Balenciaga Fall/Winter 2010: Accessories

Here's a close-up look of the accessories from Balenciaga's recent collection which I still can't get enough of.

The shoes were gooooooooor-GEEE-ous!!! Loved the heel detail- reminds me of children's wooden building blocks and mathematical cubes.

I was also reminded of milk boxes and cardboard shipping cartons. Bottom line: Nicolas Ghesquière is a genius!

Balenciaga Fall/Winter 2010 RTW

Known for his sci-fi designs and unexpected use of colours and prints, Ghesquière described the woman of his winter/autumn 2010 collection as an urban dweller who never looked back.

 

The collection included jackets that looked like bullet-proof army jackets with their super-imposed fabrics. However, some carried an added touch of glamour with wide goat fur patches. 
With their play on lines and geometry, some two-piece suits could have been inspired by paintings of Avant garde painters such as Kazimir Malevich or Fernand Leger.

 Ghesquière said he remained faithful to the house's tradition of re-inventing materials by stitching together layers of different fabrics. The collection included jackets that looked like bullet-proof army jackets with their super-imposed fabrics. However, some carried an added touch of glamour with wide goat fur patches.

My own digging around the internet revealed that new machinery and lasers had to be sourced and installed at the Balenciaga atelier in order to construct the technically-complex designs made from plastic, polyamide, neoprene, and nylon met cashmere, camel-hair, and silk. It was part ski-wear, part space-suits. Quilted and padded, zippered jackets, were worn back-to-front, with salopettes, the bib-and-braces dangling down.

Baby-pink and green knits were hand-crafted with rows of padded dots, and worn with perforated leather skirts. Neoprene 3-D dresses were embellished with hand-painted, black-and-white appliqués, like scrunched-up paper.

I'm afraid my diction isn't sufficient to describe the shoes, so here's me pasting a description of them I found somewhere else- "The shoes resembled some futuristic sculpture, hand-crafted from plywood, crocodile-skin, foam and resin, and balanced on heels resembling children’s building blocks, in multi-coloured Bakelite." Yes. That's sounds just about it.

  Speaking backstage, Ghesquière said he had been influenced by the work of photographers, such as Irving Penn and Cindy Sherman, the French artist, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, who has exhibited at Tate Modern, and basic, everyday commercial packaging.

All I can say is- wow.