The tiny Basque fishing village of Getaria claims two famous sons. One, Juan Sebastián Elcano, successfully circumnavigated the world as part of Magellan’s 1519 expedition. Instead of looking west to the sea, however, the other looked east to the grand house on the hill where a stylish Marquesa summered. She became couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga’s first client; her mansion now forms a wing of the museum dedicated to his work.
A plaque high on a wall marks the site where Cristóbal Balenciaga was born in 1895 to a fisherman and a seamstress. All photos courtesy of the author.
The plaque that identifies the building of Balenciaga’s birth does so in four languages.
The author enjoying panoramic views over Getaria and the Bay of Biscay.
I was in Getaria for the second international Balenciaga conference—technically the first to be held in person at the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museoa after its pandemic-era predecessor was moved online. My fellow pilgrims—er, presenters—came from as far away as Canada, Australia, Iceland, and Serbia as well as France, Portugal, Scotland, and Italy. There were 150 “Balenciagistas,” as keynote speaker Lesley Miller dubbed us, in this seaside hamlet of fewer than 3,000 residents. We were easy to spot, clad in architectural garments in Balenciaga’s signature black.
The Cristóbal Balenciaga Museoa, completed in 2011, incorporates the Palacio Aldamar, the summer home of young Balenciaga’s patroness, the Marquesa de Casa Torres.
“The black is so black that it hits you like a blow,” Harper’s Bazaar marveled in 1938. “Thick Spanish black, almost velvety, a night without stars.”1 Balenciaga became the toast of Paris when he arrived there in 1937, fleeing the Spanish Civil War. Yet he never strayed far from his roots, maintaining ateliers in San Sebastian, Madrid, and Barcelona and ornamenting his minimalist masterpieces with lace mantillas and frothy flamenco ruffles.
The Cristóbal Balenciaga Museoa houses 1,200 garments made for illustrious clients such as Princess Grace, Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo.
Couture garments black “as a night without stars” at the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museoa.
A monogrammed shirt and tie worn by the master himself.
Famously press-shy, Balenciaga only gave two interviews during his lifetime. The myth that grew up around him in that media vacuum suggested a monkish enigma. Exploring Getaria does nothing to dispel that image. A cross between an M.C. Escher drawing and Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride, it’s a warren of cobblestone streets, steep staircases, cloisters, and cul-de-sacs built into a rocky headland, all leading to the fifteenth-century church of San Salvador. In the new(er) part of town, outdoor escalators whisk visitors up the hillside to the museum. Opened in 2011, it’s a high-tech temple to the man Christian Dior called “the master of us all.”2 Above it lies the town cemetery, where Balenciaga was buried in 1972.
The church of San Salvador, a short walk from the museum, looms over the medieval center of Getaria.
- “The Little Black Dress,” Harper’s Bazaar, September 15, 1938, p. 71.
- Dior’s statement, reprinted often, is difficult to source. It serves as the title for a recent Balenciaga biography. See Mary Blume, The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, His World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). A version of Dior’s statement appeared in Gloria Emerson, “Unimpressed by Success,” New York Times, March 25, 1972.
