The house of Balenciaga takes haute couture very seriously indeed. Cristóbal Balenciaga was so horrified by the rise of mass-produced clothes that in 1968 he abruptly shuttered his brand and retired to his native Spain, announcing that “high fashion is mortally wounded”.
So Pierpaolo Piccioli, who now helms the house, approached the brief of his first Balenciaga couture collection conscientiously, despite having 25 years of experience at Valentino. At a preview, the haute couture war room where he worked on the show for nine months was plastered with images that ranged from a 1961 Balenciaga dress to Spanish golden age art – Zurbarán’s chic saints, Velázquez’s doll-like infantas – and a monumental Hepworth pierced megalith.
Balenciaga’s house style is clothing that stands proud of the body. The organic cocoon curves and bell shapes, with room beneath for air to move around the body, arguably share more DNA with a Hepworth sculpture than with leggings and a tank top. There is a distinctly Zurbarán-adjacent air of mystery and wonder in how the fabric is made, through cut alone, to hover in space rather than cling.
To Piccioli, Balenciaga was “a philosopher for the way you feel in a dress”. As luck would have it, a show nine months in the planning was staged under a blistering Paris sun during a heatwave which has made airy clothes that don’t touch the body look extremely appealing. The embroidered silk gazar of a bustier dress cantilevered out from the body, the fabric bouncing around the model as she walked. (A dense motorcycle helmet-shaped headpiece of ostrich feathers perhaps looked less tempting.)
Piccioli took on Balenciaga’s couture heritage with respect but on his own terms. He is a thoroughly modern designer, jeans and sunglasses to Cristóbal’s double-breasted tailoring, a snake tattoo peeking from the cuff of his traditional lab coat and a pack of cigarettes visible in the pocket.
A vertical stack of three fuchsia puffballs, bolero jacket on top of bodice on top of skirt, stalked the runway like a giant fluorescent chess piece, a perfect avatar for the pomp and whimsy of couture where anything goes – as long as it is fabulous. “Haute couture is a world with no maps,” Piccioli said. “There are no limits on your imagination.” The gorgeous colour sensibility that he brought to Valentino matched the punchy silhouettes, which were saturated in ultraviolet, aniseed or lavender.
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Some of the grandest looks in this collection were trousers – feathered, embroidered, or with a grand ballgown-scale train – because that is what many women wear these days, and “I didn’t want it to be too distant from reality”. This modernising spirit updated the historic made-to-measure methods using modern technology. Clients’ bodies will be scanned using 3D technology and the blueprint for a garment digitally adjusted correspondingly. But while Piccioli enthused over technological advances at the preview, he was keen that they be invisible on the catwalk. “You don’t want to know too much about the technique, it needs to be hidden so that all you see is the magic of a woman in a dress.”
Silvana Armani, niece of the late Giorgio, moved more decisively into the driving seat with her second Armani Privé haute couture show. Her uncle’s succession plan has placed her in charge of womenswear, while Leo Dell’Orco, his longtime life partner and menswear design lead, now helms menswear. Consistency and elegant restraint are core values of the Armani empire, and the pace of change under the new designers is gentle, but there were personal touches on the catwalk. The little hats with which Armani loved to accessorise his couture catwalks were banished – Silvana is on the record admitting, since her uncle’s death, that she never liked hats – and her own personal style, as a woman who wears trousers for evening as well as daytime, was reflected in a lineup where trouser suits outnumbered gowns.