Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/44746
Gonzalez Foerster. "The point of my collaboration with Gonzalez Foerster is not to stay safe in our own worlds, but to see what can be expressed when two worlds cross paths. Each time we collaborate on the Balenciaga boutiques, it's like adding a new landscape to the Balenciaga universe." This universe first spun into sight in 1997, when Ghesquière designed his inaugural collection for Balenciaga, the storied house begun in 1937, exactly 60 years earlier, by the legendary couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga, author of such startling innovations as the sack dress, the cocoon coat and the balloon skirt. At first blush, you might think that Ghesquière, who in the recent past has advanced such ideas as jaunty giant hound's-tooth-checked bright red faux leather coats, doesn't have much in common with the house's founder, but look more carefully: especially this season, Ghesquière has infused his avant-garde ideas with a strict and clever architectural precision. Hamish Bowles, who curated the recent "Balenciaga: Spanish Master" exhibit, an impressive retrospective of Cristóbal Balenciaga's oeuvre, is confident that the legacy is in good hands. "I think that Nicolas Ghesquière has the same engagement with pushing fashion forward with fabric innovation and changing the silhouette," Bowles has said. "I think [his work is] closer to Balenciaga's right near the end of his career when he was really challenging himself more. I think there is definitely a connection." And Ghesquière himself has admitted, "Everyone references Cristóbal—I'm lucky to be in the house where I can use it without any problem. It's part of the patrimony of fashion. His work is so influential, it's everywhere." Cristóbal Balenciaga made clothes for Gloria Guinness and Mona von Bismarck; Ghesquière loves to hang with people like the shape-shifting artist Cindy Sherman, who he cites as a serious influence. "I am always impressed by Cindy Sherman's unique relationship with aesthetics, and how she plays with aesthetics to create distinct identities," he says. "I'm interested in the idea of self-transformation, and I love the precise way Cindy Sherman develops her ideas and how she integrates clothes in her work." Which leads us to an interesting point—because fashion is always about, among other things, self-transformation, how do Ghesquière's ideas for fall 2011 further his customers' personal quest for re-reinvention? Perhaps the questioning of conventional categories, so prevalent in Sherman's work, can also be taken as a palimpsest for Ghesquière's designs. "The season is a game of proportion, zooming in on textures, the way seeing things with a [jeweler's] loop can give you different, shifting points of view," the designer has said of his current collection. "It's a bit surrealist." The good news is that, this fall, in addition to such surreal Ghesquière-esque indulgences as frocks seamed with metal mesh, there are also structurally simple overcoats, made from a single rectangular piece of fabric, that recall Cristóbal Balenciaga's designs from 1965. Which makes another of the Ghesquière's revelations perhaps less surprising. Though the designer lives in France, he has visited Miami and says he believes that the town has become "one of the most influential cities because of its strong links to contemporary art and design; you can see so much there." But it isn't just the gallery scene that occupied the designer, or the sand and surf or the storied nightlife that excites him. "I've also visited Miami's vintage stores," he confesses, revealing that his interests, though eclectic and intellectually ambitious, do not always stray so far from his stated metier. "They have such fantastic and unusual pieces!" This ability to look at fashion with fresh eyes, to bring a knowledge of and profound enthusiam for art to the making of clothes, is what has made Ghesquière's work for Balenciaga so exciting. 38 BAL HARBOUR Looks from Balenciaga's Fall collection.