Palacio De Liria

María Flora Villarreal Medina (1894-1977) began to show great sewing skills as a child.

At the age of 24, he moved to Madrid to set up his own workshop, on the same floor where he lived. It was after the Civil War that Villarreal installed the workshops and halls on Avenida del Generalísimo, now Paseo de la Castellana, and began a successful career that ended with his retirement in 1968, the same one in which Balenciaga retired. Villarreal managed a firm that had more than one hundred employees and that based its commercial strategy on the reproduction of French haute couture models or on the creation of its own designs following the trends of Paris.

The dressmaker's own creations were highly valued, especially party dresses and wedding dresses, such as the one she made for the 18th Duchess of Alba and which has been provided by the Costume Museum in Madrid for the temporary exhibition “Fashion at Casa de Alba” curated by Lorenzo Caprile and Eloy Martínez de la Pera (19 October 2023-31 March 2024, Palacio de Liria).

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Cayetana Fitz-James Stuart, in her first marriage, wore the dress made of ivory satin and with 18th-century Brussels lace, a marked waist and a large skirt composed of overlapping layers of tulle; the Duchess accompanied it with a tulle veil.

“I always loved Flora and they never recognized her as Balenciaga,” the Duchess recalled years later in a memoir entitled I, Cayetana.

Flora Villarreal died in Madrid in 1977.

Flora Villarreal and the wedding dress of the 18th Duchess of Alba