Balenciaga was mentioned in yesterday's post as Givenchy's friend and inspiration. So let's continue for another day the thread by focusing on an art event that will be opening next week at the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum in Getaria, Spain.
Entitled "Maleta de una modista" (A Dressmaker's Suitcase, 13th December 2014 - 12th April 2015), the event will feature photographs, clippings and patterns contained in a suitcase that belonged to Pilar Ayarza, dressmaker at Eisa in Barcelona.
Balenciaga founded in 1924 his own house in San Sebastián at 2 Avenida de la Libertad under the name Cristóbal Balenciaga.
Three years later he opened Eisa Costura (Eisa was an abbreviated form of his mother's patronymic), dedicated to traditional quality dressmaking for an upper middle-class public, at 10 Calle Oquendo.
In 1932 the designer opened a new dressmaking establishment called B. E. Costura at 6 Calle Santa Catalina in San Sebastián and, a year later, he closed Eisa Costura and B. E. Costura founding a new establishment, EISA B. E. Costura, on first-floor premises at 2 Avenida de la Libertad.
Following his success in San Sebastián, Balenciaga opened a Madrid branch in 1933 and a Barcelona branch in 1935. When the Spanish Civil War started, in 1936, Balenciaga left Spain for Paris and the Eisa stores were closed. At the end of the war in 1939, they reopened; Eisa closed in 1968.
Catalan artists Fiona Capdevila and Rosa Solano will rescue and re-interpret fragments of the dressmaker's life and of her profession dedicated to sewing, employing the suitcase as a magic hat from which they will be producing images and small objects.
The event - that will also develop over the next year - is planned not just as a homage to Balenciaga, but to design, materials, technical mastery, perfection in execution and, above all, as a tribute to all the people who worked for Balenciaga and all the dressmakers, seamstresses, pattern cutters, fitters and finishers who have been lending their skills and expert fingers to many iconic fashion houses out there, symbolically becoming the weft to a designer's warp.
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