A heartfelt farewell to Renato, whom we wish to remember as we knew him and for the happy professional collaborations with our brand. We wish to remember a man of great grace, elegance, and good breeding who taught us so much, and we wish to pay tribute to his long professional history, which is a source of great pride for all of us Italians.
We want to remember him for his tireless work, for being a Fashion artist, and for the distinct identity he was able to give to his brand and to each of his creations; we want to remember him for being deeply connected to Made in Italy and its hallmarks: quality and craftsmanship. Because his contribution to the prestige of Made in Italy is one from which the entire Italian fashion supply chain, and Made in Italy in general, benefits and will continue to benefit in the future.
We want to remember the artist who, as a young man, studied piano and was passionate about painting, and as an adult, created impeccable cuts, used fabrics and colors like few others, and who, over time, even created a color, “Balestra Blue”; we want to remember Renato for his modesty in recounting how it was chance that brought him, an engineering student, into fashion, and for how he would modestly shrug off having discovered “only on TV” that he was charming: “[…] someone like me, who at 11 was reading Dostoevsky and playing Beethoven on the piano [...]”.
We want to pay tribute to the artist who produced an archive—declared in 2019 by the Mibac to be of “particularly important historical interest”—of over 40,000 sketches and drawings, garments and tailoring works, press reviews, and photographs, created and collected from the mid-fifties to the present day.
And if it is true that the start of his career was due to a lucky incident in which a dress sketch—drawn on a bet with some friends—was sent without his knowledge to the Italian Fashion Center in Milan for a competition… his immense success was due exclusively to pure genius, just as the intuition of the person who immediately invited him to collaborate on a high fashion collection that would be showcased in Florence was brilliant. His career began just like that, by chance, in 1954… but his ascent was more than rapid, seeing him immediately become a protagonist, first within the most renowned ateliers of the Eternal City, the Sorelle Fontana and Schubert, and then in 1958, in the United States, from Los Angeles to New York, eventually arriving at Hollywood cinema just a few years later, and collaborating with many movie stars: Liz Taylor, Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren, Natalie Wood, Claudia Cardinale, Candice Bergen, and many others. A decidedly rapid ascent, so much so that only 5 years after beginning, in 1959, Renato inaugurated his first atelier at Via Gregoriana 36, and by the end of the 60s, his brand was already distributed all over the world and his creations were worn by first ladies, princesses, and empresses.
“With the passing of Renato Balestra, we lose an excellence of style, a dean of high fashion, and a symbol of Italian genius in the world”.
