Take a 360-degree tour of Balenciaga’s renovated couture salon

‘What is a legacy? It’s a vision, of course, and it’s also a place,’ says the disembodied narrator of a new film from Balenciaga, which offers an unprecedented tour of its haute couture salons at 10-12 avenue George V in Paris, where house founder Cristóbal Balenciaga lived and worked until the couture arm of the business was shuttered in 1968. Such was its resonance for the Basque-born couturier – who arrived in Paris in the late 1930s during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War – he named his first fragrance ‘Le Dix’, in reference to the salon’s street number. 

In 2021, current Balenciaga creative director Demna returned to the address to stage his first haute couture collection, which also marked the house’s first haute couture collection since 1968 (in the designer’s typically idiosyncratic style, he created haute couture versions of hoodies and jeans, alongside an extraordinary array of gowns inspired by Cristóbal Balenciaga’s most memorable silhouettes). Originally designed by Albert Le Voisvenel in 1887, before being later redecorated by Christos Bellos – an interior designer who worked for Balenciaga – the space was built to reflect apartments of the time with clean white walls, curtained doorways, and looping mouldings which reflected those found on the salon’s furniture. 

Inside Balenciaga’s Avenue George V address

For the reopening, Demna chose not to dramatically alter the space; rather, he noted a desire to evoke the feeling that those entering the space had just opened the door to the salon after it had been left untouched for decades. As such, new white stucco arabesques and light-grey carpets were ‘patinated’ as if to suggest the passing of time, a technique not dissimilar to Demna’s ‘Raw Architecture’ concept in the brand’s stores, whereby purposefully stripped-back spaces are made to recall abandoned warehouses or car parks (rust, patches of damp and the traces of graffiti are all painstakingly hand-applied by a team of artisans). More contemporary elements in the Avenue George V location include smoked-glass partitions, as well as a ‘Couture Shop’ at street level comprising rare Balenciaga products and collaborations.

The short film, released today, takes the viewer inside the address using 3D-scanning technology which glides through various rooms and salons, ending with Cristóbal Balenciaga’s office, ‘into which no one entered,’ as the narrator describes. ‘As history tells you, all the greatest works start out as silence.’

Watch the film below

balenciaga.com