From private collection to museum: Balenciaga

Two museum acquisitions

A private collection outside museum holdings. In the early 1980s Lorenzo Riva, couturier of international renown and artistic director of the Maison Balenciaga in Paris between 1980 and 1981, transfers to Italy a collection of more than nine thousand drawings from the operational archives of the fashion house. The material documents the period in which Cristóbal Balenciaga redefines the canons of women’s dress: models, variants, technical annotations, indications on fabrics with original samples attached to the sheets with atelier pins. Materials that show from within the construction of the garments that transformed twentieth-century fashion. For decades they remain in private hands, without institutional placement. Some drawings had occasionally been exhibited in contexts connected to the figure of Riva as documentary testimony, without being treated as a unified heritage.

The collection. Before this definition, no body of design materials from the Maison Balenciaga had been treated as an autonomous museum object. Art Consulting studies and orders the collection, defining it as a coherent corpus: more than nine thousand drawings, with a principal nucleus from the 1950s alongside materials from the 1940s and early 1960s. The collection documents the design process of haute couture, from the show numbering to the technical construction of the garment, with original fabric samples attached to the sheets. The corpus constitutes a continuous historical source, not a series of isolated sketches.

Acquisitions. In December 2022 the Department of Culture of the Basque Government acquires 8,362 drawings, placing them within the public cultural heritage of the Basque Country, conserved and exhibited at the Museo Cristóbal Balenciaga in Getaria. From 03 March to 21 May 2023 the museum presents for the first time a restored selection of the collection in the exhibition Sketches from the House of Balenciaga 1943–1964. Riva Collection. Historical Archive of the Basque Country, organised by the Museo Balenciaga and the Historical Archive of the Basque Country in collaboration with Art Consulting. Present at the inauguration: Bingen Zupiria, Minister of Culture of the Basque Government; Miren Vives Almandoz, director of the museum; Lorenzo Riva; Marina Pizziolo and Romano Ravasio. In 2025 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquires a further 700 drawings of the same provenance. Materials conserved for decades as operational atelier documentation become the object of deliberate museum acquisition.