Its pretty sad hearing about this, but creative director Nicolas Ghesquiere will be leaving Balenciaga at the end of this month! Ghesquiere has been with Balenciaga since 1995 and is known to have revived the fashion line.
I wonder what this will mean for the future of Balenciaga? I believe their motorcycle bags and jackets are here to stay since it's been a hit for every season. I guess what's up in the air are the runway collections. I will truly miss Ghesquiere's creations which are beautiful works of art that have modern and futuristic twists to them.
Detailed article on the Daily Beast:
Balenciaga and Designer Nicolas Ghesquiere Split
The designer who revived the storied label will leave at the end of the month, the company announced Monday. By Robin Givhan.
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| Nicolas Ghesquiere on the runway at the Balenciaga Spring Summer 2012 fashion show during Paris Fashion Week on September 29, 2011 in Paris, France. (Chris Moore, Catwalking / Getty Images) |
In a startling Monday morning statement, Balenciaga
announced that, by mutual agreement, designer Nicolas Ghesquiere and
the storied brand were parting ways at the end of the month.
“Cristóbal
Balenciaga was a master, a genius whose avant-garde vision dictated
fashion’s greatest trends and inspired generations of designers,” said
Francois-Henri Pinault, chairman and CEO of the French luxury
conglomerate PPR, in the statement. “With an incomparable creative
talent, Nicolas has brought to Balenciaga an artistic contribution
essential to the unique influence of the house.”
According
to a spokesman at Balenciaga’s Paris headquarters, there’s no timeline
for announcing the company’s plans going forward.
Ghesquiere
arrived at Balenciaga in 1995 as a relative unknown. It was not
considered a particularly prime posting. While Balenciaga boasted a
tremendous legacy, it had fallen out of fashion.
Two years later, Ghesquiere was
promoted to creative director and the renaissance began. He acknowledged
Balenciaga’s design history but refrained from any sentimentality about
it. His vision was not merely modern, it was futuristic. He embraced
high-tech fabrics, a bracing urbanity, and a vision of women as a kind
of superhero that only science fiction could create.
In
2000, Balenciaga was swept up into Gucci Group – now PPR Luxury –
during a corporate buying spree led by Domenico de Sole and Tom Ford. At
its new home and thanks to a significant accessories business and
countless critically acclaimed collections, the brand prospered.
News
of his departure has left retailers reeling. After all, they hadn’t
even come to grips with the earlier fashion uproar over designer shifts
at Jil Sander and Yves Saint Laurent.
“It’s
a collection I truly do like. I like his sensibility. I like how he has
a nice balance between classic and modern,” says retailer Nancy
Pearlstein, owner of Relish in Georgetown. News of his departure, she
says, has left her “frustrated.”
Over
the last decade, Ghesquiere – along with Raf Simons, Phoebe Philo and
Hedi Slimane -- had emerged as one of the most influential designers of
his generation. Ghesquiere’s success, of course, led to inevitable
questions about his future and the likelihood that he might launch his
own label. In a conversation
with Ford for Interview magazine a couple years ago, Ford asked the
younger designer where he saw himself in 10 years. “Honestly, I think I
will be here at Balenciaga. Maybe not only. I have no idea what I would
do for my own collection if that does happen one day,” Ghesquiere said.
“I give so much of myself for Balenciaga that today if you put me in a
room and said, ‘Okay, let’s try to do a Nicolas Ghesquière project,’ I
wouldn’t be able to do it.”
For
today’s customer, Balenciaga is defined by Ghesquiere, not by the
Spanish master who founded the house and showed his first collection in
1937. “For all intents and purposes, this was a Nicolas Ghesquiere
collection,” Pearlstein says.
Under
the founder’s leadership, the brand was known for its haute couture
rigor and its sculptural shapes. He closed the house in 1968 and
retired. What Ghesquiere created is a brand that is both fanciful and
sophisticated. He works around an impossibly long and lean ideal, but
never allows his work to grow ascetic and cold. His greatest strength
has been his refusal to become mired in vintage shapes, historical
references and stubborn traditions.
Ghesquiere
is a resolutely modern designer whose work is both comprehensible and
challenging. He didn’t merely revive Balenciaga; he reinvented it.
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| Balenciaga Spring 2013. (Chris Moore, Catwalking / Getty Images (3)) |
