Between Cristóbal and Balenciaga
"I guess that, in the age of streaming and high-octane, luxury-brand marketing, not even exhuming a dead king is off limits."
The pressures looming over the second episode of Cristóbal Balenciaga—the new Disney+ limited series created by Lourdes Iglesias and directed by Jon Garaño, Aitor Arregi and José Marí Goenaga (known as El Trío Moriarti)—have the enigmatic couturier on a tight chokehold. While Nazi troops occupy Paris, secluded in his George Avenue V atelier, the Master ponders whether the fabric of one of his prototypes has enough volume to align with his concept.
The linearity of cause and effect, as well as the different ways in which fashion is used as a metaphor, propels the 47-minute episode and leads to an honest appreciation of the art of couture as a powerful document of the world and the offspring of psychological somatization. Malhereussement, all through the rest of the series when it attempts to create an intrinsic universe for Cristóbal, the man, all efforts deflate into what feels like a pastiche, exhausted rendition of Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017).
When I first read about the show my immediate thought was, What the hell are Cristóbal Balenciaga and ‘television drama’ even doing in the same sentence?
It’s a complicated task, you know, to paint an accurate portrait of a man who wanted so badly to remain invisible.
A man so concealed away from the public that not even top clients got to ever see him. A man who famously only gave two—very brief and scarcely quoted—interviews in his seventy-seven years of existence. Six episodes of fully-fleshed Hollywood fabrications surely feel like an odd pairing. But I guess that, in the age of streaming and high-octane, luxury-brand marketing, not even exhuming a dead king is off-limits.
“A victim of crushing shyness, he fled the press, the photographers, and his admirers until they began to wonder whether there was a Balenciaga at all.”
With that said, the show’s sensibility toward fashion is admirable, and done with such elegance and respectful research by costume designers Bina Daigler and Pepo Ruiz Dorado, that I dare to say this is one of the best depictions of haute couture, its traditions, characters, techniques and idiosyncrasies in any piece of fictionalized entertainment. Fashion (the abstract and formal) merges seamlessly with the script. It is perhaps the only way through which the show effectively explores who Cristóbal was: someone who—like many other designers and couturiers of the time—made the craft and world of couture his shelter and armour. His everything.
Intimate moments with his partner (in life and business), Wladzio d’Attainville (played by Thomas Coumans) come across as needy and checkbox-ticking; desperate attempts at leaving an indelible mark on the shore. Other instances, like a tense encounter with a border officer that leaves Cristóbal stripped down to the minimum, both literally and metaphorically, fall flat for the bluntness in their meaning—and for how ridiculous and awkwardly it fits within the reality of the character. Paths taken just for the sake of it, sadly leading nowhere.
Designing the wedding dress for Fabiola de Mora y Aragón, queen consort to Baudouin of Belgium, is the throughline of episode five.
A close-up of the actual white silk and tulle wedding gown, trimmed with ermine, had a high neckline, three-quarter length sleeves with a drop waist and a full skirt created by the Balenciaga atelier in 1960. (Source: The Cristóbal Balenciaga Museoa)
These and many other choices leave the show void of a character with enough depth for one to sink into; Balenciaga without Cristóbal is just Balenciaga, a brand. And the show, with all its assumptions and highly fabricated roads, is a simple prototype lacking the body to sustain its own concept.
