Some of his clients never saw his face or talked to him. Cristóbal Balenciaga did not speak, nor did he let himself be seen; He gave only two interviews in his entire life, and also despite himself. His haute couture dresses constituted, each one of them, an alphabet, a dazzling word and phrase, sometimes indecipherable, because that's how the master wanted it: without chatter, in a liturgical silence palpitated by the rubbing of the fabrics. However, never has the figure of a couturier generated so many publications, tributes, exhibitions and research. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of words by Balenciaga (Getaria, 1895-Xàbia, 1972) that he never uttered and that were written by others.
His work is kept in the best museums and institutions in the world. There is a foundation and a museum named after him. And a trail of printed nouns that are repeated like a mantra to reveal the mystery of it: seamstress, couturier, designer, sculptor, engineer, visionary, teacher, architect, king of couture... and, in short, genius.
There are also biographies, some better fictionalized than others, but the person who knows the most about him is undoubtedly Miren Arzalluz, current director of the Paris Fashion Museum, the Palais Galliera, who inaugurated and directed the Balenciaga Museum in Getaria for years, and published Cristóbal Balenciaga, the forge of a master (1895-1936), about his years in Getaria and San Sebastián, in which he consolidated his early vocation – at the age of twelve he made a dress for the Marchioness of Casa Torres, a symbol of elegance Parisian among the à la mode aristocracy who spent their summers in Donostia.
The son of the seamstress who made alterations for these seasonal clients and of the noble fisherman grew up among scraps, threads and scissors, seeing how his mother's hands worked wonders on the dresses of the king of fashion Paul Poiret (1879-1944) and Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895), undisputed creator of haute couture.
I learned the science of the adjustment of a sleeve to the movement of the arm, the dynamism of a skirt when walking, the communion of the collarbones and cervicals with the cut of the necks. At thirty he already had his own sewing workshop in San Sebastián, first under his name and somewhat later under the name Eisa, which would be his brand in Spain until the end of the sixties. In those years his visits to the Prado Museum were as frequent as his bibliographical consultations on popular Spanish clothing. At her headquarters in Madrid, the sublime and scandalous Marchioness of Llanzol became her friend and best client, and therefore, the great spreader of the passion for Balenciaga among the great names of the Franco era.
We must go back to 1937, the year in which, without closing its workshops in Spain despite the Civil War, Balenciaga moved to Paris to open its maison on Avenue Georges V in Paris. He and his right-hand man and his great love, Wladzio D' Attainville, had everything organized to publicize and sell their haute couture outfits without uttering a single word that defined them. Mannequins of indefinite age, in no case perfect and starving girls, paraded around the carpeted room carrying a card with a number. Eye contact was prohibited, smiling was prohibited, this was more of a performance in which some infantas by Velázquez, some duchess by Goya, the saints of Zurbarán and the colors of El Greco advanced in absolute silence, before the astonished spectators.
Because there were no luxury pieces on parade, an idea for the future was advancing there, the vision of what a construction should be to house a body in motion, where the secrets of its workmanship are revealed in its interior engineering. Balenciaga looked at and weighed the fabrics with his hands, and thus, each material asked him for a unique and different project. Never the other way around. He not only studied the painters of the Spanish golden age: in 1937 he visited the Spanish pavilion at the Paris Universal Exhibition and admired Picasso's cubist expression in front of Guernica.
It concentrates on the fit and length of the sleeves, changes the location of the waists, lowers the collars an inch or two... tends towards the tunic, the jacket dress, the collar of the kimono, the dancer's skirt, cuts in front and long at the back, stitch by stitch. His style is polished like a diamond. Although Dior triumphed with his New Look in 1947, Balenciaga, undoubtedly critical of his colleague, perplexed by the transfer of clients from one house to the other, did not blink at this new world of licenses and brands that were beginning to become global.
In his workshop nothing changes, on the contrary, the silence is stubborn. He asked Gustave Zumteg, textile creator of the Swiss firm Abraham, to create a silk fabric with a new weave that he could shape, a fabric that would follow only him, the dressmaker who was going to treat her as an artist. From this collaboration, gazar was born in 1958. A temperamental fabric, which would be the tool of the creative process towards abstraction of the artist who finally domesticated the air that circulates between the body and the fabric.
In 1968 he closed the house and retired with his head held high. In the 20th century there were three Basque artists who managed to combine matter and air: Balenciaga, Oteiza and Chillida.
With the Cristóbal Balenciaga series, the famous silence of Balenciaga is broken, and the man gains voice and presence thanks to actor Alberto San Juan. Created by Lourdes Iglesias, directed by the trio of filmmakers Aitor Arregui, Jon Garaño and Jose Mari Goenaga and producers Irusoin and Moriarti, this television fiction is one of Disney Spain’s first original productions. With an international cast, a demanding and very well advised production, music by Alberto Iglesias and, above all, faithful and magnificent reproductions of some of Balenciaga’s iconic dresses, performed by Bina Daigeler and Pepo Ruiz-Dorado.
The six chapters narrate the thirty years of the couturier's life at the head of his maison in Paris and his Eisa sewing workshop in Spain. The script tries to unravel his personality and his daily life through a fiction that is credible thanks to the language and the wonderful performance of Alberto San Juan, the absolute protagonist. “He was the king of silence, a very attractive character, for whom it was necessary to do an exercise of imagination. “My work is about an artistic approach to reality,” says the actor, who for fiction also had to learn to express himself in French and Basque.
“Everything seemed to be beyond my physical, mental and acting capabilities. But I fell in love with the character: his contradictions, those of a guy who wants to preserve his privacy in a world that puts him at the center of public attention, a man who is homosexual and Catholic in Franco's Spain. That he does not want to get involved in any politics despite having lived through the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi occupation of France.
The physical and emotional work of the actor to become the enigmatic and restrained man that Balenciaga was achieves a memorable scene, typical of a method actor at the level of Brando, in which, before the corpse of his great love, Wladzio, in a morgue in Madrid, cries, moans, and also tries to hide his pain and repress it. “I thought it was the most heartbreaking event of his life, the early and sudden death of the person he loved most. I imagined it was an emotion that overwhelmed him and he let go because he was alone. So I got loose and then had to pull myself together before leaving the scene.”
San Juan identifies with the couturier in some aspects: in the creative process, in the paradox of the creator who always works between desire and fear, in vital honesty and coherence." He adds: “His work by him is overwhelming, dazzling. I am very struck by how a rather gray, handsome and well-groomed guy, but who could be a diplomat in an embassy, is capable of transforming into a brilliant creator.” Here is the great achievement of the series, which will surely hook thousands of followers, Alberto San Juan/Cristóbal Balenciaga admits that “this approach to fashion through the character has removed all the prejudices of my ignorance; those of treating fashion as a minor art. Well, it turns out that no, I have understood that it is another form of artistic expression.”
Of course it talks about the art of haute couture. Balenciaga abandoned him when he understood that the cobblestones that the students of Paris threw at the old system, in May 1968, were an unequivocal sign that times had changed.
