Golden Gate Glamour

Sandra Stillwell’s San Francisco Convention was a celebration of the master couturier, Balenciaga. We look at the stories behind the fashions…

By good fortune, two major fashion exhibitions coincided with the Golden Gate Glamour Convention which captured the spirit of Balenciaga’s rich heritage. As well as enjoying a full program of events, attendees were entertained by a private tour of Balenciaga’s work in a retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. A companion exhibition, Pulp Fashion, at the Legion of Honor, was another treat for fans of fashion. The artist Isabel de Bourchgrave, had made an incredible collection of historical fashions created entirely from paper.

Thanks to the expert guidance of a de Young docent lecturer, Julia Geist, an authority on the master’s works, we learned a huge amount about the world of couture and Cristóbal Balenciaga in particular. For two decades he honed his tailoring and dressmaking skills in his native Spain. Initially in the medieval town of Getaria, where he was born in 1895, then, at the precocious age of 19 he opened a boutique in the fashionable resort of San Sebastían.

His father worked on the water ferrying rich people out to their yachts, the young Cristóbal often accompanied him and got to rub shoulders with the ritzy moneyed crowd. When his father died at a young age, his mother began sewing for this wealthy clientele. Balenciaga showed an early talent for needlework and at the age of 12 the Marquesa de la Torres employed him. He could take pieces of fabric and, without patterns, create anything he desired.

Balenciaga established The House of Eisa, taken from his mother’s maiden name Eisaguirre, in Madrid in the 1920s. He became well known and wealthy – his clients adored the craftsmanship and style of his garments, always made to measure, and with personal fittings.

As a result of the tribulations caused by the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939), Balenciaga moved to France and established his atelier in Paris. He met with immediate acclaim. The 1939 collection “Infanta”, based on 17th and 18th century court paintings, was hugely successful and influential. One of the key features of his designs was to draw attention to the shapeliness of a womanly hip and to celebrate the female physique.

During the war, and the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940, the fashionable silhouette was obliged to change due to fabric shortages. Shoulders became more square, the waist was nipped in and the hemline ended at the knee. This was one of the reasons why Dior’s post-war New Look caused such a sensation, with rounder, softer shoulders, a more curvilinear outline, longer lengths and lots of fabric.

The Balenciaga store at No. 10 Avenue Georges V in Paris is there to this day, still arranged as a ground floor boutique with the salon upstairs. Balenciaga always had a minimum of three fittings for each outfit. He was passionate about details such as how the sleeves were set into the garment, and it was not unknown for him to rip the sleeves out if they had been incorrectly done. He was aware that the setting-in of sleeves is the true test of a master tailor.

His sales women kept a close track of measurements and details of clients purchases. This was vital so that society ladies would not arrive wearing the same frocks at the same event. All the cutting and sewing was done on the floor above the salon at No.10, some specialized techniques such as fine embroidery might be sent out to the House of Lesage but otherwise everything was done in house.

The window displays at street level posed a particular conundrum. Clothing could not be displayed as the couturier did not sell ready-to-wear, everything was made-to-measure for individual customers. A solution was found with the sculptor Janine Janet, who was responsible for designing the windows from 1951 – 1968: she would combine sculptural elements with small accessories and perfumes that were available on the ground floor. Balenciaga created only three perfumes – the last one, Quadrille, in 1955.

It’s worth mentioning that access to the salon upstairs, by private elevator no less, was only by discreet invitation. Once there, the privileged few would be treated to a fashion show of the latest designs. House mannequins were under strict instructions not to make eye contact with clients and not to show their teeth. Smiles would be distracting – this was all about the clothes.

Balenciaga’s dresses were owned by the cream of society. He was particularly favored by older clients. While with Dior you had to fit the dress, even to the extent of requiring girdles under bathing suits to maintain the correct line, with Balenciaga the dress was fitted to the body, always to flattering effect.

Although clearly a master craftsman, Balenciaga was not a good draftsman, and he employed artists to translate his vision on to paper. Through his designs, he was responsible for creating and pioneering key looks of our time, many of which can be traced back to his Spanish heritage. The themes running through his work derive from Spanish artists, especially Velasquez and Goya, although he would rarely set foot in a museum. Religious iconography was also a strong influence: it might be pared down like a nun’s habit, or be built on the elaborate embroidery of icons or saints such as La Macarena from Seville. Dance, flamenco, and the matadors of the bullring introduced black, red, pink, and dots, as well as boleros and monteras (those little pompon hats), to his couture.

The couturier was at the peak of his powers in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1951, he was responsible for a radical transformation of the silhouette, broadening the shoulders and removing the waist. In 1955, he created the tunic dress, which later developed into the chemise dress of 1957. The Baby Doll dress was first made by him in 1958 and can be seen to have its roots in fishermens’ smocks and regional dress from his Basque background.

By 1959, he had introduced the Empire line, with high-waisted dresses and coats cut like kimonos. Puffball dresses and balloon skirts first made their appearances in his salon. He reintroduced the back-trapeze gown, last seen in paintings of the 1700s, and he was very keen on accentuating the movement of the hips and waistline, as well as shape. His 1950s suits were beloved by mature women. He allowed for their body type: for example there was ease around the mid-section for a flattering, yet comfortable look. Sleeves were given extra fabric at the underarm, so that if the arm was raised to hail a cab, the jacket did not rise too! All seams were a generous 1″, not the ⅝” we are more accustomed to nowadays. This was to allow some room for maneuver should the costume require alteration at a later date.

In an historical moment reminiscent of a recent Royal event, Balenciaga created a wedding gown completely in secret for Queen Fabiola of Belgium in 1960. The deceptively simple design had a length of white mink as the single decorative element.

Although he was driven by detail and obsessed with perfection, Balenciaga was a prolific couturier and around 2300 outfits by him have been catalogued. As a point of detail, the word ‘mannequin’ refers to the house model wearing the dress and ‘model’ in the french world of couture refers to the ensemble itself.

To satisfy the needs of a burgeoning American market, two custom salons were established in San Francisco. These were run strictly along the same lines as the European salons. Stores were licensed with selected patterns from the collection and outfits would be fitted and produced with the same exacting standards as in Paris. Balenciaga was not forgiving of disloyalty in his customers, and once excluded from his invitation list, it was impossible to be reintroduced to the salon.

During the 1960s his silhouettes became more geometric, pared-down and architectural, often with an abstract element. In 1968 he presented his very last collection, he was beginning to feel out of step with the times, and wasn’t comfortable with the more relaxed approach to dress of Carnaby Street and the swinging sixties. He briefly came out of retirement in 1969 to design the uniforms for Air France. Both André Courrèges and Oscar de la Renta worked in his workshop at the time, and the influence of Balenciaga’s designs can be seen in both designers’ later work. Givenchy was also one of his devotees: the hallmark Balenciaga cut and style are present in the outfits Givenchy created for Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Cristóbal Balenciaga’s very last commission was in 1972, he designed the wedding dress for Maria del Carmen, Franco’s grand-daughter, a project he really couldn’t refuse. He died in that year aged 77. In his own words, “A couturier must be an architect for design, a sculptor for shape, a painter for color, a musician for harmony, and a philosopher for temperance.”

Taking her inspiration from the work of Balenciaga, Sandra Stillwell produced an incredibly detailed fashion gift set including many ensembles created to fit 16-inch tall fashion dolls, like Gene and her friends. The collection was designed and manufactured especially for the event, and included many mix-and-match pieces to create a huge range of outfits. There were also Sandra’s renowned centerpiece dolls showcasing haute couture fashions at each meal. Highlighting Friday night’s gala banquet was the ultra limited Golden Gate Sasha 16″ resin doll, produced exclusively for the event by JamieShow.

Speakers included Lynne Day and Wayne Nilson who gave us an insider’s view on designing for Gene in her Ashton Drake guise, and showed us examples of their creations. We learned that in his original incarnation Trent Osborn, Miss Marshall’s paramour, was much more hunky. The plan was for Trent to have a great physique, but sadly this made some outfits too bulky – layers on a muscular body at that scale just do not work – it looked like he’d been stuffed! So the version of Trent that went into production was a little more slender. But the problem of fabric bulk still remained when integrating collars, necklines and shoulders. Setting in sleeves for those bulging arms was a challenge. and they didn’t even want to talk about his thighs!

One of the head office requests the designers dreaded was “can you scatter some beads over it?” This had to be done by hand for each of the prototypes (up to seven), and often the beads did not exist in the correct color, so they had to be painstakingly hand-painted before sewing.

Fabric patterns could also be an issue, sometimes a particular vintage print could not be reproduced (even on a doll-sized scale) because of copyright issues. This is one of the reasons why spots, stripes and checks are such a mainstay of the wardrobes of Gene Marshall and her pals.

On the final evening, I was honored to give a program about the world of magazines, illustrated with my features about dolls, together with anecdotes about some of the celebrities I have worked with in the wider publishing arena. To memorably wrap up the whole event, Sandra Stillwell indulged us with a video from her own personal collection of Balenciaga imagery.

To discover more about Sandra Stillwell Presents… or for more information on the next event, go to sandrastillwellpresents.blogspot.com

This feature originally appeared in Fashion Doll Quarterly Magazine in 2011.

Here are some Balenciaga fashion links:

Balenciaga 1960-67

The first UK exhibition exploring the work of Spanish fashion designer Cristobal Balenciaga opened in London on May 27, 2017. This investigation from the exhibition uses x-rays to show how Balenciaga constructed his couture. And here are some digital animations showing the construction of an evening dress.

Balenciaga and Spain by Hamish Bowles, Vogue

When Cristóbal Balenciaga closed his house in 1968, the headlines read: “Nothing Left to Achieve.” So what was it that made Balenciaga so remarkable? Was it his reputation for uncompromised standards or how seriously he took every little piece of his design?