A Balenciaga photograph from the 1950s and one from this decade share more than the eye expects them to.
In 1950 Irving Penn cropped most of a model's face out of the frame so the gathered folds of a single Balenciaga sleeve could have the picture to themselves. We've had that print propped against the espresso machine all week next to a Balenciaga campaign image from the last few years.
The longer they sit side by side the less believable it seems that 75 years separate them.
Cristóbal Balenciaga was reluctant to deal with the press for reasons that went beyond temperament.
A 2013 doctoral thesis on his communication policy concludes that it worked mainly as a defence against copyists. It adds a second strand that matters here, which is his dislike of magazines that moved attention from dressmaking to photographic originality and the beauty of models.
He wanted the cut to be the story.
A few photographers still got through the door. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed him at work in his Paris studio and Inge Morath photographed him at his country house near Paris in 1959.
Penn was the one who kept coming back. According to the New York Times, Balenciaga gave him a free hand through the 1950s. Vogue sent him to Paris in July 1950 to cover the autumn collections and the clothes came to a daylit studio on the Rue de Vaugirard, which reversed the usual order of couture photography.
His own notes describe a discarded theatre curtain hung as the backdrop and 1950 as the only year couture could be shot in daylight at the height of the collections. The couturier wary of clever photographs had found one whose cleverness lay in what he removed.
Richard Avedon took the clothes outside. In 1948 he put a Balenciaga suit among street performers in Le Marais and in 1955 he photographed Dovima in a suit and cloche at the Café des Deux Magots. The street changed from picture to picture while the suit kept command of the frame.
Then Demna arrived and the curtain came back.
His first season as creative director was Fall/Winter 2016 and for Spring/Summer 2017 Harley Weir photographed models against colourful stage curtains. In December 2024 the Fall 2025 collection was presented as watermarked, internal-use images shot on Demna's own iPhone. Juergen Teller followed days later with a campaign called This Is a Balenciaga Campaign, a title that declines to claim more than it has to. Penn removed a face to clear space for a sleeve and Demna handed the collection images to his own phone and left the watermarks showing.
They pull in opposite directions and both stop the photograph from performing.
Pierpaolo Piccioli changed the temperature. His first campaign, shot by David Sims in an 18th-century Paris mansion and released after his October 2025 runway debut, favours ease over Demna's deadpan. Sims had already photographed a retrospective portfolio of Balenciaga looks from 2016 to 2021 for System magazine, so one photographer has now covered both chapters of the house.
It shows how much room this one house leaves a photographer to move the mood without losing the outline.
75 years of photographers have been handed the same house and the same temptation to make the picture say more than the clothes do. The frames we keep going back to mostly turned it down. Whether that was their discipline or the clothes leaving them no choice is an argument we've been having at the counter all week.
The next round is on whoever settles it.
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The espresso is always on.
Shot of the good stuff.
