‘Balenciaga and Spain’ exhibition fashions fine art

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Those who believe fashion is art point to the runways of New York, Paris and Milan, where intricately beaded gowns, architecturally avant-garde blouses, and dresses made of digitally manipulated prints make collectors swoon. Critics wave it off as evidence of fine handicraft, and nothing more.

John Buchanan, the director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, who is presiding over “Balenciaga and Spain” – one of the most important fashion exhibitions to hit San Francisco or any city in recent years – begs to differ.

“Is it art?” he said. “The ability to dress oneself is one of the greatest personal expressions of creativity that exists, after the creation of fire and reading.”

Hundreds of guests flying in from around the world for the gala Thursday agree, as do visitors to dozens of shows illustrating fashion’s aesthetic, political, social and historical meaning at vaunted institutions such as the Costume Institute at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

This exhibition, conceived by American fashion designer Oscar de la Renta for a show last fall at the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute in New York, will be almost twice as large at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, where it opens Saturday and runs through July 4.

Curated by Vogue’s European editor at large, Hamish Bowles, the exhibition draws from the French fashion house’s archives, private collections, and the Metropolitan’s Costume Institute and the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as the Fine Arts Museums’ trove of 12,000 textiles, among others.

Study of influences

More than just an assortment of pretty frocks, “Balenciaga and Spain” is a study in the influences that Spain had on three decades of designer Cristóbal Balenciaga’s work, an event that bolsters museums’ growing reputation as world-class showcases for textiles, and a potential moneymaker to keep revenue and membership growing at the museums, which encompass the de Young and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

The show follows several celebrated clothing exhibitions at the Fine Arts Museums: the Nan Kempner and Vivienne Westwood retrospectives in 2007 and the blockbuster Yves Saint Laurent retrospective that ran from late 2008 to early 2009.

In San Francisco, its only U.S. venue, the Yves Saint Laurent show drew more than 261,000 visitors, ranking it the fourth-most-visited decorative arts exhibition in the world in 2009, Buchanan said.

Vast cultural influences

Balenciaga, the son of a seamstress and a pleasure boat owner, designed for the world’s wealthiest women and drew on such cultural influences as the art of Francisco Goya, Diego Velázquez and Pablo Picasso, religious ceremonies using monastic hoods and capes, and the regional garb of Basque fishermen.

“The show looks at the influences in Balenciaga’s world, which were very, very Spanish, because even after his success in Paris, he remained very Spanish as a person,” de la Renta said in an e-mail from his home in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He, Hubert de Givenchy and Emanuel Ungaro are the only designers still alive who worked for Balenciaga.

“He was deeply influenced by the culture and folklore from Spain, from the religious to the Gypsies, flamencos and bullfighters.”

The late Sir Cecil Beaton, a fashion photographer and award-winning costume designer, once called Balenciaga “fashion’s Picasso.” The characterization is apt for Lourdes Font, a fashion historian at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, who will lecture on Balenciaga at a sold-out symposium at the de Young on Saturday.

Font said many people have trouble perceiving fashion as art because their relationship to it is so personal. In everyday life, clothing is worn on one’s own body and doesn’t inspire awe, while fine art is often remote and appreciated most by those who study it. Not all fashion is art, she concedes, but not all paintings belong in museums, either.

“When you look at Balenciaga and have a mind that is open enough to accept fashion as art, he is going to be considered the greatest fashion creator of the 20th century,” she said. “The artistry of Balenciaga, the key to it, is the forms he creates.”

Evolution of artist’s work

As his vision toward abstraction evolved, Balenciaga worked with a Swiss mill to develop a new fabric, gazar, which is made of silk or wool, has a crisp feel and a smooth, flat texture that allowed him to make the material spring away from the body, fall forward or even cocoon it – all without heavy scaffolding under the garment, Font said.

Viewers will see the evolution of Balenciaga’s work, which, like some modern art, became abstract by the 1950s and ’60s. Several black dresses from the late 1960s, she said, are “pure sculpture.”

Bowles, a nonacademic considered a world authority on Balenciaga, also is a collector whose first acquisition was a Balenciaga purchased for a mere 50 pence in London when he was a teen.

He hobnobs regularly with the world’s top fashion designers and their wealthy clients, giving him special access to the Balenciaga archives as well as the closets of jet-setters whose secret treasures he coaxed out of storage.

“They were simply worn to a gala or lunch at the Ritz or an afternoon on a yacht in Capri and have never really been seen from that day forth,” Bowles said by phone from New York, “so that’s particularly exciting.”

“Balenciaga and Spain” is a coup for the Fine Arts Museums, which is using it to bolster its mission to build exhibitions showcasing pieces from its own textile collection, which spans 2,500 years and represent the cultures of 125 countries. The pieces include 20th century haute couture, 17th and 18th century European ecclesiastical vestments, Asian and Indian silks dating from the 12th to 15th centuries, Turkmen carpets, and what Buchanan described as “the most important group of kilim rugs outside Turkey.”

More than just paintings

Internet entrepreneur Trevor Traina, 42, sits on the Fine Arts Museums board and would like to see high-caliber fashion exhibitions mounted regularly.

“To be relevant today, we have to offer more than just exhibitions of paintings,” Traina said. “We serve a broad audience. Variety has been a key to our success.”

This show has drawn six-figure contributions from Google’s new fashion enterprise, Boutiques.com, and individuals such as Christine Suppes, former publisher of the now-defunct Fashionlines.com.

As to the question of whether fashion is art, Font has a simple answer: “If fashion isn’t art, why do you need an artist to do it?”

Balenciaga show

The exhibition focuses on the influences on fashion designer Cristóbal Balenciaga.

Where: M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, Golden Gate Park

When: Saturday through July 4