Balenciaga
Designer: Nicolas Ghesquière

• “Balenciaga struck a high note at Paris Fashion Week Thursday, sending out a couture-inspired look part pure and part playful.” {AFP}
• “A game changer. Precise cuts and clean lines were Ghesquière’s answer to fashion’s current print and embellishment overload.” {All The Rage/Los Angeles Times}
• “There was distinct tailoring and reality-based silhouettes. But in each piece there was also a bit of daring-do, a reminder that you don’t have to yell in order to be heard. Because a confident voice, with an original message, can whisper and still capture our attention.” {The Daily Beast/Newsweek}
• “Ruffles and ridges! Who else but Nicolas Ghesquière could make the girliest of motifs feel so architectural?” {Daily Front Row}
• “It’s not with every collection that sex appeal and extreme craftsmanship go hand in hand, but then again Nicolas Ghesquière isn’t every designer.” {fashionologie}
• “Nicolas Ghesquière’s talent lies in combining flounce with edge.” {The Guardian}
• “Mr. Ghesquière’s Balenciaga has been 15 years in the making. But he has never offered such a confident vision. He took the rigor of the founder; the steely geometry of his cut–swirling, Spanish shapes–and mixed all that with a 21st-century freedom of flesh.” {International Herald Tribune}
• “In one sense, the lean tailoring and white squared-off tops, with their Catholic overtones, brought his designs back to his roots at Balenciaga, when the clothes attracted a girl force. But in another way, this collection was confidently grown-up, as if Mr. Ghesquière knew he had nothing to prove.” {The New York Times}
• “All the talk this season is about the rivalry heating up between the new guys at Dior and YSL, Raf Simons and Hedi Slimane. But don’t count Nicolas Ghesquière out. This is a man who, if he didn’t invent the heritage brand reinvention, has certainly mastered the art. And his fantastic new Balenciaga collection was a case study in how he’s done it season in and season out for the last decade, by putting an utterly modern gloss on intense study of the house’s archives.” {Style.com}
• “[A] collection of exceptional, understated modern elegance.” {Vogue.com}
• “Ghesquière is nothing if not a fashion mathematician–his rules and style equations always setting the benchmark for what is to come.” {Vogue.co.uk}
• “Adieu, clunky officewear! Bonjour, accessible high chic!” {WWD}