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

by Mary Blume

  Marie-Louise Bousquet

  Carmel Snow from Harper’s Bazaar came over in January for the summer 1940 collections in order, she said, to give the French fashion industry a boost. Her aide was the wizened, clever Marie-Louise Bousquet, an earlier attempt by Snow to employ Daisy Fellowes having faded when the fabulously rich Mrs. Fellowes received buyers, if at all, reclining on her Neuilly chaise longue and wearing Chinese pajamas in peacock blue silk. (Marie-Louise Bousquet was neither rich nor elegant but she was a major mover in artistic and literary circles and a gifted gossip of the sort who doesn’t embellish the truth but invents it.)

  Balenciaga opened the collections, a star by now with press and buyers fighting to get in, according to London’s Daily Express. L’Officiel de la Haute Couture praised his profound originality, and Vogue and Harper’s reported purchases by Marshall Field in Chicago and Hattie Carnegie in New York, proof that he was definitely in the buyers’ books. Florette’s sales soared for the month of January, then slowly dropped so that in June, when the Germans marched into Paris, they were very slight, and in July and August there were none at all. Balenciaga was in Madrid attending to his Spanish houses, which remained open during the war, while Florette and the directrice stayed on to protect Avenue George V because the Germans intended to shut it down. But the Spanish embassy intervened, and because Germany was courting neutral Spain to enter the war on its side, Balenciaga was allowed to return to a Paris that was deserted and without hope. The month the Germans arrived, Florette had snapped a photo (the only one ever taken) of the three founders, Balenciaga, Bizcarrondo, and d’Attainville, smiling on the balcony at 10 Avenue George V.

  The Germans had marched into Paris on June 14, 1940. It had all happened so quickly, just a month after their breakthrough at Sedan, yet the civilians at the Louvre, who had shipped their treasures to safety as early as 1938, had foreseen the debacle. A corrupt and confused government and hopeless military leadership made it easy. French troops were neither outnumbered nor ill-armed: the problem was their generals, fusty relics from World War I with kepis deep in gold braid and outmoded ideas. General Gamelin, hero of the Battle of the Marne and known to his troops as Gaga-melin, refused to disturb his sleep by installing a radio or telegraph in his fortress outside Paris, and Marshal Pétain attributed the defeat to the fact that newfangled communications had taken the place of reliable carrier pigeons.

  Florette snaps the three founders in 1940: (from left to right) Bizcarrondo, d’Attainville, and Balenciaga

  But Pétain, the eighty-four-year-old Victor of Verdun, blue-eyed with a snowy cowcatcher mustache, occupied no military post during the defeat and so nothing was held against him, neither his views on carrier pigeons (if they were known) nor the fact that he had been the first government minister to flee Paris. Parliament voted him full powers, 569 for, 80 against, and 20 abstentions. He was the would-be restorer of an ancient moral order that had unraveled in the dislocated present and he promised redemption for past weaknesses. Short months later he was photographed shaking hands with Hitler. For many it was the sensible way. “What is the worst thing that can happen if Germany invades?” the writer Jean Giono had asked. “Become German? I’d rather be a living German than a dead Frenchman.”

  The good part was that the French didn’t even have to become German. Under the new regime, the collaboration government, with headquarters in the spa town of Vichy, was French-run and the French police were put in charge of all crime, including political crime. As Robert O. Paxton, the finest historian of Vichy France, wrote, “The logic of the armistice poison thus drew Vichy into trying to do the Germans’ dirty work for them.” Sometimes the work was dirtier than even the Germans demanded: sending Jewish children to their deaths was a French initiative.

  That France seemed to have been given more freedom than other occupied countries was simply a great convenience for the Germans. Their troops, assigned to relatively light Occupation duty thanks to a soon-enlarged French police force, were available for battle in the East, and the Germans benefited from an obedient French government, huge payments for Occupation indemnities, and raw materials and labor that were cheap against a new, and highly unfavorable, exchange rate. Pétain, comfortably tucked away in Vichy, 195 miles south of Paris, was more than compliant, and the word patriotism was stretched by all sides to the point where it made no sense. “I used my power as a shield to protect the people,” Pétain told a judicial inquiry after the war. “I paved the way for Liberation by preserving France, suffering but alive.”

  It was not a time for heroics, because the worst possible thing had already happened to the French: their belief in themselves was shattered. In the Battle of Britain spines stiffened, in France’s war they slumped. England loves itself in adversity, France loves itself in majesty and there was none left. The French became both victims and accomplices, their one aim to see that life went on, whatever that meant.

  “Abandoned populations—put your trust in the German soldier,” said a poster showing a handsome soldier enfolding a small urchin in one arm and with the other offering a biscuit to a child clinging to his knees. The Occupation troops were carefully chosen, especially for Paris. They were neat and mannerly, and the word still used about them ad nauseam is “correct.”

  “The one thing we learned in four years of Occupation is that the German is correct,” Jean Dutourd would write in his savage black market satire, Au Bon Beurre. Their hair was so well brushed, their boots were so well shined, their respect for French culture was so affecting. Speaking of a German soldier over lunch at Florence Gould’s, Marie-Louise Bousquet told the ineffably correct writer and officer Ernst Jünger, “With a regiment of young men of his caliber the Germans could have conquered France without firing a shot.”

  * * *

  With all of France’s riches to plunder, the Germans made their first major move on, of all things, the haute couture. The entire fashion industry, including its workers, would be transported to Berlin.

  It seems to me that, in Nazi logic, it was a perfectly sound choice. High style was lacking, and the easiest thing was to appropriate it from France just as Göring took the paintings he fancied from the Jeu de Paume museum. The idea was not frivolous: Magda Goebbels and Emmy Göring and wives of other high officials and ambassadors had to be able to embody the culture and taste of the Third Reich as it took over the world.

  The fashion takeover began in late July, within weeks of the armistice, when five German officers entered the offices of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, high fashion’s governing body, questioned the general secretary, Daniel Gorin, who replied with caution, and then left with the files of foreign buyers.

  A few days later, a Sunday, the Germans broke into the offices and removed almost all the remaining files and archives. In August, the couturier Lucien Lelong, head of the Chambre Syndicale, was informed of the fate of the French haute couture: it was to disappear. Designers and their staffs would be transferred to Berlin or Vienna (which had a more fashionable past than Berlin), and Paris would lose an unfair monopoly that did not correspond to the needs of the New Europe. Lelong replied, “Haute couture is French or it does not exist,” and told the Germans that fashion creativity cannot be stolen since it springs from cultural traditions.

  Lelong owned a successful house whose well-bred clothes were produced by a team of designers that included Pierre Balmain and Christian Dior. “He dressed women very well, nothing extraordinary but in good taste and well-made,” said Florette, who admired him. More significantly for dealing with the Germans, he was the one designer who was also part of Paris society, according to Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, an infallible arbiter of such things. Even Chanel, always welcome at fancy dress balls because she was amusing and wore wonderful costumes, would not be invited to private dinners, something she understood and accepted perfectly well. “There was a social custom that one did not entertain one’s tradespeople,” she told the journalist Marcel Haedrich. Le
long came from a gentlemanly background and, above all, was married to a beautiful and very mondaine Russian princess, Natalie Paley. His social standing, of which the Germans were surely aware, helped make him a formidable opponent.

  Using his connections, Lelong quite simply saved the haute couture. His first act was to enlist the press and radio in a campaign to show the cultural importance of French fashion, a move that cut across political lines. As Germaine Beaumont, a dowdy but influential author, wrote, “It may be just a dress but it is the entire country that created it.”

  Lelong’s next step was to show that the loss of the couture would be an economic disaster for France and therefore for Germany: not only would the great houses be gone but a legion of small suppliers of buttons, trimmings, feathers, and embroidery would be out of work. On the other hand, keeping the couture in France meant the possibility of earning a great deal of foreign currency from neutral countries in exchange for very little raw material. “Before the war,” he argued, “it was calculated that one exported haute couture model enabled us to purchase ten tons of coal.”

  Summoned with Daniel Gorin to Berlin, Lelong did not let up. And eventually the Germans backed off, convinced that the couture would break down on its own under draconian rationing and constant harassment. It was awarded a so-called state of exception, which was then called into question no fewer than fourteen times (both Balenciaga and Grès were briefly shut down, then allowed to reopen). “More than once observers were sent from Berlin who demanded that the collections be shown to them,” Lelong wrote, “but it was never possible to discover the exact nature of their mission.”

  Vionnet had retired and Mainbocher, an American, and Molyneux, who was British, left France, as did Schiaparelli, whose house remained open so that her workers would not be out of jobs. Chanel, who had shut down her couture activities to move to the Ritz with a German lover, kept her perfumes going so that she could seize back the rights she had sold to the Wertheimer brothers, who, as Jews, were now in exile. She failed on a legal technicality. Marcel Rochas, who dressed the wife of Prime Minister Pierre Laval, crossed the street rather than greet his Jewish former clients; pretty blond Jacques Fath and his pretty blonde wife, Geneviève, became ornaments of what were politely called Franco-German gatherings.

  The remaining houses were limited to thirty (more were later added) and their fabric consumption was cut to 50 percent of what it had been before the war. Each collection could show only 100 models, reduced to 60 by 1944, with yardage strictly regulated according to the kind of models—suits, coats, day dresses—shown.

  Just as Lelong’s efforts remain largely unsung outside the trade, so fashion historians tend to ignore the influence of the new sumptuary laws on styles during the Occupation. If Balenciaga, for example, showed few evening gowns, it was because from 1943 they could be sold only to actresses. If he used more lace and embroidery, it was not, as has been suggested, because of a Goya influence but because it had been decreed, in 1942, that in order to keep the smaller artisans in work, each collection had to include at least one model containing, or entirely composed of, lace. Embroidery was to be used on 10 percent of all models and two of them had to consist entirely of embroidery. It was not a situation likely to encourage creativity, but it kept 97 percent of the couture workforce in their jobs.

  In order to be a customer a woman had to hold a couture card (15,016 were issued in 1942), which was given in exchange for two hundred francs and two kilos of fabric. Another two hundred cards were allotted to the German authorities. Contrary to belief, couture customers during the Occupation were almost all French (German officers had for the most part left their wives at home), which accounts for the small number of German cards. Since couturiers, including Lelong, were obliged to receive all card-carrying customers, the clientele was a new mix. There was plenty of French funny money around, profiteers from sales of seized Jewish property and black marketers known as BOFs, from beurre, oeufs, fromage, the commodities so many of them dealt in.

  One couturier sold four dresses to a rather gross woman from whom, on his service staircase, he had earlier bought butter at the exorbitant price of three hundred francs a kilo, and, peering through the curtain one day at Lelong’s, Christian Dior said to his friend Pierre Balmain, “Just think! All these women are going to be shot wearing Lelong dresses!”

  There were questionable clients at Balenciaga, too, although the BOFs, while impressed by his high prices, generally preferred the showier clothes of someone like Fath. Marie-Louise Bousquet dropped by, of course—“she was not very appreciated by us,” Florette said—and while Florette’s order book shows no German names, most of the clients were new: the mistresses (sometimes titled) of German officers and the wives of Vichy government officials. Many of the Rothschilds had gone to New York, where the Baroness Alain dressed at Hattie Carnegie and received, she never knew how, the occasional hat from her Paris milliner, including one with a sweeping green feather that she happened to wear on Saint Patrick’s Day. “They thought I was Irish,” she said.

  The house of Balenciaga was, like the rest of Paris, too quiet, too expensive, and too cold: after the war Carmel Snow’s fitter apologized for the slowness of her chilblained hands. Clients had to climb three flights of stairs since the elevator was shut down, but still they came. “So many houses were closed and Balenciaga was much in demand,” Florette said. By l943, when the war was at its worst, her sales, bolstered by high prices, surpassed those of 1938. Clients ordered slacks for country or home use, culottes for bicycling, fur-lined hostess gowns, and an outfit called a bain de soleil, a halter-necked playsuit for women who were in the unoccupied south of France and at play. Wladzio d’Attainville, his military service over with the French defeat, made huge hats to balance austere outfits until the authorities banned hats as a waste of material and Balenciaga called in the hairdresser Guillaume to build big chignons padded with a piece of stuffing known as a rat. Florette wore her rat as a false beard to one of the Saint Catherine’s Day parties but lost it when she put it on a table in order to drink an ersatz orangeade. Thereafter, and for the rest of her Balenciaga career, she scraped her hair back into a tight chignon à la banane.

  She bicycled to work in a brown corduroy culotte suit that she exchanged upstairs for her black vendeuse dress. Sometimes clients with country houses would bring a precious gift of food; sometimes she went with Maria, the rackety Spanish vendeuse, to a bar on the nearby Rue Boccador where one could pick up a bit of butter or a black market egg. “So I had to go out drinking with her and when I came home my husband was glad but said you’re picking up bad habits.” The rule of the times, she says, was to say nothing and think nothing. “It was a question of work,” she finally said one day when I had asked one question too many. “It may seem strange to you, but it was easier to work with the occupier than against.”

  In the only interview he is known to have given, a year before his death, Balenciaga brought up the attempted German takeover: “You know that Hitler wanted to transfer the haute couture to Berlin. He sent six enormous Germans—much taller than I—to talk about it. I said he might as well take all the bullfighters to Berlin and try and train bullfighters there.”

  His reply sounds a bit sassy for someone so circumspect, but since he once told Givenchy, who had suggested that he had exaggerated something, “You must remember, my dear Hubert, that I have never in my life told a lie,” we must take the words as said. What is certain, if never acknowledged, is that the war years made Balenciaga into the great couturier he became.

  His unusual situation as a Spanish citizen in occupied Paris meant that he could travel to his couture houses in neutral Spain and bring back fabrics that, although less good than those of prewar France, were better than what was available.

  Another advantage was the continued publicity he got in the American press. French Vogue had closed down, so there was no Paris fashion news, but in the United States Vogue and Harper’s were able to publish the occa
sional Balenciaga design from Madrid. In 1941, Vogue described his “Drapery from Spain” and reproduced, with a half-page drawing by the leading illustrator, Eric, four models from the Barcelona branch that had been bought by I. Magnin in California. In 1944 Harper’s Bazaar showed his hats with the caption “Extravagance in Madrid.”

  The third benefit, and the most crucial to his development as a designer, was, quite simply, the silence of those gray years. Closed off in his studio, which became a sort of laboratory, Balenciaga could work quietly and develop his craft. Until then he had merely been gifted: by war’s end he was unique. Every scrap of fabric, no matter how synthetic and shoddy, became a subject of study. From this came his unequaled mastery of construction and his fanciful use in later years of embroidery and trimmings—the curly green plumes of ostrich feather on an evening coat, the cabochon pearls Lesage made for him in 1964, the black jade on brown lace, the swirls of chenille, the snowflake effect of a huge guipure lace evening cape, the expert trimmer Judith Barbier’s cascade of pink and white flowers made from parachute silk—all had their beginnings in the strictures of wartime Paris. Technique fully mastered, he was free to dazzle and to dare.

  When I asked Florette if, in addition to fabrics, Balenciaga ever brought back from Spain foods that were unobtainable in Paris, she replied, “He never gave me any, though once when I was in bed for a month with internal bleeding caused by a lack of vitamins, he brought me some lemons. I thought that was very kind. He needed me, but still it was kind.”