My Concept

After researching Balenciaga and his very Spanish influenced designs, I would like to experiment with drapery, silhouette and proportion. I would like to use the Tudor's costume as the starting concept as the drapery and silhouette are very similar to Balenciaga's designs and I would like to carry this essence through to my collection. Paying particular focus to the Tudor's men's wear, my aim is to translate it into a fashionable and desirable collection for the modern woman.

From the images above, it is clear that there is a distinct correlation between Balenciaga's designs, both past and present, and the Tudors' costume in terms of patters, details, fabrics, collars, cuffs, shape, silhouette and drape. Nicolas Ghesquière's Spring 2011 collection echoes punk masculinity and this collection has been described as:

·         Punk, couture

·         Street, Japanese, punk, British (80s riveted by future)

·         Strong masculine, feminine mix.

·         Boyish trousers, lost in big jacket.

·         Complex, layers make it feminine

·         Wear it both feminine but also hard and edgy.

·         Reinvented simple dresses and materials. (little black dress, tweed)

·         Plastic, lace, leather,rubber

·         Play on dinner shirt

·         Instinct of protection with the big coats and emphasised shoulders.

·         Semi- defense mode, less of a victim in woman.

·         Strong girl

I would like to preserve a certain sense of edgy masculinity in my collection through form and structure. 

As both early Balenciaga and Tudors' costume were quite sever in cut, symmetrical in shape, I want to inject some playfulness and unexpectancy into my collection by introducing Cubism into the design concept. With this, I want to experiment with proportion, scale, displacement of garment features, exaggerating certain parts while understating others. Play with layering fabrics and asymmetry to break away from the severity and austerity of Cristobal's precise tailoring yet retaining his essence of design at the same time.

  

Spring 2011

Balenciaga: Spanish Master

At New York's Queen Sofia Spanish Insititute, the exhibition "Balenciaga: Spanish Master" focuses on Crisotal's enduring influence of Spain in his work.

"The show looks at the influences in Balenciaga's world, which were very, very Spanish."- Oscar de la Renta, chairman of the Queen Sofia Insititute. Even after achieveing great success in Paris, Cristobal "remained very deeply influenced by the culture and folklore from Spain, from the religious to the gypsies, flamencos and bullfighters.”

Below are pictures of parts of the exhibition with a video by Bart Boehlert.

Modern Balenciaga

In 1997, French born Nicolas Ghesquière was named the Creative Director of Balcenciaga. His Spring 2006 ready-to-wear collection aimed to fuse two apparently contradictory ideas together of "architecture and embellishment, sharpness and ornamentalism." The collection collaborated Balenciaga's past and present while making refernce to Crisobal's bubble dresses. It uses heavy radzimir, embossed silk with sharp tailoring and patchwork dresses. Like Cristobal's influence of the Spanish Renaissance in his early designs, Ghesquière calls this collection his "baroque rock star" and is evidently inspired by the elaborate patterns and details of the Baroque style.

 

 

Balenciaga

For this project scenario, I have been asked by Balenciaga to develop a capsule collection for them after seeing my graduate show and present back my findings about Balenciaga and my design concept for the new collection to the senior design team. This first step I have taken is to research  the brand of Balenciaga and understand its designs so that my designs may still capture the essence of Balenciaga while at the same time is infused with my own style and influence.