Sandra Ericson, creator, Center for Pattern Design, talks about Balenciaga, the de Young exhibition and her “Balenciaga in Depth” seminar this weekend at CCA
Balenciaga's puffy and voluminous evening gown in turquoise silk gauze, summer 1958, epitomizes his ability to sculpt audaciously with fabric. While very modern in its feel, the dress echoes the abstracted influence of a gown depicted in a Goya portrait. Fabric swatch is attached in lower right. Archival House photograph.
In the course of researching the de Young Museum’s amazing Balenciaga and Spain exhibition, I had questions about the precise techniques that made Cristóbal Balenciaga the consummate designer and master sculptor in textiles that he was. I turned to Sandra Ericson for answers. Sandra taught fashion design, pattern design, and textile courses at City College of San Francisco (CCSF) for 31 years. In 2006, after retiring, she established the Center for Pattern Design (CFPD) in her hometown of St. Helena, CA, as a way to focus on the people in the fashion industry who actually cut the cloth. At CFPD, Ericson teaches advanced courses in cutting, draping, pattern design and construction and also takes these courses on the road. She is the turn-to resource for a lot of fashion insiders and museum curators and is a respected authority on French designer Madeleine Vionnet who pioneered draping on the bias, the bias cut and ruled haute couture in the 1930’s, designing sensual gowns for Marlene Dietrich, Katherine Hepburn, and Greta Garbo that did marvelous things for their bodies. What a pleasure to have Sandra explain Balenciaga with an insider’s detail to attention.
Geneva Anderson: Does “pattern designer” accurately capture what you do and what your center emphasizes?
Sandra Ericson: I am a pattern designer and after 31 years of teaching at City College, I established the Center for Pattern Design in 2006 as a way to bring the focus back to those persons who actually cut the cloth, an important part of the fashion industry. Before the recession, which brought back a return to value, the fashion industry and the discipline of fashion got very theatrical and celebrity-driven
Francisco de Goya, The Marquessa de Pontejos, c. 1786, Andrew W. Mellon collection. Image: National Gallery of Art.
and concentrated on the designer as the single figure in the fashion company. Often, the designer did not cut his own work and it really became a situation where the credit did not go to the craft people who did it. Primary among those craft people are the people who actually understand fabric, the body and who can interpret design and cut a two-dimensional pattern that looks amazing in three dimensions. I wanted to focus on people who could do that and this requires a special skill set.
This requires spatial visualization so that you can imagine what something lying flat on the table in an odd shape will look like in three dimensions. You have to have a good grasp of all the textile characteristics so you know what will happen when you hang the fabric and gravity and body motion come into play. You also need a good sense of anatomy and how the body moves and what makes clothes functional, not just decorative. When you look around the world for people who can do really that well, there are few. Balenciaga is one of the most important from the past who we can look to. When something like the Balenciaga and Spain exhibition comes along, I get excited because I want people to understand what made his clothes terrific–it was his ability to cut and his meticulous attention to detail and construction and, finally, his eye—discerning how the overall effect is going to been seen and thought about and how it accentuates the wearer.
Geneva Anderson: Balenciaga is known for the balloon skirt, the baby doll, the sack dress, the 7/8 length bracelet sleeve, his masterful manipulation of the waist, and he’s been called the “king of dissymmetry.” Explain these.
Balenciaga's dramatic wedding dress of white silk-satin and silk gazar, summer, 1968, shown on the eve of the Paris student riots, is austere in its simplicity. It is meticulously crafted with very few carefully placed seams that run along the bias. The headpiece repeats the lines of a nun's stiff veil and reflects the ever present influence of the church on Balenciaga. Image: courtesy Balenciaga Archive.
Sandra Ericson: All of those are related to a singular skill—the ability to sculpt. His medium was textiles and he was particularly famous for using textiles that were sculptural in nature, especially silk gazar, a heavy silk with a very springy quality. He also worked with silk “zagar” but it’s very rare and you can’t find it these days. When I do the Balenciaga draping class, I will look for something comparable to the gazar for us to work with. Because we will be draping on the half-scale dress form, which is 36 inches high and all the measurement are exactly half of a size ten person, I will be able to go out and find something that will have the qualities that Balenciaga’s fabrics had. A very heavy satin, duchess satin, (made from silk fibers) is an example—it’s stiffer, fuller, heavier, and has a lot more body than full silk has. In his coats, he used fabrics that might have been double woven, fabrics that could retain their dimensions even though they were folded or manipulated or gathered.
Balenciaga was a person who inspired a lot of designers who came after him in the architectural mode–André Courrèges, Ronaldus Shamask. In the mid-1970’s I actually took a class in architectural design and one of the presenters, interestingly, enough was a guy named Salvatore, who was Balenciaga’s right hand man and he gave our group several patterns that belonged to Balenciaga but were not out there in circulation. I kept those and when I do my class, I will be bringing those in.
I’ve also made several of the pieces myself that he made famous. He was strong, very architectural but careful –he had a way of doing a coat so that he set the collar on the neckline back a little bit so that if you were a lady who was no longer standing up too straight, you looked as if you had perfect posture in the coat.
The voluminous silhouette of Balenciaga's "chou" wrap, from winter 1968, is entirely dependent on the stiffness of silk gazar, while the evening dress is done in a more fluid black silk crepe. Photo: Balenciaga Archives, Paris.
I’ve made that coat several times and will be bringing one in. He had a way of working with a woman’s body so that whatever was a perceived negative about her figure disappeared and you focused on the most wonderful parts. In the 1950’s you have to remember that people with money were not necessarily young. Ladies might have thick waists or necks, but the wrist is the last to go. The 7/8 length (or bracelet) sleeve made the wrist look delicate and drew attention there. He also lowered the waist in the back so you had a beautiful curve in the back.
Geneva Anderson: In terms of construction, these ideas are incorporated right as the fabric as being cut?
Sandra Ericson: His clothes were created either for the runway model or specific clients, so he knew what needed to be done on a body by body basis. In terms of the general construction of the pieces, he was ever committed to cutting the cloth in the way that women would be exhibited in the best possible way, cutting off a line just before a beautiful physical curve on the body would take the eye into unflattering proportions. Kind of design by restraint! Likewise, he would suggest or replace a shape rather than define it as it was on a particular person – again bearing in mind that his clothes were created either for the runway model or specific clients whose proportions he knew.
A lot of his high fashion clothes though were reproduced in one way or another for the mass market and became ready to wear. I used to send my students down to the Sunset Market in the Sunset district in the City when I teaching over there because the Balenciaga coat would still be going up and down the aisles pushing the grocery cart. It was such a popular style coat with a small stand-up folded over collar, straight in the back and the sleeves were usually cut in one and looked sort of molded and stopped short of your wrists. Sometimes, it had fur on the collar.
Several of Balenciaga's designs contain overt allusions to the matador’s costume—cape, bolero, the bolero’s edging of borlones (pom pom tassels), medias (stockings) and headgear. Legendary Spanish matador Luis Miguel Dominguín (1926-1996) was friendly with Picasso, had a romance with Eva Gardner and was written about by Ernest Hemingway. Here, he wears an ornate bolero with traditional embroidery and sports an anadido or plaited pigtail worn until retirement from the ring and then ceremoniously cut-off. Photo 1960.
Geneva Anderson: Who was buying and wearing Balenciaga back in the day?
Sandra Ericson: Socialites. The celebrities in that period were mainly people who had social stature and there were film and theatrical people as well. It was the Babe Paley era, debutants, wives of important men. They went to Paris for their fittings. In the Bay Area, they would have had fittings at I Magnin. When the whole architectural trend waned, and things went to the tight denim of the 1970’s, his influence and that way of working faded and he closed his house in 1968 and he died way too young in 1972. A lot of designers from that era and this is what happened to Madeleine Vionnet too– they are exquisite, perfect, in what they do — but they are so finely attuned to a certain way of working that is very difficult to follow fashion. A lot of them feel philosophically committed to the aesthetic they have been enthralled by and when that no longer is the fashion it is very difficult to change that philosophy and that’s what happened to Vionnet. Balenciaga was also a very private person, so once he had done it and he saw the way the world was moving in the 1960’s, a lot of factors contributed to the closing of the house.
Balenciaga's cocktail hat in ivory silk satin, 1953, is a whimsical reference to the añadido or tiny braided pigtail that a matador wears until his retirement. Originally, the bullfighter's own hair was used but the pigtail later became a separate element, a castañeta, that is attached to a flat fabric-covered disc and is placed beneath the montera. Photo: John Rawlings, 1953
Geneva Anderson: How strong were Basque and Spanish influences on him?
Balenciaga’s winter 1946 bolero in burgundy silk velvet and jet and passementerie embroidery by Bataille deonstrates his engagement with historical styles and with the influence of bullfighting. Collection of Hamish Bowles. Photo by Kenny Komer.
Sandra Ericson: He was from Spain and he, of course, was living in a Catholic country. In those days, before Vatican II which ushered in a new era for the Church, Catholicism was very old-fashioned, formal, and rigid. The Church vestments were very sculptural, things were done in platinum, and there was an air of solemnity about everything. There’s the sense of a very heavy structure laid over the religion and the dress code and that a strong influence on Balenciaga, living in a strongly Catholic society. Fashion designers become translators of their era: they are masters of the zeitgeist who interpret everything that’s going on in an aesthetic way. And because fashion is for human beings, it becomes almost a complete mirror of the society a designer is living in.
A lot of the pieces in Balenciaga and Spain are definitely ecclesiastical or nationalistic without reservation — a strong indicator of his identity with his culture certainly. There are two other factors too–one, a presentation of the idea that women could be members of the clergy, or bullfighters, or run a country as royalty. None of this was even remotely possible in general for women. The second thing is that it shows he was not beyond co-opting a design concept and using it for his own — maybe evidence of his business pressures. Familiar ideas sell.
Balenciaga’s cocktail dress of rose peau de soie and black lace, winter 1948, suggests a modernized version of the lace dress worn by Dona Tadea Arias in Goya’s 1973-4 portrait at the Prado. It also reflects his conservatism in his expression of femininity which was not highly sexualized. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Mrs. C. H. Russell. Photo by Joe McDonald/FAMSF
Geneva Anderson: What is the significance of the re-emergence of the House of Balenciaga under the ownership of Gucci and the design influence of Nicholas Ghesquière, who is supposed to be like Balenciaga because he is a self-taught designer. He’s known for hip interpretations of Balenciaga classics, such as the semi-fitted jacket and the sack dress and is worn by celebrities like Madonna and Sinéad O’Connor. How do you see transitions like this?
Sandra Ericson: Anytime somebody buys a house that had a very strong leader, designer and a strong aesthetic, they are doing it primarily for business reasons. It’s not as if anyone is going to resurrect Balenciaga or copy him and the person who is coming to fill those shoes is going to be who he is in his own time. He or she can’t be anything else because everybody can only be who they are in their own time. What the house is hoping is that the brand, the name, will carry enough social cache that it will allow them to be financially successful in a completely different time. It’s kind of akin to hitchhiking on a name–if it works, that’s great but it’s very difficult for a new designer to come in and interpret another person’s work that is that personal. So far, they’ve had three designers come to house of Vionnet and it hasn’t clicked. If the person is good in his own interpretation of his own time, then they’ve got something to work with. If the talent is short, then that won’t happen because staking it on Balenciaga’s name isn’t enough.
Geneva Anderson: Tell me more about the “Balenciaga in Depth” event you’ve organized.
Sandra Ericson: I’m doing a 3 day series of events and it all starts on Friday May 20 with a morning tour of the Balenciaga and Spain exhibition with someone who worked on the exhibition and this followed by an elegant box lunch. In the evening, there will be a reception at CCA followed by a slide presentation explaining more of the history and chronology of Balenciaga. I will talk about the design issues, pattern, fabric, and construction pattern and an overview. On Saturday and Sunday, at CCA, there will be a master class in draping where we will do two Balenciaga classics. We each work on our own dress forms and there is room for 15 people
Balenciaga's cocktail dress of fuchsia silk shantung and black lace with black silk satin ribbons, summer 1966, illustrates his understanding of women as feminine, properly sexy, sugary--bows, ribbon, lace--and fabrics that are about femininity. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Eleanor Christensen de Guigne Collection (Mrs. Christian de Guigne III), gift of Ronna and Eric Hoffman. Photo by Joe McDonald/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
in the class. Each person will work with a half-scale dress form, which is 36 inches high, and all the measurements are exactly half of a size ten person. I am certainly not planning on duplicating the talent of Balenciaga but I want people to understand how he worked, how to cut cloth the way in a similar way and how to work with similar cloth so that they can begin to embrace fashion design as a more sculptural activity, as a form of art.
We each work on our own dress forms and there is room for 15 people in the class. Each person will have a half-scale dress form
Center for Pattern Design Details: for further information, contact Sandra Ericson, Director, Center for Pattern Design, St. Helena, California 94574, 707-967-0852
Balenciaga and Spain Details: The de Young Museum is located at 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA. Admission to Balenciaga and Spain is $25 adults and free for members and children 5 and under. There is a $5 discount for purchasing tickets in advance. For a complete listing of the numerous special events associated with the exhibition visit its webpage Balenciaga and Spain.
ARThound’s previous coverage of Balenciaga:
Smart marketing: the de Young Museum’s foray into pay-per-view–hook ‘em by streaming a sold-out Balenciaga Symposium and later they will visit (March 23, 2011)
Bouquets to Art 2011 launches Monday with a Spanish theme to celebrate Balenciaga–at San Francisco’s de Young Museum through March 19, 2011 (March 13, 2011)
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