Balenciaga – To the Moon. Digital extension of a museum heritage

From museum to bit

A heritage in museums, beyond the reach of many. More than nine thousand original drawings by Cristóbal Balenciaga, rediscovered by Art Consulting, have been acquired by two international museum institutions: the Museo Cristóbal Balenciaga in Getaria, with 8,362 sheets entering the public cultural heritage of the Basque Country in 2022, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with 700 drawings acquired in 2025. That collection was discovered, studied and brought to the museum institutions by Marina Pizziolo and Romano Ravasio, who directed its scientific cataloguing, authentication, negotiations with the two major museums and the representation of the owner Lorenzo Riva, couturier and artistic director of the Maison Balenciaga in the early 1980s. A collection of this scope, once it enters the museum system, follows the rules of that system: conservation, rotations, programmed exhibitions. An inevitable limit: entire generations accustomed to living in digital environments will rarely come into contact with it. The question Art Consulting poses is not technological but cultural: how can a historical heritage exist also in the environments frequented by young people, without losing its identity and without becoming a commercial product?

Curatorial translation into the digital. When the collection enters the institutional circuit, Art Consulting addresses a second decision: building a parallel form of access that maintains the cultural identity of the collection without transforming it into a commercial product. The point of departure is not the technology but the heritage itself. Gaspard de Massé, director of the archives of the Maison Balenciaga, had personally visited the collection, recognising its exceptional historical value. It is also on this basis of legitimacy that the entire subsequent project is built. Art Consulting develops an intensive public programme: conferences, presentations and international streaming that bring the collection to the attention of an increasingly broad audience. In May 2022 a selection of 25 original drawings is exhibited at Fondazione Sozzani in Milan, the first public appearance of the Balenciaga sheets in a contemporary cultural context. The decision to create a digital collection originates from this moment. Art Consulting selects as partners Cointelegraph and Crypto.com, two of the most authoritative platforms in the international digital sector, and assumes curatorial direction of the entire project. The leading in-house designers of Cointelegraph work under the direct guidance of Marina Pizziolo and Romano Ravasio: selection of the drawings to be translated, aesthetic supervision of every stage, continuous correction to ensure that every digital work remained recognisably Balenciaga. The criterion is one: the heritage guides the technology, not the contrary.

A new form of cultural access. On 21 July 2022 the drop “Cristóbal Balenciaga: To the Moon” is launched on Crypto.com, partner of Art Consulting together with Cointelegraph and Animal Concerts. Every digital work is a controlled translation of a historical atelier sheet: recognisable in its line, its elegance, the construction of the original mark. Among selected collectors, physical redeemables are distributed: original drawings by Cristóbal Balenciaga, sent to recipients in Melbourne, Toronto, Singapore and New York. The boundary between physical and digital heritage becomes permeable in both directions. The stability of the collector community measures the cultural solidity of the project: in a market in which the great majority of digital projects of that period have disappeared or lost value, more than 1,300 collectors out of an initial 1,400 have retained their works after years. In March 2023 the project extends into the metaverse with “Cristóbal Balenciaga: New Code”, developed with Animal Concerts and RLTY, specialists in virtual environments, for the Metaverse Fashion Week in Decentraland. Ten three-dimensional wearables for avatars, each derived from an original drawing from the collection, are presented in a dedicated virtual boutique, alongside brands including Dolce&Gabbana, Tommy Hilfiger, COACH and Adidas. The theme chosen by Decentraland for that edition is “Future Heritage”: a concept that describes exactly the nature of the project.
A cultural heritage can exist simultaneously in different environments without losing its identity, if the translation is guided by curatorial direction and not by technology.