These past few weeks must have been rough for you.
If you’re watching from above, you must be mourning the desecration of your beloved brand.
It must be heartbreaking for you to witness the soul and ethos of your brand—once steeped in uncompromising standards and beauty—ransacked, gutted, and defiled in the name of creative expression.
I feel your pain.
Your own creative expression was rooted in your brand’s core values and personal convictions. You sought first and foremost to serve your beloved clients by dressing them in clothes that were as much a testament to your God-given talent, as they were to your clients’ dignity and worth.
And as a result, the fruits of your creative endeavours were beautiful clothes that adorned fashion’s greatest icons like Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, whose timeless style inspires to this day.
And isn’t that the point of fashion? To create something of value, that piques curiosity, delights the senses, and infuses colour into a world so desperately in need of hope and beauty?
Susanna Nicoletti, author of the book, Luxury Unlocked captured this best when she said: “Fashion should entertain. It can be an incredible strategic tool to leverage to make the world a better place. But it should be uplifting, beautiful, a work of art.” (Source: Forbes)
And so I hope, Mr. Balenciaga, that this heartbreaking chapter in fashion history, serves as a wake-up call and reminder that creative expression needs to be tempered by responsibility in order to serve a greater good, and for beauty to emerge.
If Dostoyevsky’s prediction that ‘beauty will save the world’ extends to the fashion world, then my sincere hope is that recent events will inspire the House of Balenciaga, and its current creative director, to rekindle their relationship with beauty, and return to the foundation that your House was originally built on.
I hope, Mr. Balenciaga, that the remembrance of your legacy and artistic contribution inspires a new zeal for cultivating beauty in fashion.
Sincerely,
Sabina
“A couturier must be an architect for design, a sculptor for shape, a painter for colour, a musician for harmony, and a philosopher for temperance.”
Cristobal Balenciaga (1895 – 1972)
S.K.