User:Dominikazrastakova/sandbox

Františka Inka Bálková ( Fashion designer )
Františka Inka Bálková (1907 - 1992) was a Czechoslovakian fashion designer and visual merchandiser in the 20th century.

 Early life : 

Františka Inka Bálková was born in Tabor, Czechslovakia a small town in the South Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic. She was born on the 5th of March 1907 to Antonia Markov and Frantisek Volek a bricklayer.

 Career : 

After graduating from industrial school, Františka moved from Tabor to Prague, where she worked in the art and industrial studio of Ema Kudrnová, at the same time as working there she also kept busy by selling garments at the Sandholz Model House. After this Františka moved on to work as a visual merchandiser and fashion consultant at the Lyon Sil k Department Store on Wenceslas Square. This is where she first created designs for famous Czech actresses, as well as for the first Czech film star, Andula Sedláčková. After that she became independent and ran her own fashion and textile shop in Celetná Street.

During the 50s she devoted herself to her family and had a son Jaroslav Balek who later became an economist and writer.

It wasn't until 1958 that she joined the White Swan, the largest department store in Czechoslovakia at the time, where she began her work as a visual merchandiser and fashion designer. There she was also commissioned to organise fashion shows and run a fashion consultancy. She specialised in pinned garments or better known as fashion draping which is the process of positioning and pinning fabric on a form to develop the structure of a garment design. The clothes she made were from a single piece of fabric that was not allowed to be cut or broken, they were only shaped with pins, because after pinning they were usually resold. The garments were thus pinned to mannequins, dancers or customers, who then had them sewn in the customer salon. During a fashion show, the garment had to be completed within 5 minutes. On average, Františka created about 1,300 original garments a year.

In 1975 after the opening of the Máj department store, she also worked for them, as well as for the largest textile companies of the time, such as the national companies TIBA, Dvůr Králové and HEDVA, Moravská Třebová. The clothes she made were exported around the country and in addition to this they also gained considerable attention at the World's fair exhibition in Montreal in 1967. According to newspapers, she tried not only to comply with world fashion, but also to predict it, which she allegedly often succeeded in, thus contributing to the fact that Czechoslovakia was at that time in the fashion forefront of the world. Františka designs had a great response in newspapers and magazines, for example, she had a series in Standard magazine called "Mrs. Inka advises our readers'’

Further, her designs were very popular in film and television, and she collaborated with some of the biggest leading Czech film directors such as Věra Chytilová or Věra Jordánová and leading models such as Markéta Krbušková later Muchová or Ivana Zelníčková later known as Ivana Trump, Donald Trump' s former wife.

 later life : 

Františka died on the 3rd of January 1992 at the age of 84.

 Refference : 

 External links :