All eyes were on Balenciaga Pre-Fall 2013 collection. Reasons were obvious as everyone wanted to see how the new appointee – Alexander Wang fared after the departure of the maverick Nicholas Ghesquière. Well it seems that Alexander Wang and the studio team played it safe buy revisiting the archives of the label’s creator – Cristobal Balenciaga. WWD reported, “The name invoked during a preview of the collection, designed by the studio team, was the one on the door: Cristobal Balenciaga.”
In fact the Balenciaga Pre-Fall 2013 collection had nothing from the predecessor – Ghesquière. The house public relation director noted that the highly developed technical fabrics of Ghesquière’s tenure were left behind in favor of natural materials, such as wool, shearling, leather, cotton and silk, with a lot of what he called “noble” and “poor” fabrics — chiffon and the kind of sturdy wool typical of naval peacoats — which Cristobal was known to combine in his couture collections.
The collection stuck to signature Cristobal Balenciaga’s master craftmanship, saturated floral prints and bohemia and had structured trenches, nice ‘n’ fun pants, and vintage prints. The collection’s salable merchandise had hints of the Sixties, Seventies and Nineties, with the standouts coming mostly from outerwear, such as a powder blue shearling jacket and a slimly tailored salmon coat.
Going by the Style.com review, this is not Alexander Wang’s debut collection for Balenciaga, but the work of the design studio. “Without Nicolas Ghesquière to guide them, the team must’ve known that its efforts would be best spent making commercially viable versions of their former leader’s signatures.” Wang wasn’t in charge!