Textiles carry great importance and significance in your work. Where does this interest come from?
Edith Dekyndt: It is a practice that goes back a very long way: I have never drawn a distinction between embroidery and drawing, or between sewing and assembling. Textiles can serve as a medium, but they also speak the language of materials that interact with air, wind, water, the sea and fine sand. Textiles are fundamental to human civilisation: we must clothe ourselves, seek shelter and eat. Stone and metal enabled the creation of tools, weapons and vessels. With those tools and weapons, we were able to hunt and cut up hides and furs. Thousands of years later, the furs were felted; thousands more passed before they were spun and woven. Knots and embroidery play a role in the cults, stories and myths of all known civilisations. I am fascinated by this family of materials. We say that a fabric ‘hangs’ well. Textiles evoke the movement of falling, waterfalls and waves. I immerse myself in techniques that bring about these flows.

The title, The Fabric Decides, focuses on the material. You take Balenciaga’s archives as your starting point. How have the textiles influenced your work?
Dekyndt: I was moved by the silent presence of bodies within the clothes. Even in their absence, they remained perceptible in the folds, tensions and distortions of the fabric, evoking the movement of the body and the wearing of the garment. These objects are imbued with memories: the material becomes the site of a relationship between the body, time and the environment. Creation thus arises less from a desire for control than from a dialogue with what the material offers or allows to emerge.

The exhibition evokes the idea of a material capable of influencing the creation of a work. Three dimensions therefore take centre stage in your practice: context, process and time.
Dekyndt: When you discover a context, it is a little like wandering alone through a forest or an unfamiliar city. You take in the landscape, open yourself up to it and turn inwards. It is a somewhat primal state, in which all the senses are attuned to the gaps, the corners, the shifts between strength and gentleness. It engages both body and mind: a state of complete surrender to intuition, disruption and sensory experience. The process stems from explorations and wanderings, from combinations of materials, objects and media. It is a slow and continuous learning process, shaped by encounters and coincidences. I arrange elements according to how they resonate with the light, temperature, humidity, scent and acoustics of the space. These are assemblages that, depending on their nature, change state: from solid to liquid, from liquid to gas. They fade, rust, disintegrate and sometimes disappear. I can control their behaviour only partially, as matter has a mind and a language of its own. I follow its lead, guided by what I know.

Who was Cristóbal Balenciaga?

Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895-1972) founded his eponymous fashion house in San Sebastián in 1917 and, from the 1930s onwards, became a leading figure in Spanish haute couture. During the Spanish Civil War, the designer moved to Paris in 1937. From the 1940s onwards, he was revered for the poetic simplicity of his lines, reaching the pinnacle of his career in the 1950s and 1960s.

Balenciaga radically transformed women’s fashion with new silhouettes – the shift dress, the babydoll, the tunic and the semi-fitted style – and designs that stood apart from the body. A master of cut, he embodied a modernity founded on research, precision and textile innovation. His peers held him in high esteem: Christian Dior called him ‘the master of us all’, while Gabrielle Chanel described him as ‘the only true couturier’. His clients included icons of the age such as Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner and Marlene Dietrich.

Exacting and publicity shy, the couturier refused to make concessions to ready-to-wear fashion. To remain true to his vision, he closed his fashion house in 1968. Balenciaga died four years later, leaving behind an oeuvre that has since become legendary.