Black Cocktail Dress for Balenciaga

After fleeing the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Basque designer Cristóbal Balenciaga began a fashion house in Paris. There, his love for the ‘monastic and austere aesthetics characteristic of Catholic convents’ merged with French haute couture standards. Balenciaga’s fashion house pivotally influenced Chanel, Hubert de Givenchy, Christian Dior, and many celebrities, including Audrey Hepburn. Balenciaga thus helped reinvent (Spanish) black as modern aristocratic women’s couture hue of choice. In 2019, curator Eloy Martínez de la Pera dazzled audiences in Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum with an exhibition explicitly demonstrating the link between Balenciaga’s epoch-making designs and 16th-century Habsburg court fashions.