Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion - Inside The Exhibition

In September 2017, while travelling to London for fashion week, I took the opportunity to visit Victoria & Albert Museum to see a new fashion exhibition, Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion. Spanish designer, Cristóbal Balenciaga, dubbed by Christian Dior as “the master of us all”, was known for his abstract architectural shapes, bold colours, and clever manipulation of fabrics. For curator Cassie Davies-Strodder and her team, the large-scale fashion retrospective was the result of an 18-month journey through museums and private collections all around the world. Striding purposefully into the designer’s Spanish roots and carefully drawing out the influence on his designs of Catholicism, bullfighting, and flamenco; there are over 100 garments and 20 hats on display – previously worn by Hollywood stars like Ava Gardner, and 60s fashionista Gloria Guinness. In a special collaboration with the V&A, artist Nick Veasey has built the first ever-mobile x-ray art studio and the images from it are displayed alongside the clothing exhibited. The project reveals details, on how Balenciaga created his signature shapes as well as replica toiles created by students at the London College of Fashion.

Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion

Cristóbal Balenciaga’s work takes up the ground floor of the small fashion gallery, while upstairs is given over to more contemporary work from designers who are inspired by or derivative of Balenciaga’s innovations. Balenciaga’s output was nowhere near that required of contemporary fashion designers, and this, combined with a historic tendency not to treat designer clothes as culturally significant objects in their own right and so to not retain and maintain them, means that there’s actually a limited amount of his work left in the world to make up a retrospective of this kind. Nevertheless, the broad theme of construction is clear from the pieces selected, and the architecturally and sculpture of Balenciaga’s oeuvre is evidenced across the installations. This is why Cristóbal Balenciaga is so important. While historically fashion has always played with the human form, using various pads, supports, and trusses from farthingales and bustles to crinolines and corsets to reshape the body in new and innovative ways, Balenciaga was the first person to use the construction of the garments themselves to create distortion. This requires a very particular skill set, as well as a peculiar and quite remarkable imagination. His design philosophy is writ large on the wall of the exhibition, putting into words what can be read in the clothes, that beauty is not innate, but made. Upstairs, there are designs by Gareth Pugh, Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, Azzedine Alaïa, and various others, showing how Balenciaga’s heritage is still evident in fashion today. Some of the links are more tenuous than others, and while some pieces are merely derivative there are some that show real innovation in the designers’ response to the challenge set by Balenciaga.

Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion

The exhibition shows how fashion continues its complex dialogue with the human body. Indeterminate boundaries are taken as read, containment continues to be impossible, and shape shifting is the norm. Cristóbal Balenciaga showed how fashion and the body interact to produce some of the most fascinating structures and images of our time take the ‘semi-fit’ suit or the envelope dress, for example and set the bar for pretty much every fashion designer subsequently. His work is modernity and femininity writ large, in the sorts of dresses and coats and hats that even now, almost one hundred years since he opened his first shop, are still relevant. Although a large jazzy theatrical spectacle à la Alexander McQueen is not on the cards, Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion is as glamorous, and intricately detailed as the craftsmanship of the man himself.

Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion is open to the public at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, till February 2018. Book your tickets here

All images are courtesy: IMAXTREE