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

by Mary Blume

  Although he was never at ease with the French gratin, or upper crust, from her he picked up a comfortable familiarity with the Spanish aristocracy: it was of course Balenciaga who made the wedding dress of the marquesa’s great-grandaughter, Fabiola, when she married the king of the Belgians in 1960, and a few years later one of his models was astonished to see, on the salon’s white sofa, the taciturn Balenciaga laughing and chatting away with an elderly lady who turned out to be Victoria Eugenia, the former queen of Spain.

  Through the marquesa, the twelve-year-old Balenciaga apprenticed with a San Sebastián tailor, then moved on to a tonier shop called New England, and to the new San Sebastián branch of the Grand Magasins du Louvre department store, which was patronized not only by the marquesa but by María Cristina, the dowager queen. By 1913 he was being sent to Paris as a buyer. After a short spell in Bordeaux to learn French, in 1918 he opened his first salon, C. Balenciaga, in San Sebastián, then went into a six-year partnership with two sisters who provided most of the backing. Balenciaga’s investment was 7,362 pesetas and 25 céntimos, the 25 cents recalling that if his reputation was growing, his finances were still tight. When the six-year contract ended in 1924, he was able to open a new house, Cristóbal Balenciaga, gradually creating branches in Madrid and Barcelona under his name or under variations of Eisa, a reworking of his mother’s maiden name.

  The timing was just right. While most of Europe agonized in World War I, Spain, which remained neutral, flourished, especially San Sebastián, enriched by the wealth of Bilbao, a port and a banking and industrial center, and by the well-heeled of all nations who came to bask in its elegance and ease. Old-timers such as the duchess, who went to Paris each year to order 365 hats (366 in leap year), would disappear after the war, but the new crowd was avid and deeply attractive to Paris couturiers who, starting in l917, arrived with their collections. The major houses of Callot, Paquin, and Worth showed in such luxury hotels as the Maria Cristina, and Balenciaga saw, and possibly met, Chanel at San Sebastián’s casino. Most important, he began a lifelong friendship with Madeleine Vionnet, the first designer to use the bias cut on the body of a dress, fashion’s equivalent of inventing the wheel.

  Balenciaga probably met Vionnet when she showed her collection to the Spanish court at San Sebastián in 1920. He was already buying her clothes for his shop on his Paris trips (a hasty working sketch on a piece of hotel stationery in the Arts Décoratifs archive in Paris also suggests that he was not above pinching her ideas), but when they met and she saw his work she encouraged him to create rather than adapt other people’s designs. They shared a stubborn and exalted view of clothes as a sort of second skin that sculpts, rather than encases, the body: the couturier as a builder, not a decorator. They were both brilliant technicians, Balenciaga the more versatile in that he was as expert at tailoring coats and suits as at cutting soft fabrics, and both saw the designer as a craftsman dealing with clients and not as a remote artist. “A couturier dresses human beings, not dreams,” Vionnet would say. Their friendship lasted until Balenciaga’s death, and when I met Vionnet in the late 1960s she was just back from a two-week stay in Balenciaga’s country house near Orléans to recover from bronchitis and was wearing a floor-length bias-cut wool crepe skirt and matching vest that he had made for her in bright red (her own palette tended to shades of beige).

  Balenciaga copies a dress on a buying trip to Paris

  They were of equal historical importance—if Dior later called Balenciaga “the master of us all,” he also said “no one has carried the art of dressmaking farther than Vionnet”—but she was a generation older, having been born in 1876, and was already approaching glory when they met. Their clothes were dissimilar, Vionnet specializing in richly simple Greek-style folds, a deliciously errant vestal look, but they shared ardor and integrity—“a dress must be sincere,” Vionnet said—and had so intense an understanding of fabrics that neither of them liked to sketch. “I hate sketching. Designers who sketch have no feeling for fabric,” Vionnet said. Instead, she draped her fabrics on a wooden doll 31.5 inches tall, and Givenchy told me that when she was very old and bedridden and Balenciaga came to visit, she would show him something she had just confected on the doll with the wish that it might be useful to him. “And Cristóbal, with that marvelous smile, would say to me, Isn’t it adorable that at her age this woman would continue to work and give me her models,” Givenchy said. “He had until the end of his life someone who counted enormously for him, and that was Madame Vionnet.”

  To the young Balenciaga, Vionnet must have seemed like a favorite teacher, firm but kind, and indeed she had hoped to teach, but a neighbor pointed out to her father (her mother had run off) that further studies would mean more clothing bills, so at the age of ten she was yanked out of school and apprenticed to a dressmaker. “If I had become a professor I would just have had a brain,” she said many years later. “Instead I discovered my hands and learned to love them.” In England to pick up the language, she became an attendant in a lunatic asylum, then worked for five years in Kate Reilly’s dressmaking establishment on Dover Street in London. Returning to Paris, she was engaged by the prestigious Callot Soeurs, then hired away by Jacques Doucet, a very grand designer and collector (he was an early patron of the furniture designer Eileen Gray and the first owner of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), in order to modernize his house. It was there that she discovered that the bias cut, a version of which had been used only to line garments, could give fabrics a new fluidity: “I wanted it and found it,” she told me. “It seemed natural.” The vendeuses, she added, hated it. In 1912 she opened her own modest house on the Rue de Rivoli and in 1923 got backing to become the first couturier on the Avenue Montaigne.

  Madeleine Vionnet

  The House of Vionnet, at number 50, towered over its neighbors and triumphed in the architectural press as a perfect example of steel and glass Art Deco. It had 1,900 employees and 43 ateliers. While the grand salon of a house like Callot was heavy and crowded with furniture, Vionnet had a vast clean space framed with arches bordered in Lalique glass. When it came to opening his Paris house, Balenciaga followed Vionnet in keeping his public rooms simple and his private studio strictly off-limits. He did not follow Vionnet’s more compassionate innovations—a free staff cafeteria, medical service, and child care as well as classes for those who, like her, had had to leave school too young. Since he shared her loathing for copyists, having himself been one on a modest scale, he adopted her practice of photographing each model with its number, flat police lineup pictures, though he did not, like Vionnet, put his thumbprint on the label of every dress he made.

  Vionnet was stronger and more authoritative than the young Balenciaga—he would not have said “I have never seen a fabric that refused to obey me,” even though it was true—and it was her strength and encouragement that helped him free his fantasy and develop his prodigious technique.

  Discovering his talents, the young Balenciaga had great success—by the age of twenty-one he is said to have dressed the queen of Spain—and success brought a confidence he lost in his later days when his sole, and impossible, rival was his glorious self. After each new collection in the 1950s and ’60s, people recalled, he would be tearful and tense because it hadn’t been up to his standard. In all, it was a dog’s life, he said after his retirement. But when he was young and imperfect, all he had to do was get better, and he did.

  And he found love. Probably on a buying trip to Paris he met a charming and well-connected young man with sleek dark hair, Wladzio Jaworowski d’Attainville, with whom he would live for some twenty years. D’Attainville was Polish-French; his mother, according to a story in American Vogue in the 1940s, entertained in style and was photographed grandly under a portrait of Princess Ghika, her grandmother. Wladzio joined Balenciaga and Balenciaga’s sister and brother in the Spanish company, designed witty hats, and smoothly made contacts that Balenciaga, less experienced, was still awkward about.

  Early Balenciag
a is not exciting (his first extant design, made in 1912 when he was seventeen, is a stiff but correct floor-length black suit with a jabot of boned lace). He was forming the rock-solid base that made his later vanguard designs so appealing and convincing. And he knew intimately the needs of his well-off and conservative clientele.

  Balenciaga’s Paris portrait, 1927

  By 1927, when he was important enough to have his portrait made, he did not commission a local but went to Paris and sat for Boris Lipnitzki, the fashionable celebrity photographer of Poiret, Schiaparelli, Cocteau, and Chanel. The resulting series shows a gracile, perfectly tailored, and easeful young man of great beauty, with fine hands, a long fastidious upper lip, and heavy brows crowning limpid and myopic dark eyes.

  It was a golden new world, and there were cracks in it. The year that Balenciaga posed for Lipnitzki he opened a less expensive second house for a younger clientele in San Sebastián, since the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, ruling as prime minister with the complicity of the king, had cut into the luxury trade by closing the casino. Worse, much worse, was to come. There is no conflict more dreadful than a civil war, and in Spain the tremors began soon after the Second Republic—the last freely elected Spanish government for forty years—took over in April 1931.

  The economy, mismanaged by Primo de Rivera, was deeply in trouble: the peseta had lost nearly 50 percent of its value, unemployment was rising while industrial production fell, and the Morgan bank had cancelled a $60 million loan. Francisco Franco—Europe’s youngest general since Napoléon—was waiting in the wings.

  Franco indicated that he would restore King Alfonso XIII, who had been best man at his wedding, and many early supporters believed that he would bring back the good old days, the sturdy status quo. Like most craftsmen in luxury trades, Balenciaga was as conservative as his patrons and—as he showed later during the Occupation of Paris—totally indifferent to politics. Franco detested the unruly Basques, displaying the gravest cruelty when he allowed his German allies to test their new aircraft by bombing Guernica and its sacred oak tree, symbol of Basque unity, on a sunny market day in April 1937. But Franco’s wife, the nearly aristocratic Carmen Polo, was a Balenciaga client from as early as 1933, when he made her a long bias-cut black faille gown for the ceremony at which her husband took command of the Balearic Islands. The last dress he ever made, weeks before his death in 1972, was her granddaughter’s wedding gown.

  The houses of Balenciaga—he had opened branches in Madrid and Barcelona while continuing to live in San Sebastián—remained open during the sieges of both cities. In San Sebastián, which Franco bombed by air and sea, there was deadly street fighting and the stench of war invaded even the Maria Cristina hotel, scene of so many fashion shows, where it was claimed that Franquists used live bodies as sandbags. By mid-September 1936, refugees were fleeing by the thousands and Balenciaga was among them, surely not for political reasons but because he knew that luxury trades do not flourish during a civil war.

  He decided to head for Paris with Nicolás and Virgilia Bizcarrondo, whom Vogue’s Bettina Ballard says he met in a bomb shelter but who were in fact neighbors in his apartment building. Nicolás, a militant Republican opposed to Franco, was a balding engineer with a knobby, pleasant face; his wife was comfortably plump and wealthy and had a sister living in Paris. Wladzio had his excellent social connections. So why not relocate?

  The Bizcarrondos in the 1950s

  The usual view is that the Balenciaga who left Spain in 1936 was a gifted tyro who bloomed in the creative air of Paris, but in truth he was already a seasoned success, forty-one years old. Legend also portrays him as a dreamy recluse remote from money matters, but he had proved his business skills by creating—and, when necessary, discarding—no fewer than seven houses during his Spanish years, shrewdly adapting from couture to semi-ready-to-wear as the times demanded. And anyway there was never a question of shutting down Balenciaga/Spain, or a doubt that he would return when the unpleasantness was over.

  * * *

  The Paris they found was nominally peaceful but so bestirred by economic and political problems that the word revolution was muttered, if not said aloud. The scandal caused by the financial outrages of the Stavisky affair in 1934 had revealed widescale corruption and was followed by a general strike, violent anti-Semitism, riots in the Place de la Concorde—the worst since the Commune of 1871—and the selection as prime minister a few months before Balenciaga arrived of Léon Blum, a man whose probity and humanity ensured that his tenure would be brief. Even the house of Chanel went on strike, its workers demanding that Mademoiselle receive their delegates. She refused on the grounds that the word delegate was unfamiliar to her. It was a tired, rotting world mad for something new. “It was this that made the thirties so memorable,” Janet Flanner wrote, “for what was new automatically became a fresh formula for new memories.” A good moment for a fresh face on the fashion scene.

  Balenciaga found space on the third floor of 10 Avenue George V, a few blocks from Vionnet and next to Mainbocher, whose quarters he would take over after World War II. The first person he hired was a twenty-five-year-old vendeuse with brown hair, a competent air set off by a smile at once delighted and comforting, and a black order book from her previous job at her mother-in-law’s fashion house. Her name was Florette Chelot.

  “I was recommended by a friend in the fabric business,” Florette told me. “I arrive, I find a very handsome and charming man who speaks French rather badly. He is in a big bare space which later became two workrooms, seated on a stool in front of a trestle table filled with swatches of fabric. He said, I am sorry I cannot offer you a chair because this stool and table is all there is. He didn’t even have any ateliers then.

  10 Avenue George V

  “So we chatted and got to know each other. I told him about myself, that I knew the métier from my mother-in-law and I knew the business side from working with sales offices.” Her black book included such names as Mme César Ritz, Bloomingdales, and Harrods. “He immediately said fine and I said, If you agree, I’ll start making contacts with clients and buyers.” He agreed and offered her a 10 percent commission on sales.

  “When he saw what I sold after the first collection he cut me down to five percent because he said otherwise I’d be earning more than he did.” In later years Balenciaga’s bookkeeper would tell Florette that her sales accounted for half the earnings of the couture house.

  Florette was born Amélie Flore Delion in Burgundy, in the village of Égriselles-le-Bocage, where her mother ran a small hotel for commercial travelers and Florette went to the local school in her black sateen smock buttoned in the back and wooden shoes. “I loved my sabots, I used to admire my feet as I walked and decorate them with flowers. In the winter I used them as skis.” When the weather was fine the neighbors would sit outdoors and Florette would go from house to house and sing to them.

  It was a sunny and loving childhood. Then her mother died in 1918 from Spanish flu: “I was happy until the age of seven” is how Florette put it. Her grieving father sold the hotel, bought another, and then died when she was eleven, leaving her in the charge of her older sister. She left school unwillingly and at fifteen was in Paris living in a pension her sister found on the Rue Eugène Carrière in Montmartre, where the girls had to cover their bodies in a gown when they took a bath and dinner was vegetable soup with no vegetables. She quickly found work as a telephonist at the new Paris buying office of the New York merchant Henri Bendel, although she had nothing much to recommend her aside from doggedness, a good nature, and tidy handwriting of which she remained proud all her life.

  The very first day at work a charming older man of twenty-four named Pierre Chelot showed her how to plug the wires into the switchboard and how to address telephone operators. He became her Pygmalion and, in 1931, her husband, but at first he was simply her mentor. Pierre, nicknamed Payot, was the son of a top fitter at Callot Soeurs, where his father was a director, and had always worked on the
edge of fashion. Employed by a silk maker in Lyons, he was charged with introducing a local seamstress, Yvette Labrousse, the recently crowned Miss France, to the Paris couture. She later married the Aga Khan and became one of Florette’s best clients.

  The salon, or showroom, at Balenciaga

  Florette took night classes at Berlitz and in 1929 went briefly to England, where she improved her English by learning popular songs. “I cahnt geeve you enyseeng baht loove, babby,” she sang to me in her chirpy voice over lunch in a bistro near her flat on the Île St. Louis while telling about her stay in Sussex. Sometimes, she once said, she wished she had been an actress, and I could imagine her not as a leading lady but as the soubrette in an operetta, saucy and warmhearted. There was indeed a touch of theater in her Balenciaga days when, in shining her full attention on the client, she in turn became the focus for that client, as if she were onstage. She liked it and did it spectacularly well.

  The salon at Callot Soeurs

  Payot saw to her education, even getting her to read Proust, and introduced her to his mother, who renamed her Florette and whom she adored. “You who have a family cannot imagine what it was like for me to find one,” she told me. Henriette Chelot, a fine-looking woman in her Callot dresses and Hellstern shoes, might have hoped that her only son would make a more advantageous match, but even when Florette fell ill with tuberculosis of the uterus and became unable to bear children, Mme Chelot encouraged the marriage, gave the young couple a big engagement reception at the Hotel George V, and took them into her home at St. Cloud. And it was thanks to her that Florette became a vendeuse in the haute couture.