Balenciaga Museum. Riva Collection

Sketches from the House of Balenciaga 1943-1964.
Riva Collection

A major museum acquisition thanks to Art Consulting. Sketches from the House of Balenciaga 1943-1964. Riva Collection. Historical Archive of the Basque Country: an exceptional collection on show for the first time. From 30 April to 21 May 2023. Couturier Lorenzo Riva, artistic director of Maison Balenciaga in Paris between 1980 and 1981, assembled this enormous collection of more than 9,000 drawings. The collection was studied and catalogued for the first time by its curators, Marina Pizziolo and Romano Ravasio, who initiated a valorisation project that in December 2022 led to the acquisition of a corpus of 8,362 drawings by the Department of Culture of the Basque Government for the Balenciaga Museum.

Lorenzo Riva, couturier and avid collector. It is only thanks to the intuition and passion of internationally renowned couturier Lorenzo Riva that these precious drawings have been preserved. “Each drawing is a project,” said Lorenzo Riva, “containing the seed of an idea destined to become the dream of an entire generation of women. The drawings lead us behind the scenes at a legendary atelier, where the clothes that made fashion history in the 1950s were created”.

The Balenciaga Museum and Art Consulting. Bingen Zupiria, Minister of Culture of the Basque Government, Miren Vives Almandoz, Director of the Balenciaga Museum, Lorenzo Riva, Marina Pizziolo and Romano Ravasio attended the opening of the exhibition organised by the Balenciaga Museum and the Historical Archive of the Basque Country, in collaboration with Art Consulting. For the first time, a careful selection of drawings from the incredible Riva Collection is on show to the public. The iconic Balenciaga Museum also paid homage to Lorenzo Riva with an exhibition of some of the clothes that made his name world famous.

Rare footage. A film recording a key moment in fashion history will also be shown for the first time at the Balenciaga Museum. It includes an extremely rare clip of the Balenciaga Spring-Summer 1981 collection that Riva presented in Paris. The star model on the catwalk was Jerry Hall, later to become the wife of Mick Jagger. The film contains a long interview with Lorenzo Riva, in which the couturier talks about how he became artistic director of the historical Maison in Avenue George V.

The video shown for the first time at the Balenciaga Museum

Browse the Balenciaga Museum exhibition catalogue