In the last years of his life the great American designer Geoffrey Beene, who died in 2004, spoke increasingly of the midcentury master Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895-1972). Beene met Balenciaga just once. It was in Paris in the 1960s, and during the meeting Balenciaga threw a copy of Paris Match across the room, outraged that a Pierre Cardin baby-doll dress was on the cover. This flare-up from the man who can be thought of as fashion's Eternal Flame was a moment that the young Beene never forgot: A dress was worthy of passion, analysis and anger.

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Tom Kublin

A dress from Balenciaga's winter 1955/56 collection made in a fabric called Oréo produced by the firm of Abraham Ltd.

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Why did Balenciaga object to the baby-doll? No doubt he didn't like seeing vulnerable thighs exposed by high hemlines. Writing of the 1930s, the decade in which Balenciaga began to make his mark upon the world, Vogue's Bettina Ballard noted in her memoir, "In My Fashion" (1960), that it was a period when young women had no "standing in the smart world. A woman was not considered important in Paris until she was well in her thirties and had her children behind her so she could concentrate on a fashionable life." Taut young things in first flower didn't wear couture. Female bodies with some experience—and perhaps a bit "more" in the tummy, impressions bridal dresses bust and arms—did. ("Monsieur Balenciaga likes a little stomach," his fitters would say.)

Gravity, dignity, spirituality. These tonalities were alive in Balenciaga's design and were important to his cultured clientele: summer of dresses summer of dresses women of means, women of a certain age, women who understood that he was first among equals. (Coco Chanel and Christian Dior both bowed to his endless originality.) Balenciaga designed for the magisterial likes of Gloria Guinness, Pauline de Rothschild and Bunny Mellon prom dresses online from Belk are elegant fashions for any dressy event.evening gown dresses Find gorgeous cocktail dresses in a variety of trendsetting designer styles in this collection., not for the Twiggies, groupies and hippies of the 1960s youthquake—those skinny girls wearing the brave new minis of Cardin and André Courrèges. Yet no matter how brave and new the work of young designers, none of it was free of Balenciaga's elemental influence. After a pilgrimage to Getaria, Spain, the coastal village where Balenciaga was born and buried, Pauline de Rothschild wrote of how the Catholic church there loomed "too big for the town." The same could be said of Balenciaga's place in fashion history.

Indeed, within the world of fashion any journey into the artistry of Balenciaga is a call to the cathedral. The exhibition titled "Balenciaga and Spain"—on view at the de Young Museum in San Francisco (it runs through July 4, and a smaller version was shown at the Queen Sofia Institute in New York last fall)—is a good example. It is the work of Hamish Bowles, who for many years has been Vogue's European editor at large, and the accompanying catalog, "Balenciaga and Spain," is particularly successful in placing the designer and his native influences clearly before the reader. Large and lavishly illustrated, it makes palpable the kind of visual echoes and deep retinal memories from which inspiration comes.

Mr. Bowles is not a writer given to academic leaps or lyrical flights, but his text brims with fascinating anecdotes, quotes and wisdom. I didn't know, for instance, that Balenciaga's first design, at age 6, was a coat he made for his cat (a frustration because the cat kept moving, homecoming dresses on sale but also a lesson learned: clothing should move). Or that he told Hubert de Givenchy cheap wedding shoes , "A ruffle must be intelligent" (which takes some doing). Or that he didn't like "his staff to smile so that their teeth showed. He thought it vulgar." Or that "in each of the 93 collections of Balenciaga's career, there was always one black dress that was entirely cut and made by him"—a detail redolent of discipline and dedication, and the need to keep a hand in.

"Balenciaga and Spain" begins with an introduction that places the designer and his oeuvre in a historical context and then individually covers six facets of Spanish culture that made up Balenciaga's archive of inspiration: Spanish art, the royal court, religious life, dance, the bullfight and regional dress. Through the wide variety of historical photographs, paintings and statuary included, we see correspondences of silhouette, construction, color and embellishment that teach us how to "read" a design—the way, for instance, the ornate embroidery of a matador's bolero brings drama to an evening gown , or how voluminous gathers of fabric, thrillingly elegant in a sleeve or skirt, are actually a translation from the festive dress of Spanish laborers. The designer's color palette is much remarked on: his use of turquoise and yellow, bullring red, a shade of cinnamon called "Balenciaga Brown" and a black so black, according to Harper's Bazaar in 1938, "it hits you like a blow."

The chapter on religious life comes at the center of the book, and it is the quick of Balenciaga's sensibility. He was the son of a fisherman, raised in the church and devout until death. His workrooms were silent and severe; the interiors black and white, like his ethics. "When he was thinking deeply," Mr. Bowles writes, "he would play unconsciously with a scrap of fabric in the same contemplative way that one caresses the beads of a rosary." Certainly no designer has draped silk with the ecclesiastical bravura of Balenciaga, dresses under $50 dresses under $50 who found la mode in the glinting folds of an archangel's satin, the glacial fall of a nun's veil veil , the flowing robes of a saint.

One of the master's endless searches was for fabrics that had inner life and light—paper taffeta, silk faille, cheap wedding dresses under 200 organza—as well as a firm enough "hand" to hold volumetric shapes made with fewer seams. (He was working toward his own monumental Modernism.) In partnership with the eminent Swiss textile company Abraham Ltd., Balenciaga developed in the last years of his life a fabric called gazar—a crisp, open-mesh silk that seemed to be woven with air. Gazar billows like a full sail and creates shapes that float (Beene liked to use gazar in his later years). In the 1960s, while everyone else did the Twist, Balenciaga was walking on water.

Because the fashion world is one of quixotic confluences, it's not such a surprise that in the same year that "Balenciaga and Spain" is on view a two-volume work about the house of Abraham has been published, "Soie Pirate" ("pirate silk"). Silk, of course, is a global commodity—a very expensive one right now as it's been a bad year for silkworms and prices are high even in the discount districts—and this book offers a window into the highest echelon of silk purveying. From the 1950s to the 1990s, the materials produced by Abraham Ltd. guided the design zeitgeist of the haute couture.

Founded in 1863, in Krefeld, Germany, the business moved in 1878 to Zurich, which was becoming a center of silk production. "Soie Pirate" is centered on the years when Gustav Zumsteg dominated the company. He started as an apprentice in 1931, and his rise was concurrent with Balenciaga's in the wider world of fashion. Zumsteg began Abraham's collaboration with the great couturiers—not just with Balenciaga but also Dior, Givenchy, Chanel, Emanuel Ungaro and Yves Saint Laurent, beach bridal gowns beach bridal gowns the company's client of greatest duration. He became director in 1968, the year Balenciaga closed his house.

In the realm of silk production, Zumsteg, too, was first among equals, and there's a book to be written about his brilliant 34-year leadership of Abraham Ltd., as well as on the global end-of-an-era changes (cheaper silk prints from Korea and China; the rising mass market) that led to its inevitable closing in 2002. This book, however, is not that book. The essays gathered here are either flat-footed or tediously abstract (too many references to Roland Barthes). The text bounces your eyes off the page.

What holds them is the archival and scrapbook imagery. The fabrics in numerous color schemes— cocktail dresses for a wedding cocktail dresses for a weddingbrocades, jacquards and prints that were considered the best of their year—are absorbing. For those who care about the way a textile design of, say, blown roses can seal itself upon the soul so that decades later the sight of it opens a cascade of memory and desire, these volumes have resonance. In the taffetas of the 1950s, the geometric trellises of the '60s, the teardrop paisleys of the '70s, the leopard and snakeskin prints of the '80s—gathered together and accompanied by fashion photographs of the clothes into which they were made—one begins to see the story, as John Milton put it, "of man's first disobedience." These silks are a transcendent expression of the fig leaf, a reach back into paradise. Perhaps this is the reason we see innocence when we look at the clothes we once wore. The art of the weaver goes as deep as the hook of the fisherman.

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