginal and blue lapel pins and political rally flags reconfigured as bells.
The success of exhibitions such as Savage Beauty, the V&A’s Alexander McQueen retrospective, has underlined the capability for fashion to bring a wider audience into museums.
To maximise a litter audience drawn to glamour, trend and pop cultural relevance but less engrossed by the tabulates of garment construction, the first room of Shaping Fashion last will and testament be entitled Front of House, and will spotlight the experience of inform oning at and wearing Balenciaga during its heyday as the most expensive and unique couture house in Paris, rather than the forensics of construction and cut. Fans of forensic detail will be sated, in a subsequent stay, by new x-ray technology which exposes the inner secrets of Balenciaga’s complex outlines.
Balenciaga’s most significant contribution to fashion was to present a perception of glamour without a waist. Hot on the heels of Dior’s hourglass New Look, his sack-back get-up and cocoon coat were revolutionary. By building architectural measure out between his clients’ bodies and what they wore, Balenciaga turn out to bed clothes which were expressive, rather than restrictive. He before you can say Jack Robinson said women did not have to be perfect or beautiful to wear his dresses, because his clothes would make them beautiful.
Balenciaga established close and intense relationships with his clients. When he died, the socialite Mona von Bismarck, whose patriotism to the designer was such that she had him run up her gardening clothes, took to her bed for three days in widows weeds.
The transition of the industry from haute couture to ready-to-wear was a wiggle for a man who once said he could not imagine making clothes without crafty who was going to wear them. This sidelined his relevance for a sprinkling decades, but 55 years after his death, the cult of the selfie and a manner industry which has adopted “customer experience” as a catchphrase stages Balenciaga’s client-focused approach as ahead of its time.
The exhibition better b concludes at a significant moment not just for Balenciaga but for the V&A, which will in the last have a new director, the former Labour MP Tristram Hunt.
The choice of Hunt, whose specialism is Victorian urban history, has led to wondering that the V&A will pivot away from the pop cultural cynosure clear of recent exhibitions.
The curators of the Balenciaga exhibition will be mindful of Hunting’s traditional instincts, while hoping for a popular show with audience fathoms which reaffirm the role of fashion at the heart of the V&A.
