Balenciaga creations on display at Mexico’s Museum of Modern Art

On display now at Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art is the exhibition “Cristobal Balenciaga: The Discreet Splendor of High Fashion,” showcasing creations of the iconic Spanish designer.

Balenciaga (18951972), a contemporary of figures such as Coco Chanel and Christian Dior, was the crucial designer in the Paris fashion scene of the mid20th century.

“The exhibition can be appreciated from three points of view: through sketches, through the photographs of Manuel Outomuro, Spain’s most prominent fashion photographer today, and through the Balenciaga pieces themselves,” the museum’s head of collections, Maria del Carmen Canales, told EFE.

The garments come from the Balenciaga Museum in his hometown of Getaria, from private collections in Spain and Mexico, and from the museum’s own permanent collection.

“Balenciaga developed a very refined technique along with imagination and creativity, and worked hard to give to his pieces lines that were novelties at the time,” Canales said.

She recounted that Christian Dior once spoke of haute couture as an orchestra with Balenciaga as the conductor and himself and others as the musicians.

The exhibition, the first in Latin America devoted to Balenciaga comprises 100 of the 10,000 pieces he created.