The Button-Pushing Impresario of Balenciaga
How Demna engineered the rise—and near-fall—of the luxury fashion house.
By Lauren Collins
Cristóbal Balenciaga was a poor boy, too. He was born in 1895 in the fishing village of Getaria, on Spain’s Atlantic coast. He could have been a priest or a boat captain, like his father, if he hadn’t become Paris’s greatest couturier—“the master of us all,” as Christian Dior deemed him. Balenciaga was also a refugee, who relocated to France when the Spanish Civil War made business untenable. Beaton dubbed him the “Basque Dick Whittington,” mocking his humble origins, but acknowledged his peerless refinement, writing, “Balenciaga uses fabrics like a sculptor working in marble.” It is necessary to quote Balenciaga’s observers because he did not grant a single interview during his fifty-year career, pursuing a recondite vision of beauty with an intensity that left room for nothing else. “The sleeve was, as is well known, Balenciaga’s obsession: everyone connected with the house remembers anguished cries of la manga and the awful sound of the master ripping one out at the last moment,” his biographer Mary Blume writes in “The Master of Us All.” Coco Chanel said, simply, “He is the only one among us who’s a real couturier.”...
Creatively, Balenciaga was a radical. He began his career as a conventional maker of pretty clothing, but by 1950 he was moving toward the purified, architectural forms for which he became revered.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/27/balenciagas-button-pusher