Balenciaga's artisans, named

The atelier on Avenue George V is quiet at nine in the morning, the kind of quiet that holds thirty people working in concentration. Dominique Leblanc sits at a table near the north window, a half-finished coat sleeve pinned to a dress form beside her. The sleeve is cut from double-face wool, charcoal on one side, ivory on the other, and the seam she is preparing to sew will not show on either surface. This is the point.

Leblanc has worked at Balenciaga for nineteen years. She is a première d'atelier — a head of workshop — which means she oversees the tailoring team and, more specifically, the construction of the house's sculptural coats. The ones that stand away from the body. The ones that photographs flatten into graphic shapes but that, in three dimensions, are exercises in engineering. She did not set out to become known for this. She set out to learn how to sew.

She grew up in Rennes, the daughter of a seamstress who worked from home. By fifteen she was enrolled at the École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, learning to set sleeves and drape bias-cut silk. She graduated in 2003 and spent two years at Dior, then another three at Chanel, working in the flou atelier where evening dresses are made. In 2006, Nicolas Ghesquière was five years into his tenure at Balenciaga, and the house was hiring. Leblanc applied for a position in tailoring. She has not left.

The Coat in Question

The piece that made her name inside the industry, if not beyond it, is a coat from the autumn/winter 2016 collection. It is knee-length, double-breasted, with sleeves that bell slightly at the wrist. The fabric is a wool-cashmere blend, dense enough to hold a sculptural line but soft enough to move. The coat's defining feature is its shoulder, which extends past the natural shoulder line by three centimetres and then curves sharply downward, creating a shape that reads as both armour and architecture.

Demna Gvasalia had arrived at Balenciaga the previous year. The press was still deciding what to make of him. The coat, shown on the runway in March 2016, was not an obvious commercial proposition. It was expensive — just over €3,000 at retail — and it required a body confident enough to wear a silhouette that did not apologise for its volume. But it sold. More to the point, it was copied, which is the more reliable measure of influence.

Leblanc was responsible for translating Gvasalia's sketch into a pattern, then into a toile, then into the final garment. The process took six weeks. The challenge was the shoulder. To achieve the shape Gvasalia wanted, Leblanc had to insert a structure — a kind of internal scaffolding made from horsehair canvas and cotton batting — that would hold the coat's line without adding visible bulk. The structure is sewn in by hand, using a stab stitch that passes through the canvas and into the wool but does not break the surface of the fabric. You cannot see it. You can only see what it does.

"It is not about making something look handmade," Leblanc told System magazine in 2017, one of the few times she has been quoted in print. "It is about making something that looks inevitable."

Training Ground

Leblanc's path is not unusual for someone at her level. The École de la Chambre Syndicale remains the primary pipeline into French couture ateliers, though its curriculum has shifted over the decades. When Cristóbal Balenciaga was alive, the house trained its own staff, often pulling young women from the Basque region and teaching them in-house. That model is gone. Now, petites mains — the term for atelier workers, literally 'little hands' — arrive with formal training and are expected to produce work at a professional standard within weeks.

Leblanc's early years at Balenciaga coincided with the final phase of Ghesquière's tenure. He was known for demanding precision, and the atelier culture reflected that. A seam had to be invisible. A hem had to hang without rippling. If a sleeve did not set cleanly into the armscye, you unpicked it and started again. Leblanac learned to work quickly, but not at the expense of accuracy. Speed, she has said, is a byproduct of repetition. You cannot rush your way into it.

When Gvasalia took over in 2015, the atelier expected disruption. Gvasalia's previous work with Vetements had been raw, unfinished, deliberately crude. But the first thing he did at Balenciaga was spend three months in the archive, studying Cristóbal's patterns. He was particularly interested in the sleeves — the way the founder had cut them to stand away from the arm, creating volume without weight. Gvasalia's coats, including the 2016 piece Leblanc constructed, are direct descendants of that technique.

The Hands, Not the Myth

Leblanc is not the only artisan whose name ought to be known. Alongside her in the tailoring atelier is Marc Duteil, who specialises in topstitching and has been with the house for twenty-three years. In the flou atelier, Claire Moreau handles embroidery placement, working with external embroiderers to ensure that beadwork sits correctly on bias-cut silk. In the accessory atelier, Julien Renard constructs the house's structured bags, including the Hourglass, a top-handle style introduced in 2020 that requires fourteen hours of hand-stitching per piece.

These are not anonymous workers. They are listed in the house's internal records. They sign off on quality control sheets. They attend fittings with Gvasalia and offer feedback on construction. But their names do not appear in press materials, and they are rarely photographed. The industry prefers the myth of the solitary designer, the single vision. It is simpler to sell.

Balenciaga, to its credit, has made some effort to shift this. In 2019, the house released a short documentary about its ateliers, featuring interviews with several petites mains. The film was shown at the Musée Bourdelle during Paris Fashion Week and later posted online. It was well-intentioned, if somewhat glossy. But it did name names, and it did show hands at work, which is more than most houses manage.

What Comes Next

Leblanc is fifty-one now. She has trained six junior members of the tailoring atelier, three of whom have moved on to other houses. She has no plans to leave Balenciaga, though she has been approached. The work, she says, remains interesting. Gvasalia continues to push the atelier toward shapes that require problem-solving, and problem-solving is what keeps the job from becoming rote.

The coat from 2016 is still in production, in modified form. The shoulder has been softened slightly, the price has increased to €3,400, and it now comes in four colours instead of two. It is not a bestseller — Balenciaga's Triple S sneaker claims that title — but it is a steady seller, which in the luxury market is often more valuable. It is also, one suspects, the piece that will be cited in retrospectives when critics attempt to summarise Gvasalia's first decade at the house.

Leblanc will not be mentioned in those retrospectives. She is accustomed to this. But the coat will carry her work regardless, in the way the shoulder holds its line, in the way the seam refuses to show itself. The signature is there. You simply have to know how to look.