FASHION'S SECRET GENIUS

From squabbles with the Nazis to a child-porn ad scandal, Balenciaga has survived many crises - yet most people know little about the man behind the controversial fashion label

- LISA ARMSTRONG

THERE’S a scene in Cristóbal Balenciaga, a new TV drama about one of the 20th century’s most important and mysterious designers, in which Balenciaga, partway through an interview with British fashion journalist Prudence Glynn, can no longer bear it.

The sleeves on Glynn’s mustard patterned dress (it’s 1971) are a travesty. The Spanish fashion guru rips one off and begins to rework it.

Most fashion screenplays – a small but growing genre – steer clear of the actual grunt work of making a garment, mining instead their subjects’ lives for scandal and roller-coaster emotion. Kudos, then, to the makers of this Disney+ series, who turn the technicalities of creation into gripping drama.

“To be honest, I didn’t know much about him,” says Lourdes Iglesias, the writer who came up with the idea for the big-budget six-parter.

“That’s despite us both being Basque. It’s only when I was living in Korea and met a designer there who worshipped Cristóbal and told me how iconic he is for so many of today’s designers, that I got really interested.”

Surely some mistake, you might suppose, to place a writer with little background knowledge in charge of a major TV retelling of the life of the great Cristóbal Balenciaga, who was revered by his rivals Coco Chanel and Christian Dior.

But what Iglesias instinctively understood is that his story is as much about the often painful act of creativity, “and how you maintain authorship and integrity of what you create”, as it is about a man who lived through extraordinarily turbulent times while making a living from clothes.