All colours are wonderful and can provide designers with great fashion inspirations, but there is one shade that is mysteriously beautiful and timeless – black. Last year the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum in Getaria, Spain, celebrated it in the exhibition "Coal and Velvet".
The latter juxtaposed Balenciaga's Haute Couture designs and the traditional garments donned by people in José Ortiz Echagüe's photographs and highlighted correspondences between shapes, silhouettes and colours as well, looking at the black shade as interpreted by Cristóbal Balenciaga and at the textured black in Echagüe's images.
The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, is currently exploring the power of darkness in the Spanish couturier's designs via the exhibition "Balenciaga in Black" (until January 6th 2019), a sort of edited version of another event that took place last year at Paris' Bourdelle Museum, - "Balenciaga, l'oeuvre au noir".
All the items on display - mainly from the collections of the Palais Galliera, in Paris, and from the Balenciaga Archives - come, you guessed it, in black, yet each of the designs is unique and intriguing for the way the couturier shaped and sculpted the fabric, covered it in beaded and sequinned embroideries and appliqued elements such as fringes, or enriched it with lace, creating matte and shiny, solid and transparent juxtapositions.
The first section focuses on structured volumes and introduces the technique behind the designs: Balenciaga trained as a tailor with Casa Gomez and worked as head of the ladies' tailoring department of the Au Louvre department stores in San Sebastián.
He was therefore first and foremost a skilled tailor capable of creating perfectly shaped designs chatacterised by impeccable proportions.
This section looks at his skills through a series of unique creations including a fitted coat from 1949 in rayon cannelé with three perfectly sculpted notched lapels opening in a V. This part features also accessories such as gazar hat with a striking waving silhouette.
Yet maybe the most important piece in this section is not a rich evening dress, but a toile for a leather coat as it shows the first stage of Balenciaga's process - draping fabric onto a dress form and then manipulating and adjusting this three-dimensional sketch.
Usually toiles are created in an ecru-colored cotton, but Balenciaga's were done in black percale, twill or stiff tarlatan, depending on the fabric to be used for the ultimate piece.
The fabric was then marked with white lines, seams and stitches indicating and defining the structure and the construction of the garment.
The next session about abstract volumes introduces more intriguing techniques: as he started creating and experimenting a bit more, Balenciaga left behind more traditional forms to come up with abstract shapes and silhouettes.
At times they enveloped the body, softly embracing it with hooded capes, at others they created geometrical cocoons around it.
Lightweight gazar and zagar fabrics specially developed for Balenciaga in 1958 and 1968 by Gustav Zumsteg (who ran the Swiss textile firm Abraham) allowed the designer to create more abstractions.
The selection includes a classic baby doll dress from the '60s in a cloqué fabric, a trapezoidal shape and a dropped waist, and a cone-shaped dress made of four bias-cut panels delicately anchored on the shoulders via two jeweled straps.
Thee art of draping introduces visitors to the next section: Balenciaga employed draped elements to emphasize shapes, create shadows and movement in crêpe, taffeta and seersucker, with rounded pleats often shaping dramatic volumes that stood out from the body.
The couturier also loved designing semi-fitted evening dresses, inspired by the construction of the Japanese kimono that featured a fitted front and a supple effect in the low-cut back.
Fans of shiny and appliqued elements will instead be more interested in the part of the exhibition dedicated to contrasting black that includes gowns that would fall into the "bright and brilliant" category.
Evening dresses embellished with satin ribbons, shiny sequins and beaded elements or made with lurex lamé are juxtaposed in this part to matte and opaque black wool or quilted fabric dresses, hinting at darkness and at the colour of mourning.
Spanish traditions are echoed here in an Abraham Lurex lamé bolero calling to mind the chaquetilla, a short stiff jacket worn by matadors, while under the lights of the museum halls the silver plastic sequins and glass beads on a cocktail dress from 1967 shine, remembering the embroideries of the bullfighter's traditional costumes (while hinting at the same time at fashion revolutions as natural stones and metal were gradually replaces by lighter plastic sequins as the years went by).
Lace has made a comeback on quite a few runways and the section dedicated to Balenciaga's fondness for black lace could be considered as very trendy by the impenitent fashionistas visiting the event. Yet, Balenciaga's interest in this material was directly linked with Spanish piety and folklore rather than with mere trends and fashion and he often employed it in different ways, crumpling or gathering it to create new and enchanting effects.
The choice is wide here and goes from long tiered evening gowns in black chantilly lace stiffened with horsehair braiding to make sure the lace flounces stood out from the fabric designing imperceptible modulations and shades of opaqueness, to a dress almost entirely covered with little flounces of lace hand-sewn onto tulle, forming a topiary-like black mass.
Colours appear at the very end of the exhibition and in very subtle ways to show how Balenciaga would employ them to break the austerity of the darkness: the soft white Arctic fox collar matched with a black dress designed for the early incarnation of Balenciaga's fashion house - Eisa Costura (Winter 1957; Eisa was an abbreviated form of Balenciaga's mother's patronymic; Eisa was dedicated to traditional quality dressmaking for an upper middle-class public) created a contrast with the matte surface of the dress fabric. A pink satin ribbon on a black lace dress accentuated the waistline, while a grand ball gown from 1964 featured instead a dramatic skirt trimmed in chocolate brown and cream ermine tails (the piece belonged to Claudia Heard de Osborne, a Dallas debutante and international socialite who married a wealthy Spaniard and became a dear friend of Balenciaga).
Among the rarest pieces in the event there are never-before-seen black prototypes, but the most striking ones remain the designs in which Balenciaga created architectural shapes using his techniques without adding any embellishments as there's definitely no better way to study the construction of a garment than through the absence of colour. Describing Balenciaga's designs in October 1938, Harper's Bazaar wrote, "Here the black is so black that it hits you like a blow". The same could be said about this exhibition: hopefully, it will hit like a blow young students and designers willing to discover the dignity, drama and pathos of darkness and learn how to incorporate them in their own visual languages.
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