Spanish fashion designer Cristóbal Balenciaga was BOTD in 1895. Born in Getaria in the Basque Country to a working-class family, he apprenticed to a tailor when he was 12. His patron and client the Marchioness de Casa Torres sent him to Madrid to study tailoring, skills he retained for the rest of his career. He opened his first boutique in San Sebastian in 1919 with the help of his lover, the Polish aristocrat and milliner Wladzio d’Attainville. He expanded to Madrid and Barcelona in the 1920s, designing for the Spanish royal family and aristocracy. As the Spanish Civil War broke out, he and d’Attainville moved to Paris, opening the Balenciaga couture house in 1937. He became an international celebrity in the 1950s with his modernist designs and voluminous sculptural creations, notably the Sack Dress which broadened the shoulders and removed the waist, and the one-seam Yoki coat. His work was popular with Jackie Kennedy and Hollywood stars Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner and Audrey Hepburn. He also taught fashion design classes, training a generation of designers including Oscar de la Renta and Hubert de Givenchy. Discreetly gay, he appears to have had no major relationships after D’Attainville, who died in 1948. Closing his couture house in 1968, partially in protest at the direction of Swinging Sixties fashion, he retired to Valencia where he died in 1972, aged 77.