The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, His World

by Mary Blume

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  For Thea and Al

  Style? A certain lightness. A sense of shame excluding certain actions or reactions. A certain proposition of elegance. The supposition that, despite everything, a melody can be looked for and sometimes found. Style is tenuous, however. It comes from within. You can’t go out and acquire it. Style and fashion may share a dream, but they are created differently. Style is about an invisible promise …

  —John Berger,

  Here Is Where We Meet

  I wonder what happens to all the people who make the buttons.

  —Andy Warhol

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Photographs

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  Also by Mary Blume

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895–1972) was considered the greatest couturier of his time: in the words of Christian Dior, “the master of us all.” But the man himself remains mysterious, though private is perhaps the word he would have preferred. “Do not waste yourself in society,” he told his friend the fabric designer Gustav Zumsteg, and followed his own advice. Two of the things about him that one can state with absolute certainty are that he had sinus trouble and that he loved to ski.

  Some said he was tall, others short; he was either portly or gaunt, charming or aloof. Although he sat for Cartier-Bresson and Man Ray he fled photographers, and some journalists claimed that he paid the newspaper vendor across from his apartment to wave a feather duster if any were lurking in the street below. He never took a bow at the end of a collection, and so few people had even seen him. He was, says Women’s Wear Daily’s retired publisher John B. Fairchild, a strange duck.

  It got to the point where some fashion writers wondered if he was a real person, while others thought that, like Shakespeare, he was several. In fifty years as a designer he never gave an interview. There must have been some explanation for the incalculable beauty of his clothes, but of course none could be found. And none would have been sought had he remained in his native Spain, esteemed but forgotten by now. Instead, he came to Paris, and Paris had, for nearly three hundred years, been the fashion capital of the world.

  I daresay Italy was as qualified in terms of invention and taste, but it was not unified under a single leader. France’s ascendancy began when Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, informed the king that the silk weavers of Lyons were as valuable to the French economy as the gold mines of Peru were to Spain. Inventing endless and costly rules for court dress, the king easily made fashion a national preoccupation. By the mid-nineteenth century, because the silk makers had threatened to strike, Napoléon III insisted that the Empress Eugénie wear Charles Frederick Worth’s enormously wide silk skirts. The empress referred to them as her toilettes politiques.

  Having shown that it had a use, fashion came to have a meaning. It spoke volumes to Balzac and Baudelaire and Proust. The symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé founded a fashion magazine and provided all its contents under such pseudonyms as Marguerite de Ponty and Miss Satin. Leading French philosophers of the latter twentieth century wrote about fashion, most notably the semiologist Roland Barthes, whose article on Chanel versus Courrèges is said to have boosted the younger designer’s sales: “The unchanging ‘chic’ of Chanel tells us that the woman has already lived (and has known how to); the obstinate ‘brandnewness’ of Courrèges that she is going to live,” he explained.

  According to Chanel, Paul Valéry had decreed that a woman wearing the wrong perfume has no future, and even at a lower level fashion made its point: in 1936 a policeman refused to arrest a feminist who chained herself to a railing at the Longchamp races. “I couldn’t arrest her,” he stated. “She was dressed by Molyneux.”

  1936: this was the year that Balenciaga moved to Paris and found an alert and avid clientele, expert seamstresses, and superb fournisseurs (it has been estimated that he regularly used fifty-five fabric manufacturers, twelve embroiderers, and six makers of such trimmings as feathers, fringes, and lace). Fashion was an integral part of French cultural display, and Paris was the fashion theater of the world. Balenciaga moved quickly to center stage. “If a woman came in in a Balenciaga dress, no other woman in the room existed,” Diana Vreeland wrote.

  He didn’t follow the scene because he was the scene. He demanded that his designs, not himself, get the attention, which led to misunderstandings and a good deal of myth making from fashion editors in need of copy and from clients he refused to meet. If fashion is rooted in change and is deliberately delusional, his work was like a steady beacon even when it was—and it could be—downright bizarre. By 1962, American Vogue gave up trying to define his art and simply titled a four-page spread in its April issue “The Balenciaga Mystique”:

  Whatever it takes to hold vast numbers of women in the palm of your hand year after year, Balenciaga has it—to a degree that politicans and matinée idols might study with profit. Not that his clothes are easy to wear; on the contrary, they could hardly be more demanding—of elegance, wit, real clothes authority. Nor do they bristle with news; the changes he makes each season are usually just significant enough to make it dazzlingly clear that a woman in a this-year Balenciaga is a woman in touch with some of the soundest—and, possibly, most prophetic—fashion thinking of her time.

  Balenciaga was an upright man of humble background, slight education, innate dignity, and a very thin skin. He never realized how useful a mask can be: when his close friend Hubert de Givenchy gave him a Picasso drawing and asked if he would like to meet the painter, Balenciaga recoiled: “He is always wearing disguises,” he said. “The man is a clown.”

  A deeply observant Catholic (he even made a shroud for a statue of Saint Roseline in Provence), he had a feeling for ritual and for the large gesture. He despised useless detail; he spoke little. From this there grew a public image of finicky austerity and frequent descriptions of his fashion house as a monastery or church. Exaggerated, and yet his clothes had what only can be called a mystical, even a moral, effect on some of his high-stepping clients. Diana Vreeland found biblical implications in the harmony of his clothes: “women are suddenly feeling perfectly at one with creation.” Mrs. Paul (“Bunny”) Mellon said his dresses gave her courage, Gloria Guinness wondered whether she was good enough to wear them, and Claudia Heard de Osborne in Texas declared that she wanted to be buried in a favorite Balenciaga so that she would be properly dressed when she met Cristóbal in heaven. Pauline de Rothschild, who was dressed by Balenciaga for twenty-three years, said, “I knew and loved other dressmakers and understood them, but the mysteries were Balenciaga’s.”

  His friends and employees emphasize his allure. He was also very trying: a collaborator remembers Balenciaga in a London restaurant sending back the sole three times. His demands were harsh but—such is the way of genius�
�he was hardest on himself, seeking an invisible, and possibly unattainable, goal. His staff often suffered and were always devoted, even when they had to submit to searches to make sure they weren’t leaving work with secret patterns or designs.

  His technique was inimitable. Only a few years ago in London, a seamstress working on a dress for a Balenciaga exhibition noticed that the apparently straight seam of a narrow dress was, when examined from the inside, intricately curved to suit the client’s less than slim body.

  So what to make of him when the words of fashion experts (I am not one) so often failed and when so little evidence of his private life remains? There is today, it is true, the acclaimed ready-to-wear house called Balenciaga in his old premises on the Avenue George V, but he knew that the glory of haute couture ended with him and he expressed, vainly, the wish that his name die, too. There are elegiac Balenciaga exhibitions and even a Balenciaga museum in his birthplace. And yet where is Balenciaga? Where, outside the secrecy of his studio, can we ever find the man?

  We can’t, and it would be disrespectful to try. But rather than examine his twice-yearly collections, we can try to see him in his times and among his staff and suppliers, “the people who make the buttons.” The aim is not to explain the inexplicable but to celebrate it. Those who admire him want to know him better, aware that we cannot really know him at all. A paradox, and mighty unsatisfactory, but also a homage of sorts—to the art, the discretion, and even the contradictions of the man.

  The idea of trying to sketch Balenciaga within the historical events of his time (which he, typically, tried to ignore) and in the context of his house came during many luncheons with Florette Chelot, his top vendeuse, or saleswoman, and the first person he hired in Paris. When we began taping her memories she was in her nineties, with an amazingly clear recall of her thirty-one years with Balenciaga and sharp, though generous, judgment. As she told me in detail about the little realities of daily life at the Avenue George V and the interplay between designer and client and staff—no one before had thought to ask her—suddenly what I had noticed or read about the house of Balenciaga fell into a different perspective, and it became a living place rather than a church.

  So this is also very much a double portrait: the search for Balenciaga and the story of Florette, whom I had met when I was a job-hunting New Yorker just out of college, introduced by a young Englishman about town who took me over to the Avenue George V to meet her. She was so kind, so amused by my shyness (and probably also so dismayed by my styleless dress) that she promptly went to the leftovers box and fished out a suit for me at a bargain-basement price.

  This continued for a few years, until Balenciaga closed in 1968. I suppose that by then I owned about a dozen Balenciagas, most of them ending up in thrift shops because museums weren’t interested in Balenciaga’s plainer dresses and I had no place to keep them over eleven Paris apartment changes. Although I had no clothes left, I did happen on a snapshot of me in a beautiful collarless gray and white tweed coat. My memory was that it looked terrific, but the picture showed that I had ruined the clean neckline by leaving it open and hanging down like an extra flap of skin. My dress collar peeped out, headed toward my left ear.

  I found the photo irresistibly comic and brought it to Florette for a laugh. Suddenly she was talking in her soothing old vendeuse voice: “Mais non,” she said, “what a charming idea to invent that lapel.” Some time later, I was foolish enough to mention the picture again, and in her normal voice she sighed. “Monsieur Balenciaga would have torn that coat off your back,” she said.

  1

  Cristóbal Balenciaga: a beautiful name. Elle magazine rhapsodized in 1950 that the four syllables of “Balenciaga” simply burst forth upon the page (actually, there are five), while a contemporary poet sees in the name’s “swaying melody the flowing quality of Balenciaga’s clothes and exquisite justesse of their proportions.” It is a once-upon-a-time sort of name that should be part of a fable, and it is.

  The setting is the humble fishing village of Getaria on Spain’s Basque coast, between San Sebastián and Bilbao, the date early in the last century. The fairy tale has many versions, but let Pauline de Rothschild, the former Pauline Potter, begin:

  In the center of a street made dark by the shadows of its thick stone houses, a woman was walking, her back turned to the light from the sea. She wore a pale, ankle length, silk shantung suit. The severe houses enclosed her, shuttered.

  A boy was watching her.

  She would come almost abreast of him, and he would run up a side-street of the fishing village, so closely carved into the mountain that its streets are as steep and narrow as Genoa’s, some entirely made of steps. Down another he would run and be ahead of her again.

  Then he would stare.

  One day he stopped her, and asked if he could make a suit for her. The boy was about thirteen, with dark hair and darker eyes and the smile he would keep all his life.

  “Why do you want to do this?” she asked.

  “Because I think I can,” he answered.

  The boy was Cristóbal Balenciaga …

  The woman was the old Marquesa de Casa Torres (or her daughter-in-law) and she was wearing a white (or beige) Worth, Drecoll, Ceruit, or Redfern dress or suit, according to who is telling the tale. She was possibly on her way to (or from) Mass. The boy may have been as young as six (or as old as nineteen), and his father—who had died of a heart attack or was drowned at sea—was either a fisherman or the captain of the royal yacht. Cheeky young Cristóbal, the legend continues, copied her outfit so perfectly that the marquesa became his patron and took him while he was still in his teens to meet the great couturier Jacques Doucet in Paris.

  Some of this is true.

  But much of it isn’t. The very plainness of plain fact has never seemed to fit someone so exotic as Balenciaga (as if the amazing could not spring from the quotidian), and so for decades the legends were embellished rather than investigated. Then a young Basque curator named Miren Arzalluz took the trouble to dig into official records and in 2010 published her findings about Balenciaga’s family and early years. Myths, uncovered facts, and one’s own instinct about the mix can finally make a coherent, if spare, whole.

  Getaria, Balenciaga’s birthplace, is a modest and handsome fishing village whose past as a whaling port brought it sufficient wealth to have as its center an oversize Gothic church, San Salvador, of surpassing gloom and considerable weirdness because its near-trapezoidal floor tilts noticeably up toward the altar. A statue near the city hall honors the local hero, Sebastián de Elcano, the first captain to circumnavigate the globe (as Magellan’s second in command he took over when Magellan was killed in the Philippines), and new plaques mark the birthplaces of Balenciaga, in a tidy small house near the church, and the mother of Plácido Domingo, over an anchovy cannery. Getaria has excellent fish that restaurateurs grill in the street, and gray buildings whose sound proportions and straightness of line are bolder than the often-quaint Basque architecture of France. Even now Getaria has an air of provincial rectitude; its inhabitants provided San Sebastián, thirty kilometers along the coast, with fish and services when the Spanish king and his court went there each summer.

  In about 1853, France’s Empress Eugénie, who was born in Spain, invented Biarritz as a fashionable resort. Following her example, in 1887, Queen María Cristina of Spain decided to make San Sebastián, across the border, the official summer home of the Spanish court. While Biarritz is dramatic and citified, San Sebastián is calmer and more elegant, with a wide seafront and restaurants that have made it a foodie mecca today. Friends in Paris were often surprised by the supposedly austere Balenciaga’s pleasure in good eating, but he was Basque, and three existential questions, it is said, trouble the Basques each day: Where do we come from? Who are we? What are we going to have for dinner?

  The last question results in excellent local cooking; the first two are harder. No one knows where the Basques come from—even the prevalent blood typ
e differs from that of other Europeans—and they like to think of themselves as Europe’s aborigines, their spiritual locus being an ancient oak tree in Guernica. The Basques’ language, Euskera, once believed to be the tongue spoken in the Garden of Eden, bears no relation to any other, and they group all the other languages in the world in one single dismissive word, Erdera. They are proud (by an ancient royal Spanish edict they are all aristocrats), deeply Catholic, and intractable. Cristóbal Balenciaga was definitely Basque.

  Beachgoers at San Sebastián, circa 1900

  The family was modest but respected: his father, a fisherman, served briefly as mayor of Getaria and rose to skipper the launch that was often used by the Spanish court, including the queen, in the summer season. His mother bore five children, two of whom died in infancy. Cristóbal, born in 1895, was the youngest; his sister, Agustina, and his brother, Juan Martín, remained his business associates in Spain throughout their lives. The older children were already at work when their father died after a stroke, leaving eleven-year-old Cristóbal alone to help out his mother, Martina Eizaguirre.

  Well before her husband’s death Martina was already giving sewing lessons to local girls and making dresses for private clients such as the Marquesa de Casa Torres, whose dressmaker she became a year before before Cristóbal was born. Hubert de Givenchy says that Balenciaga told him that his first attempt at design was to make a necklace for his cat (“but since you can’t make a cat lie on its back all the beads scattered”), while a French magazine claims that he began by making a coat, including the legs, for his dog (presumably an early manifestation of his passion for sleeves). In any event the boy was at home with his mother, helping out, playing with scraps of fabric, and often going with her for fittings in the homes of summering aristocrats.

  So the long-accepted legend of the meeting between the marquesa and the boy must be replaced by more convincing fact: he knew the marquesa and her home, just up the hill from the center of Getaria, from childhood. While he was helping his mother or playing with the marquesa’s children, he took in her wardrobe and her fashion magazines and her well-chosen furnishings (the marqués owned paintings by Goya and Velásquez), plugging naturally into the world of high style where he would spend his life. Not only could he study the Paris gowns his mother copied for summer use, but he could also learn to appreciate English tailoring and take in such novelties as department stores and buying by catalog, both of which the marquesa enjoyed.