If Cristóbal Balenciaga were to come back to life. His surname, turned into a logo without serifs, frequently and eagerly plays with virality. In the Annie Leibovitz portrait, it returns to engineering.
In the choice of Eva Fernández, stylist of the Queen Letizia, a bridge to history is projected. In a room filled with distractions, an evening dress tailored in Balenciaga's workshop in 1948 manages to satisfy the Basque designer's obsession: transforming fabric into sculpture.
The piece drapes over the chest and, with bare shoulders, revives his vision of surrealism. Neither the watches should seem to melt nor the eyes become pearl earrings. For Balenciaga, objects were remodeled in an abstract, intuitive way.
Like an inverted carnation, Doña Letizia's skirt opens to conquer the space around her. A fuchsia gazar cape strengthens the task. Over the wearer, the semi-rigid textured fabric builds an aesthetic barrier.
Balenciaga designed the air. He built volumes through emptied space. Under his needle, sculpture renounced marble and copper. The seamster of seamsters, as Christian Dior reportedly called him, only needed silk.
Balenciaga's simplicity was a sham. Beneath the pleats of blouses and skirts that graced magazine covers in the 1950s, the perfectionism of the designer enclosed an investigation that ceased when the first miniskirts strolled down the street.
The Spanish black, iridescent, like a crow's plumage, was his tool to cut out the silhouette of the female body in gala nights. Redrawn on her own physiognomy, covered by a gazar armor, the woman wearing a Balenciaga design announced her own appearance. Her presence was magnified.
Leibovitz's photograph has begun to dry in the contemporary eye. Her style, which combines sepia tones with subjects oriented towards theatrical hieratism, scratches the young sensitivity, which seeks the vibration of color or the naturalness of soft, tender light. The friction dissolves with Balenciaga in front of the lens. The royal portrait fits its parts, and the sought-after distance by the American aligns with the voluminous designer to create mystery.
Eva Fernández has turned the Queen into a flag of current Spanish fashion. With Balenciaga, she inscribes her in its history. When modernity and trendiness divorce and form is filled with meaning, the name of the one from Guetaria spreads once again without giving her a cervical lash as a bonus.