Handbagista

Balenciaga is best known for starting the New Look fashion craze of tight suits and skirts, for the set-back collar that endowed its wearers with a swan-like, the sack dress, and the full-sized jacketwith dolman sleeves. The Spanish designer was always ahead of the fashion curve, outdoing even the most drastic runway designers with a flair for not only look good on a hanger, but what looked good on an actual breathing woman. Balenciaga bags are no different. Balenciaga Bags carry on the artist’s legacy of providing women with beauty.

It is said that Balenciaga was so valued and beloved by his customers that women would order multiples of each item they bought. That way, when their favorite sack dress was in the cleaners or otherwise inaccessible, they had a duplicate to wear. They appreciated so the designers ability to transform their otherwise average figures into something spectacular.

Such success did not come easy. Balenciaga was a tough perfectionist. He would never produce any garment or accessory until he was certain it had not one flaw. He devoted insatiable energy to ensuring that every item with his name on it fit perfectly into an outfit. Balenciaga was a genius of proportion and scale, balancing every piece of an outfit. Just take the pill-boxes and other outrageously large or small hats that he specialized in. There was no other way to complete the silhouettes of his dresses or suits.

Just take his Balenciaga bags, too. The Balenciaga Metallic Bags, for instance, are taking the runways and starlet scenes by storm in the twenty first century, just as his bags did decades ago. A Balenciaga Metallic Bag can balance out an otherwise staid outfit with instant glamour and outrageous color and sheen.

Fashion models, rock stars, and movie celebrities alike are flocking to the range of styles and colors of these Balenciaga bags. You can choose from silver, hot pink, silver, or emerald. Or pick from a small slouchy shape to a brazen and beefy shoulder bag. You’ll be in elite company, with the likes of Nicky Hilton, Jennifer Lopez, and Natalie Appleton all relying on Balenciaga bags to finish off their outfits.

Such color and pizzazz may seem odd coming from a designer known as a master of black. Balenciaga in his heyday was known for subtle blends of black and brown, earthen tones that he borrowed from his home country’s traditional dress. But Balenciaga bags are more simply an extension of his overall sense of balance. After all, Balenciaga also borrowed the frilly, embroidered look of traditional Spain, as well as the blinding whites and jeweled-endowed trimming.

written by Karen

A biography, Cristobal Balenciaga style perhaps starts at a not so opportune moment in world history. The Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936, transformed Cristobal Balenciaga’s homeland into the testing ground of modern warfare. Communists pitted themselves against nationalists and fascists, with other forces providing the bullets and bombs. Before this horrific event in Spanish history, Balenciaga ran a modest but burgeoning fashion business of three couture houses. With the onset of tragedy, however, Balenciaga fled. So began the most exciting phase of a biography, Cristobal Balenciaga style.

When war struck in 1936, Balenciaga first fled Spain for London. A year later, he found his way to the heart of international fashion, Paris. There, he opened The House of Balenciaga in 1937 on the Avenue George V.

He launched what would become one of the highest reaching careers in history. Balenciaga quite literally changed how fashion is designed. He began in the 1930s, when he designed suits with tucked in waists and hips that were rounded. His gowns of this era feature unprecedented wide skirts. He essentially invented the New Look of 1940s fashion before it was supposedly invented by Dior. When his invention, the New Look, became passé in the 1950s, Balenciaga turned away from it and created another fashion revolution. His inventions of the 1950s thus were soft shapeless suit jackets.

The brilliance of all of Balenciaga’s works perhaps comes from his uncanny ability to make the best out of any women’s features. Instead of highlighting the defects in the classic womanly shape, Balenciaga tended to hide these defects and accentuate only the positives. In this way, Balenciaga was a genius. He could make any woman, no matter her size or shape, look like the bell of the ball. As he himself liked to boast, a woman did not need to be a runway model to get away with wearing his dresses. The dresses themselves could get any woman on the runway.

For instance, Balenciaga created a furor in the 1950s with his set-back (or standaway) collar. This unique collar gave women the look of a long neck, like the neck of a swan. He originally designed the style for the famous New York editor the sole reason to disguise the fact that this woman had no neck! For many of his clients, who were rather short, plump, and older, Balenciaga invented shorter sleeves, which magically could endow any women with the appearance of greater height.

Perhaps a biography, Cristobal Balenciaga style ends on a far quieter note than it began. After rocking the fashion world in 1956 with the invention of his “sack” dress, and amazing the runways with full shapeless jackets and dolman sleeves in the 1960s, Balenciaga retired. With as much trauma as the shells and bullets of the Spanish Civil War, Balenciaga dropped a bomb on the fashion world in 1968. He retired to Spain because the fashion of the day displeased him. He died four years later.

written by Gail

Balenciaga has come a long way from its first store in Paris in the 1930s. That’s where founder and fashion genius Cristobal Balenciaga fled with his head full of ideas.

He was escaping the horrors and the depression of the Spanish Civil War.

Thankfully for the world, he made it to France unscathed. The designs and notions of fashion that would flow from Balenciaga over the course of the next decades revolutionized how clothes and accessories were designed and worn by women.

Since the death of Balenciaga in the 1970s, the couture house that bears his name may not have thrived as it once had.

It wouldn’t be until 1997 that a revival took place thanks to the owners at the time, Groupe Jacques Bogart. They set out to return the brand to its former luster.

But unlike many other design houses, which would have chased down the first big name designer available and assailed him or her with legions of models and barrels of cash, Groupe Jacques Bogart went inhouse for the first big hire.

They made Balenciaga assistant designer Nicolas Ghesquière the head of the brand. The owners eased him into the position, allotting him months and then years to get the brand back on track.

It wouldn’t take long, though, before Gucci came a knocking.

It was 2000, and the famous GG logo wanted to buy Balenciaga. But more importantly, they wanted Nicolas too. His designs were already lighting up the runways and returning Balenciaga to prominence. So in the summer of 2000, Gucci acquired Balenciaga. The famous name Balenciaga was to stay, as was Nicolas.

This says bagfuls about Nicolas. Someone who had proven himself as worthy as he could have had his own fashion line. Instead, the designer appreciates the weight of Balenciaga, and seeks to fulfill his responsibility to it and to fashion.

The newness to Balenciaga fashion, with its early retro look touching down in the 1980s, and the heat coming off of Nicolas’ designs, regrew the worldwide Balenciaga reputation.

Their biggest success perhaps has been in the United States, where over 35 percent of their sales occur. What also sells, however, is fashion philosophies first touched on decades ago by Cristobal Balenciaga. Clothes and accessories are made for the women that wear them.

So after all, it only makes good fashion sense, and good business sense, that these accoutrements make these women happy, and exceedingly attractive.

written by Karen