Cristóbal Balenciaga. Fashion and Heritage – Conversations
This year, 2018, European Year of Heritage, marks the 50th anniversary since the retirement of the Master of Haute Couture in 1968. An opportunity to reflect on the heritage value of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s work from the moment of closing his salons in Paris, Madrid, Barcelona and San Sebastián.
This is the starting point of the exhibition Cristóbal Balenciaga, Fashion and Heritage, the moment when Balenciaga’s creations left the streets and salons to inhabit the archives, galleries and museums. No longer lending beauty to bodies to become admired as beautiful in themselves. Leaving the covers of the fashion magazines for those dedicated to art, losing their exclusive patina to become accessible to all publics in all social circles.
In this dialogue of Fashion and Heritage we want to follow both roads, precisely taking 1968 as the year of their confluence. One runs from that date until today, revealing to the public the path of patrimonial consolidation intimately linked to our reason to be as a museum, and the other, starting in 1917 — opening date of his first atelier in San Sebastián — until the moment his maisons close their doors, in order to understand Balenciaga’s creative progression, evolution and revolution.
A conversation undertaken by the Museum with Judith Clark, eminent fashion curator. The exhibition discourse and the selection of pieces that accompany it, added to the spatial conceptualisation and its design are the result of the collaboration between the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum and the British curator.
The exhibition is based on the museum collections, with the indispensable support of Archives Balenciaga, Paris (Balenciaga sa, kering group).
Images courtesy of Cristóbal Balenciaga Museoa