Balenciaga at The V & A

6th Form Fashion students were treated to a design trip to the V & A Museum in London this January, to see the work of Couturier, Cristóbal Balenciaga. He was the most exclusive and expensive atelier in Paris for over three decades, introducing the baby-doll dress, the sack dress and the balloon hem, which changed the way women dressed. In the exhibition, single-seam coats, ballooning skirts and one eye-catching green dress and cape resembling a stack of three green pompoms still look like clothes for a more elegant, adventurous woman of the future.


Students spent the morning sketching his designs and then headed into Soho to visit the many fabric shops in search for inspiration for forthcoming projects.