Letter from the Editor

The Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum in Getaria (Spain), Balenciaga’s hometown, decided to celebrate the designer’s 125th anniversary with the launch of the I Cristóbal Balenciaga International Conference. The Museum is thereby fulfilling one of its most important missions: to spread knowledge on the man and his life’s work. The Call for Papers, launched in September 2019, invited specialists from academia and the museum community to send their research proposals on the couturier, his work and his legacy, and convened them in Getaria on October 1 and 2, 2020. Finally, due to the restrictions imposed by the global COVID 19 pandemic, the museum’s management decided, rather than postpone or cancel the event, to hold it in digital format on the scheduled dates. The figures on this first edition of the conference exceeded all expectations. The organization received more than forty proposals from different countries such as the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Spain, and more than 2500 people from a variety of backgrounds and ages registered and followed the conference through the museum’s YouTube channel. These figures show beyond doubt the undeniable interest that Cristóbal Balenciaga and his creation arouse throughout the world.

From the proposals received, the Conference Scientific Committee selected the eighteen papers that contributed the most original research to studies on Balenciaga. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic and its effect on access to research resources, of these eighteen proposals, five were unable to present their findings. This special edition brings together four of the thirteen that were finally presented. They have been selected for the quality of their research and for their rigorous contributions to Balenciaga studies. All four offer previously unknown findings and conclusions and open other possible future lines of research.

The first article, entitled “Supplying Woolens for Cristóbal Balenciaga: A Comparative Analysis of the Commercial Strategies of Garigue and Agnona (1947–1968),” is the result of the research carried out by Victoria de Lorenzo, PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow. The study derives from her volunteering research position with Professor Lesley E. Miller to collaborate on the last edition of Miller’s monograph on Cristóbal Balenciaga (2017). The author argues that woolen fabrics are, in general, largely absent from the Balenciaga monographs and catalogs published to date. Starting from this premise, she presents two of the Basque couturier’s wool fabric suppliers, the British brand Garigue and the Italian brand Agnona, and explains how both brands focused on attracting Balenciaga as a customer. The Basque couturier’s reputation could be used as an effective strategy to win over other clients in the exclusive Parisian haute couture sector. The author contextualizes this commercial policy at a particularly complex time for non-French textile houses, when the French government developed a protectionist policy, granting subsidies to those Parisian haute couture houses that exclusively used fabrics made in France to develop their collections.

The second article, written by Dr. Liz Tregenza, curator at Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service, is entitled “Copying a Master: London Wholesale Couture and Cristóbal Balenciaga in the 1950s” and is the result of her research work in the sector of wholesale copies of haute couture designs (“wholesale couture” is the term used in English) on the London market in the period following World War II. Her knowledge on how this very specific sector of fashion worked in Britain has allowed her to delve into the way in which Balenciaga’s innovations during the 1950s and 1960s influenced the supply of wholesale couture during those two decades in Britain. Based on the specialized British press of the time, the article explains that, on occasions, some Balenciaga designs were literally copied and, on others, they served as a source of inspiration or a starting point to create other designs, according to their esthetics, which were leading the fashion of the day. The author argues that this practice contributed to consolidating the British fashion sector as an international benchmark for adaptations of Parisian haute couture.

The third article, written by Dr. Gabriele Monti, Associate Professor at IUAV University of Venice, is entitled “Zurich 1970. The Exhibition Balenciaga: Ein Meister der Haute Couture” and explains the results of the detailed and unpublished research that he has carried out in the archives of the Zurich University of the Arts on the assembly of the aforementioned exhibition, which was held at the Museum Bellerive in Zurich from May 31 to August 16, 1970. This exhibition is considered a milestone among scholars of fashion exhibitions for several reasons. Firstly, because it was the first fashion exhibition dedicated exclusively to one designer and, secondly, because the designer to whom the retrospective was dedicated, Balenciaga, was still alive. Based on the evidence found, Monti provides a detailed reconstruction of the different curatorial and conceptual problems that arose while staging the exhibition. The author also argues that this exhibition is a milestone for the novel consolidation of certain aspects of its mise-en-scène and for having raised issues that are still valid in the field of fashion museums.

The last article, entitled “La Perse by Cristóbal Balenciaga: an historical, scientific and conservation investigation” is the result research into the embroidery of the copy of the La Perse jacket, kept in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag (the Netherlands). Its authors are César Salinas, head of the fashion and textile conservation department of the aforementioned museum, Nadia Albertini, embroidery designer and archivist at Maison Hurel, and Dr. Livio Ferrazza, science conservator of the Valencian Institute for Conservation, Restoration and Research of Cultural Assets (Valencia, Spain). This jacket was created by Balenciaga in 1947 and belonged to the Dutch concert singer Else Rijkens. The article is relevant because it offers clues to better preserve this piece and other copies of the same jacket kept in other museums around the world, and also for other Balenciaga models adorned with similar materials. The technical analysis carried out for conservation reasons also raised other questions about the historical–social context of the piece and about the authorship of its embroidery, traditionally attributed by Balenciaga’s historiography to the Maison Lesage. To find answers, the authors investigated specific documentation on embroidery and Balenciaga kept at the Musée des Arts décoratifs and the Balenciaga Archives in Paris, as well as reference bibliography and the press of the day. The article explains the evidence found and the relevant conclusions of the investigation.

The first two articles study Balenciaga with a focus on business aspects, those of the haute couture business, but from very different perspectives. While the article by Victoria de Lorenzo investigates the couturier as a customer of wool fabrics, making decisions about the sourcing of these materials to create his collections, the article by Liz Tregenza analyzes the influence of the couturier’s innovations on the success of the wholesale sales of certain London brands. The third and fourth articles focus on Balenciaga’s legacy in museums. But while Gabriele Monti investigates from a curatorial perspective, César Rodríguez, Nadia Albertini and Livio Ferrazza do so from the perspective of conservation. All four are examples of research focused on Balenciaga, delving into two large subfields—business and museums—which demonstrate that the couturier is a multifaceted figure in the history of fashion, with multiple characteristics and contexts, which deserve rigorous studies for a better understanding his place in the world of fashion past and present. But, to understand that, from his work in fashion, Balenciaga also represents a benchmark in the fields of entrepreneurship, creativity and Western culture of the twentieth century.

Those of us who are dedicated to research know that we need individuals and institutions that open their doors for us and support and promote our work. I would like to sincerely thank the Balenciaga Museum for being one of them. This first conference and the publication that you have in hand would not have been possible without the museum’s commitment to promote rigorous and quality research on Balenciaga. I would like to extend my gratitude to the members of the Scientific Committee for their generous collaboration and to other specialists who, anonymously, have contributed to the peer review process. Helpful suggestions from all of them have undoubtedly helped improve this publication. Finally, I especially want to thank Valerie Steele and the Fashion Theory team for their willingness to publish these four research papers as a special issue of their journal and their kind invitation to me for editing it.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ana Balda

Dr. Ana Balda is Associate Lecturer, Communication Faculty, University of Navarre, Spain. [email protected]