The so-called “Balenciaga Mystique” was compelling, not least because of the way the designer reconciled opposites. In Balenciaga’s case those extremes were asceticism, expressed both through his use of “Spanish black” and the rigorous purity of his pattern-cutting (Balenciaga engineered a one-seam coat), and a sort of religious ecstasy, expressed through dramatic draping and bold dashes of color.

Last year’s exhibition at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, “Balenciaga and Spanish Painting,” made clear the influence of painters like Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and El Greco on the designer. Balenciaga, who was raised in the small seaside village of Getaria, the son of a fisherman and a seamstress, first encountered these works at the homes of the wealthy and aristocratic women for whom his mother worked and who would later become his clients.

The “locals” also influenced the designer’s eye. His famous single-seam wedding dress of 1967— a “marvel of form,” according to Vogue—took partial inspiration from workwear. The hat has been likened to that worn by fishermen and is also referred to as having a “coal-scuttle” shape. Similarly, the delicate aprons Balenciaga sometimes used on evening dresses might be traced back to those of fisher women. Easier to identify are the broader Spanish influences in the designer’s work: his love of capes, his toreador hats; and preferences for fringed tassels and black jet beading. His palette, too, was influenced by his origins. As much as Balenciaga liked the ecclesiastical combination of black and white, he had a taste, too, for electrifying pops of color—scarlet, ochre, turquoise—that could have been pulled from a painting by Francisco de Zurbarán.

Balenciaga is very much a Spanish designer, but it would be a mistake to only see his work within that framework. He came to fame in Paris, the birthplace of the couture, and was, arguably, its purest practitioner. “Balenciaga alone is a couturier in the truest sense of the word,” Chanel once said. “Only he is capable of cutting material, assembling a creation and sewing it by hand, the others are simply fashion designers.” A gifted craftsman, his work became sublime through his abstraction both of patternmaking and personal memories into something new.

Here, highlights of his work in Vogue.