It is not rare, in the history of fashion, for a photographer to be associated with a specific house or designer. Quite often, indeed, the style of that photographer helped defining the codes of that fashion house.
For example, between the '50s and the '60s Balenciaga's image was defined by the production of Tom Kublin. The photographer is currently celebrated in an exhibition - "Tom Kublin for Balenciaga. An Unusual Collaboration" - at the the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum in Getaria, Spain (on until tomorrow).
Born in 1924, in Zalaszentgrot, Hungary, into a middle-class family, Kublin first served in the Hungarian army as a photographer during World War II. At the end of the conflict, he moved to Zurich, where he opened a photographic studio specialized in advertising.
While working in Switzerland, Kublin got the chance to discover the local textile industry and worked for over two decades for the Abraham silk company. It was this association with Abraham, supplier of the leading Haute Couture houses, that allowed Kublin to meet Cristóbal Balenciaga in the mid-1950s.
The photographer first shot designs by Balenciaga in 1954 for the British edition of Harper's Bazaar. In the same year, he started photographing for the house of Balenciaga and established a friendship with the couturier (the collaboration continued until the sudden death of the photographer in 1966).
Kublin established a precise style with his classic glamorous images like the one portraying a model in a large Balenciaga silk tulle and organza hat that half-shadowed her face, but his pictures also had an important purpose.
Fashion piracy was already a concern for couturiers in the early 20th century, but by the mid-20th century the problem had worsened, especially in the United States, and it seriously affected Balenciaga.
Kublin was commissioned to take pictures of the designs in Balenciaga's collections for documentary purposes and to protect their copyright.
These images could be defined as "fashion mug shots" as they portayed models posing from the front, back and sometimes profile, holding the number of the design in their hands. In this way, the details of each creation were recorded and, if necessary, Balenciaga's authorship could be demonstrated.
In the '60s Kublin started filming (in black and white and with a static camera) the collections also with this purpose in mind.
From the 1965 winter collection onwards, he began to edit the films and included an introduction with close-ups of hats and background music, even though Balenciaga presentations were carried out in silence. As the years passed, the films of the collections were no longer strictly archival and began to resemble advertisements: his last films for the house, now available in colour, introduced for example choreography.
"Tom Kublin for Balenciaga. An Unusual Collaboration", celebrates the relationship between the designer and the phoptographer through 100 photographs and 5 film excerpts (including an advert for Balenciaga's perfume Le Dix and a short film featuring Cristóbal Balenciaga, in which the couturier can be seen working on the final touches to his 1966 summer collection before its presentation).
Curators and historians will be more interested in the photographs of designs made with Abraham silks on commission by the Swiss maison, while fashion photography fans will instead prefer the more artistic and glamorous images published in Harper's Bazaar, Jardin des Modes and Town & Country. In this case it is interesting to note that, while nowadays fashion editors select the designs from the collections they wanted to publish as well as the photographers who should do the shoot, Balenciaga provided, except in exceptional cases, photographs of the designs he was interested in publicizing.
The best images in the exhibition remain the "fashion mug shots": created internally for the Balenciaga maison and currently part of the collection of the photographer's daughter, Maria Kublin, these images (on show for the first time) may not be glamorous, but they are extremely important as they show that copyright protection in fashion was considered a vital issue already in the '50s.
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