VERY OFTEN in fashion, the buzz attributed to certain designers does not translate beyond the tight sphere of editors, stylists and a few stylesavvy celebrities into sales. The mists of hype and hyperbole are very good indeed at obscuring commercial reality (though not, crucially, to the accountants).
At Balenciaga Nicolas Ghesquière has had an impressive run of seasons — including his influential “scuba” collection of spring/summer 2003 — when he received the right attention from exactly the right places, but the stock didn’t always shift with equivalent pizazz. (Mysterious production problems with the clothes’ fit in the beginning — Ghesquière likes to cut narrowly, but some pieces looked more suited to a snake — didn ’t help). Still, since he first became creative director in 1997, the best names — from early on Kate Moss, the stylist George Cortina and “fashion fashion fashion person”, as Ghesquière calls her, Chloë Sevigny — have been signed up.
But since Paris now bursts with tortured but brilliant young design minds, a hot status as the cool darling of certain sets is not likely to be enough — especially for Balenciaga’s new owners, the French retail conglomerate Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR). “I want to make my work more understandable, more accessible,” says Ghesquière, 33, with an intense, blue-eyed stare and a witty but genuine flair for self-deprecation. “I want it to be, mmm, easier.”
We are sitting in Balenciaga HQ, a haughty 18th-century dove-grey stone building on the Left Bank. Three immaculate cigarettes are lined up by an assistant next to an immaculate ashtray on a huge white table, bare except for a bottle of Evian and a stack of models’ cards. It is four days since his autumn/winter ’05 show, a make-or-break point for Ghesquière since the departure of his mentor Tom Ford from Gucci, Balenciaga’s parent company, and the arrival of PPR.
The change has forced Ghesquière to further sharpen his act. (He admits that his relationship with PPR has not always run quite as smoothly as it does now). He has a two-year deadline in which to increase profits and to build the brand into something definably recognisable — something between the iconic status of Balenciaga the original, and the white heat of the Lariat, the house’s endlessly popular bag. The show has been widely considered a hit.
One has not come to expect the accessible or the easily understandable from Balenciaga of late — beautiful creations with a hot edge, yes — but this time the collection was perfect because it was both dramatically interesting and wonderfully wearable. One of Ghesquière’s ideas for achieving a new accessibility has been to look to the house archives of 500 historical pieces of couture. It was a perfect collision of old and new, nostalgia and prescience, fusing everything that made Cristobal Balenciaga (always the designer’s designer) iconic with a sharp breath of the new. It has moved fashion on a considerable notch.
In 1968, after a battle against what he saw as the tide of vulgarity flowing through fashion, Balenciaga bowed out of the house he founded. Without him, it was poised to close as he wished, but under a weighty and disparate web of licences it managed to stagger on through the Seventies and Eighties. In 1972 he died, just as Ghesquière, the man who would eventually revive his house, was learning to walk. Twenty-five years later, Ghesquière held, as he then described it, “ what many would call the worst position in fashion”: designing uniforms and funeral clothes under a Balenciaga licence for Japan.
He had been hired from his job as an assistant at Jean Paul Gaultier by Balenciaga’s then owners, Groupe Jacques Bogart, a French perfume and ready-to-wear company that bought the brand in 1986 from Hoechst. Since 1997 Balenciaga has been owned by Gucci (which is owned in turn by PPR). In just two seasons, by the end of 1998, as a result of the ever alert antennae of Tom Ford, Ghesquière emerged as a cultish designer.
“Tom called, suggested we have a drink. Obviously, I couldn’t believe it,” says Ghesquière. He was quickly plucked from the licensing backwoods of Balenciaga and enthroned at the top. “At first, God — nobody believed it. But, mmmm, voila. I was in charge of this legendary house.”
The first point of note is that in its second life, Balenciaga is a ready-to-wear label only — under its inventor it produced just haute couture (the return of which Ghesquière does not rule out). One of his important moves early on was to create a bag: “The factories in Spain were making things with leather anyway, so why not a bag?”. That bag became the Lariat, which by now wholly deserves to be described as classic yet is still cool enough to spawn endless copies, and still resplendently responsible for waiting lists everywhere, despite the many desirable bags in the world now.
In the beginning, though, the Lariat did not hit the spot. “Nobody was quite sure about it. Even I was not quite sure about it. It was sitting on shelves in shops everywhere, not moving at all for two years.” Then Ghesquière had a flash: why not send it as a gift to precisely the kind of women he wanted to wear his designs? He made a list of 30 names, among whom were Kate Moss and the editor of French Vogue, Carine Roitfeld, and 30 bags were dispatched in time for the New York shows. Wear them they did, and by the time the Paris shows rolled around four weeks later the bag was a hit. And, of course, very soon there were none left on the shelves; Moss still happily totes hers around town.
Moss, Sevigny — those who wear it matter, of course. Ghesquière now has an arrangement in which the staff in the stores (in Paris and New York) alert him to somebody “interesting” who has been shopping. If he likes the sound of them, a call is made and as Ghesquière puts it, “a relationship is proposed”. Currently, those anointed as “Balenciaga women” are a diverse lot: Marianne Faithfull, the actresses Tilda Swinton, Maggie Cheung, Isabelle Huppert, Jennifer Connelly and the singer Kelis. Moss and Sevigny are still part of the club.
To many now, Ghesquière is Balenciaga — and yet the Balenciaga of old will always loom gloriously over fashion and Ghesquière himself. The shapely and complicated simplicity that made Balenciaga a fantastic couturier is still there, in delicately balanced homage but not imitation — in the full skirts, the swoop of the necklines, the flurry of feathers atop dresses. Opening up the archives was as daunting as it was exciting. “God, I was terrified,” he says. “Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was difficult.” But anyway, he is not interested in simply reviving the past.
The influence of the archives went right through this collection,” Ghesquière says. “I didn’t feel obliged, but I did feel compelled.” Backstage after the show, the group’s chairman Francois Pinault says he considers the incorporation of the archives into the new work — explicitly through Edition, the line that reworks old couture designs, and implicitly in the main line — is vital. According to Pinault himself, sales are rising faster at Balenciaga than at the group’s other small brands such as Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen. The perfume still lingers on in the dubious land of licences, but Gucci will reclaim it at the end of this year and relaunch it at a level befitting to the label.
It is not easy — as the litany of designers that have shot through Givenchy will testify — to drag an old house up from the dust, combining the old and the new and the heavy weight of history with individual beliefs, not to mention marrying the tricky twosome of art and commerce. If there is such a thing as premature prescience, Ghesquière has perhaps been afflicted; he was the first to push the puffball skirt (autumn/winter ’04) — with an ambivalent response — yet now it’s hard to think of a collection for next season that doesn’t feature it. But this time, he proved that it is possible to take an iconic brand and preserve its heritage without killing modernity.
Ghesquière notes with a lengthy, wry smile that the shoes he always creates for the catwalk — the lofty five-inchers — do not alone equal substantial sales in the real world. Instead, retailers demand that he also produces the four-inchers, the threes, the one-and-a-halfs.
“It’s always a compromise, you know — that’s the game now, and I have to play it. I do what I want, and then I compromise to make it work.” The most interesting thing of all is that in compromising Ghesquière has found not, as might be expected, restriction, but freedom.
