“Fear.” The designer Demna Gvasalia is talking about the emotions, namely his own, triggered by the daunting task of presenting his first couture collection. It’s May 2021 - the show is in July. “This is a little bit like a therapy session,” he’ll later add, laughing. His feelings are heightened because this couture collection is not just for himself, but for the august, austere house of Balenciaga, where couture - arguably - was raised from applied to pure art at the hands of its founder, Cristóbal Balenciaga, a legend in his own lifetime, deified since. He retired in 1968 and died in 1972. Couture bearing the label Balenciaga has never been designed by anyone other than him - until now. “This is the house where couture for me is kind of like innate, the essence,” Gvasalia says. “I felt it was my obligation.” But still, there’s fear. “Fear of not being enough. Fear of having to fill these very big shoes, left by ‘the master of us all’.” He isn’t laughing. “It’s not just a legacy - it’s Cristóbal Balenciaga’s legacy.”
Gvasalia has every right to be afraid, given that the history and prestige of the house of Balenciaga is, possibly, unparalleled in modern fashion. Others come close, granted. Christian Dior ensured his name’s immortality by resuscitating Paris haute couture after the strictures of the second world war, by saving women from nature and creating a fashion moment with his 1947 debut that outmoded all before it. Gabrielle Chanel emancipated women not once but twice, first in the 20th century’s teenage years, and then again after her comeback in 1954, inventing a uniform of modernity, eschewing fickle fashion in favour of eternal style. Yves Saint Laurent, Dior’s dauphin, rebelled in the 1960s and then refined, dedicating himself to the perfection of his craft. They are all couture greats, names whose work changed fashion. Yet the sombre Spaniard Cristóbal Balenciaga is feted as the greatest of all. Even those contemporaries - and others - openly acknowledged it. It was Dior who first called him “the master of us all”, comparing the couture to an orchestra composed and conducted by Balenciaga. “Balenciaga alone is a couturier,” said Chanel - who rarely praised anyone except herself. “The others are draughtsmen or copyists.” Madeleine Vionnet called him “un vrai”; Balenciaga’s friend and devoted disciple Hubert de Givenchy declared he was the greatest single influence on his career.
Almost half a century after his death, Balenciaga is still revered as the most significant figure of 20th-century haute couture, a defining architect of fashion as we experience it today. Balenciaga founded his couture house in San Sebastián, Spain, in 1917 - it was named Eisa, a diminutive of his mother’s surname Eizaguirre - expanded to Madrid and Barcelona, and in 1937 opened as Balenciaga in Paris, at 10 avenue George V. When that address - and the other branches - closed in 1968, the New York Times ran the news under the headline “Nothing Left to Achieve, Balenciaga Calls It a Day”. Nothing left to achieve because, in the 51 years in between, Balenciaga had reinvented how people dressed. His clothes were paradoxically formal and fluid, could appear heavy and architectural yet were magically weightless, “like a sea swell”, wrote Pauline de Rothschild, who, like pretty much every other woman of note, wore Balenciaga.
“One never knew what one was going to see at a Balenciaga opening,” wrote Diana Vreeland, breathlessly, in
