Balenciaga: the Ghesquière years

Hey! I haven't posted here in a while, but life has been pretty busy. I got a job with a children's clothing company, ilovegorgeous, at their Head Office, which is all of a 20-minute drive from my house (oh yeah – I got a car, too, a little Ford Ka, which my sister mocks me for driving but I love it and feel v grateful for my parents helping me to finance it). Anyway, I'm working at ILG full-time and am slowly adjusting to the 9-5 life, despite being so much younger than everyone else. The job involves a lot of emailing and phone calls, chatting to customers, processing online orders and returns, steaming lots of clothes, running random errands... it's so busy and I love it because everyday is different. I think that deciding not to go straight to uni was actually a great idea, in hindsight; I can earn money and learn stuff without having to be in a classroom. The best bit of the job, so far, has been assisting the wholesale department, as it's given me such an interesting insight into the world of fashion buying (think lots of spreadsheets, and learning about markups, margins etc – sounds dull on paper but I find it fascinating). It's a really varied job, my colleagues are lovely, and I feel so lucky.

Anyway, enough of my gushing – I wanted to talk about the recent Balenciaga news... 

What with all the designers playing musical chairs, the various dramas during Fashion Month and the newfound love for open letters, 2012 has been a pretty crazy year for the fashion world. Now that Sandy has done its damage and people are starting to re-establish their lives, the powers that be felt it was only right to drop another bombshell on the unassuming public. It was revealed yesterday that Nicholas Ghesquière's dazzling SS13 Balenciaga show would be his last for the house.

Many people have been pretty blindsided by the news. Whether you love or loathe Ghesquière, you can't deny that his contribution to fashion has been massive since he took the reins as Balenciaga's creative director in 1993. He gave Balenciaga a complete overhaul, carved out a distinct brand aesthetic, produced collections that were both critically and commercially successful and expanded into previously untouched areas, such as parfumerie.

We all can hope and pray that next year Ghesquière will go solo and everyone else will stay where they are and stop causing fashion people to have minor emotional breakdowns every few weeks. Change is not always a good thing. Having said that, I couldn't think of anything better than seeing the back of Karl... but those thoughts are for another blog post.

Here are my personal highlights of Ghesquière's time at Balenciaga...

Autumn/Winter 2006

Autumn/Winter 2010

Spring/Summer 2004

Spring/Summer 2007

Spring/Summer 2013