Jennifer Connelly in Balenciaga 2008 Campaign Ad

Balenciaga Spring-Summer 2008 Womens Ad Campaign featuring actress Jennifer Connelly.

The Model-

Jennifer Lynn Connelly (born December 12, 1970 is an American film actress and former child model.. Although she has been working in the film industry since she was a teenager and catapulted to fame on the basis of her appearances in films like Labyrinth and Career Opportunities , she did not receive wide exposure for her work until the 2000 drama Requiem for a Dream, and the 2001 biopic A Beautiful Mind, for which she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress .

The Design

The clothing designer shapes, with their standout shoulder lines, hand-span waists, and belled (almost panniered) hip volume, marched in on vertiginous knee-high woven-leather gladiator boots. "Instead of a put-together thing like last season, I wanted total looks—ensembles, as we say in French," Ghesquière explained, "with graphic volumes like car bodywork. Sports cars!" Each look came with its undulating folds sutured together with curvilinear topstitching, the sculptural surfaces backed with sports-derived foam, and the hems sliced short by a high-tech ultrasound machine. There were dresses and matching "ensembles" articulated as jackets over mini-pelmets, over tiny shorts.
But would this be wearable? What a silly question. If Ghesquière's extreme embroidered "robot" leggings can sell out for squillions of dollars a piece, and last season's jodhpurs, blazers, scarves, and ikat prints can fuel a global industry of knockoffs, what has he left to prove? By the time you read this, the flower-printing mills of the world will have been activated overnight. Even when Ghesquière turns to intensely rich, rarified "explorations" of detail—check the cloisonné bejeweled heels of those boots—there is something so relevant in the execution that it is capable of turning on the fashion fanatics to whom price is no object, while also sending the mass market into overdrive. In that way, Nicolas Ghesquière is one of the very few who can have his cake, sell it, and sit back and watch the rest of the market scramble for the crumbs. (source..)

The Designer-

Fashion Designer BALENCIAGA, date of creation: 1937 It is not surprising that Spain has produced a genius like BALENCIAGA, capable of the most daring innovations in a superbly classic style. What is surprising is that this Spaniard became the leading French fashion designer.

His story began something like a legend : born in 1895 in Guetaria, a small fishing village on the Spanish Basque coast, Cristobal BALENCIAGA was still very young when it became apparent that he was destinated for Couture.

At the age of thirteen, he astounded the Marquise of CASA TORRES with his comments on her elegance. Realising his interest in Couture and his aesthetic potential, she allowed him to make a copy of the Haute Couture clothing she was wearing. Trembling, he did his work so well that she awarded him by wearing it. (more..)