I don't know how many people here might be interested in haute couture - in learning about it even if they can't afford it - but I don't think many people know what a big deal Balenziaga was.
The Button-Pushing Impresario of Balenciaga
How Demna engineered the rise—and near-fall—of the luxury fashion house.
Cristóbal Balenciaga was a poor boy, too. He was born in 1895 in the fishing village of Getaria, on Spain’s Atlantic coast. He could have been a priest or a boat captain, like his father, if he hadn’t become Paris’s greatest couturier—“the master of us all,” as Christian Dior deemed him. Balenciaga was also a refugee, who relocated to France when the Spanish Civil War made business untenable. Beaton dubbed him the “Basque Dick Whittington,” mocking his humble origins, but acknowledged his peerless refinement, writing, “Balenciaga uses fabrics like a sculptor working in marble.” It is necessary to quote Balenciaga’s observers because he did not grant a single interview during his fifty-year career, pursuing a recondite vision of beauty with an intensity that left room for nothing else. Coco Chanel said, simply, “He is the only one among us who’s a real couturier.”
Creatively, Balenciaga was a radical. He began his career as a conventional maker of pretty clothing, but by 1950 he was moving toward the purified, architectural forms for which he became revered.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...-button-pusher
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