Born in Trieste in 1924 into a family of architects and engineers, Balestra cultivated his passion for art and music from an early age. Enter the world of fashion almost by accident. His comrades from the engineering faculty ask him to design a dress for a woman and then, without his knowledge, send the sketch to Jole Veneziani’s haute couture house in Milan. And immediately Balestra was invited to work with her. So his career took off.
In 1954 Balestra moved from Milan to Rome, where he worked for the Fontana sisters, among others. His passion for cinema leads him to design clothes for big stars like Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida. Over the years he has also become the favorite stylist of Hollywood stars such as Liz Taylor and Natalie Wood. But the list of celebrities who dressed in his Roman studio, first in the Via Gregoriana and then in the Via Sistina, is long.
In the 1960s, his name was definitively confirmed thanks to Blu Balestra, a luminous shade of blue, a unique color that is still today the undeniable symbol of the house, combined with a short satin dress. In 1962 Balestra became a member of the Italian Chamber of Fashion and was elected Ambassador of Made in Italy worldwide by the Institute for Foreign Trade. The designer’s creations are also famous in the USA and Japan, where they are sold in exclusive shops such as Saks Fith Avenue or Bergdorf Goodman.
Balestra doesn’t stop there, however. As early as the late 1970s, he was developing various product categories ranging from perfumes, make-up, suitcases and glasses to household items.
Lover of theater and ballet, for which he often designed the costumes, Balestra was also the first stylist to enter the world of television: in 1998 the show Rosa&Chic on Rai2. His archive was classified by Mibac in 2019 as “of particularly important historical interest”. It includes documentation that has been created from the mid-1950s to the present day and consists of over 40,000 sketches and drawings, dresses and tailoring, press reviews and photographs.