by Mary Blume
Florette was indeed at ease and made others feel the same, to the point where the clients of other vendeuses felt they could ask her advice. “Dear Florette,” the socialite Mrs. Gilbert (“Kitty”) Miller wrote to her from New York. “Would you be very kind and write me a little letter with the numbers of the models you think I would like. I don’t wish to hurt Lily’s feelings and let her think I have consulted with you, but I think you have wonderful taste and you know which dresses are good for me.”
Her order book bulged, her figure was svelte in her black Balenciaga, her hair tight in its tidy chignon. She sat at her vendeuse’s desk radiating confidence and good humor. That was the Florette I met in the early 1960s, when I went to the house of Balenciaga for the first time.
I was more curious than scared. The ground floor boutique was quiet, the ride to the third floor in the cordovan-leather-lined elevator smooth. The first sight of Véra, scowling in greeting, caused me a qualm or two; so did walking between two rows of vendeuses gazing up from their desks in bored contempt. I was wearing a cotton shirtwaist dress. My friend George carried a pot of homemade jam. We reached Florette’s desk, third on the left, and she looked up and smiled.
Balenciaga’s top vendeuse goes to work
George was young and English, a remittance man paid a tiny monthly allowance to stay away from the family bank in Hong Kong. We were each living in crummy hotel rooms and we were both short of cash and idle, I because I was unsuccessfully job hunting, George because he had no intention of dulling his existence with work. He spoke half a dozen languages, knew everyone, and cooked lunch on his hot plate for worldly women whom he charmed and amused. It was after one of those luncheons that he telephoned me and said we were off to take some jam to his new friend, Florette.
We had already been to all the collections, so I was familiar with the lily of the valley scent of Dior and wifely glamour at Balmain. In those days the couture houses showed their collections afternoons at three o’clock for a month or so after the openings, and anyone with the time—of which we had plenty—could drop by after the buyers and big spenders had gone. (This was long before the collections became one-shot musical extravaganzas in eccentric venues—Prada at the Communist Party headquarters, Lagerfeld filling the huge dome of the Grand Palais with dry ice, macabre McQueen recalling the execution of Marie-Antoinette at the Conciergerie.) Balenciaga was the grandest to watch, sublimely out of reach.
I yearned but I knew nothing, having been brought up in New York to think that fashion was for other people. As a teenager I wore Tangee lipstick and wished it were Fire and Ice, I had crinolines and Capezios and wanted them to be sheaths and spike heels. Our parents thought we should look like Doris Day, we would have preferred Lauren Bacall (both of them, although so different, born in 1924). It was still a time of Junior Miss departments whose style was more virginal than young. We wore panty girdles and Peter Pan collars, staid and safely sexless. The whole point, I think, was to keep us from being what we most wanted to be: grown-up. Our mentors were not Harper’s or Vogue but our mothers, not Why Don’t You? but don’t you dare.
By the time I was in college, my parents took me to buy a short evening dress from the very fashionable Simonetta in Rome. I was so dazzled at having the glamorous raven-haired designer kneel at my feet to adjust the hem that I didn’t really pay attention to the dress. It was strapless and peach-colored with a bouffant skirt, every centimeter covered in tiny peach bows. Leave it to my mother to find it, but what was it doing in that worldly maison de couture to begin with? I wore it only once, to a party in Monte Carlo where it was totally out of place and where a guest threw up over it in the ladies’ room.
* * *
While George chatted wittily to Florette I hung back, wide-eyed. Wide-eyed was not what Balenciaga customers were, and later she told me that this had touched her. I was about the same height as the best house model, Taiga, and I suppose my shyness could have passed for dignity. At any rate, first thing I knew, Florette was rummaging around a closet filled with past seasons’ Taigas, the wonderful tailor Salvador had been summoned, and I was out of my shirtwaist and into a blue light wool Balenciaga suit. Florette sold it—gave it to me, really—for a price that was absurdly low. Mlle Renée would not have been pleased.
I remember how easy and right that suit felt, as nothing had before, and how it gave me confidence when finally I found a job at the Paris Herald Tribune at $60 a week. I began on the women’s page, not covering fashion, which I never have done, but providing such features as I could find.
Since I was fascinated by fashion history as a reflection of its times, I sought out retired designers to interview. The first was Schiaparelli, more interested during the sixties in trying her hand at painting than in the current fashion scene: “Fashion collections bore me,” she said. The sole designer who interested her was Balenciaga because “he is the only one who dares do what he likes.” The second interview was with Madeleine Vionnet.
She lived in a town house at 3 bis Square Antoine Arnauld in the Sixteenth Arrondissement of Paris. It had a rather bulbous bourgeois façade with a stunning Art Deco interior of museum quality—sleek and cool, with lacquer surfaces and Jean-Michel Frank furniture. The walls of the salon were lined in parchment and on one of them hung a portrait—by the 1920s master of lacquer Jean Dunand—of the plump Vionnet in her heyday looking like a stiff society hostess. “I hate it, it was never me,” she remarked. It certainly showed none of the liveliness of eye or the quickness of mind that her much slimmer self retained in her late eighties. Balenciaga’s bright red skirt and vest reinforced her vividness in a rather beige décor, as he had surely intended. She had just returned from a visit to Natalie Clifford Barney and on the way there saw her first miniskirt: “It is horrible to play with proportions that way. I was the first to lower waistlines to suit my own proportions. Now when I see women in tops that are longer than their skirts I am ashamed to think it may be my fault.”
“Do you write about couture?” she asked me, and I said no, figuring that would be the end of the interview. “That’s good,” she said, “because couture is finished.” It was not only a lack of talent but changing lifestyles: the growth of air travel and lightweight suitcases, she predicted, would be a final blow.
Having closed her own house some twenty-five years earlier, Vionnet had passed on to other interests. In her sixties she taught herself the piano and in her eighties learned to read Russian. “No,” she said, “I can’t speak it but I can read it and translate it, which isn’t bad.” A book in Russian lay nearby, along with Edgar Wallace in English, some thrillers, and a biography of Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin. “When I created all day, morning to night, I couldn’t use my energy on reading. Now I am reading, starting everything all over again.”
She was great fun to talk to once we had got past couture, given to statements that I still remember, such as “Almost always, when you see a picture called Mother of the Painter, it’s good.” She died after Balenciaga, in her ninety-ninth year. When her goddaughter asked if she looked forward to reaching one hundred, she replied, “Not at all, it simply isn’t done.”
With such encounters I was learning a lot. It seemed to me that while an American childhood teaches us to be good and to try to be better, the French show us how to be more attractive. The difference isn’t as frivolous as it sounds since it encompasses a more precise use of language, a sharpening of the senses, in all a critical eye open to what Henry James called “a completeness of form” that he found only in France. I struggled then, and struggle still today, to reach this mysterious balance between measure and indulgence of which I was not even aware until, about as incomplete as a young American can be, I found myself in Florette’s hands.
It was all very casual: I would drop in, and if she had the time she would forage for leftovers, sometimes from several seasons past. They weren’t trailing ballgowns or matadors’ jackets, which I couldn’t have afforded, even at Flor
ette’s prices, and anyway I had no place to wear them. Mostly they were sleeveless wool dresses, but there was a beautiful black silk crepe for evening, the collarless gray tweed coat, and even a brown suede suit, as well as a couple of mistakes, like the rather elderly pink crepe dress with its pink lace coat for $150 noted in Florette’s order book for 22 June 1966. (Most of my purchases were not listed in her book since they were near giveaways.)
I could go to 10 Avenue George V wearing the most uneventful outfit and emerge with the certainty that to the knowing, or even to the ignorant, eye I was well dressed. A Balenciaga could be outlandishly showy or, like mine, almost plain. What they all had, uniquely, was poise—a savant equilibrium that was quiet even at its most extravagant—and this poise was passed on to the wearer. It was my blue light wool Balenciaga suit that enabled me to take out a notepad and quiz Eleanor Roosevelt at the Hotel de Crillon as if I were (almost) entitled to. Whether you were Mrs. Mellon or a motor tycoon’s plump wife or a tyro journalist going to interviews with trembling knees, you knew that despite your imperfections you were, thanks to him, perfect. I remember how easy to wear and right my clothes felt.
But if much was conferred by a Balenciaga, much was also exacted: a bearing that excluded slouching, stains, or untoward behavior. For that there was the King’s Road and Carnaby Street and all the fun and inconsequence that life suddenly had to offer.
6
Across the Channel, they were having a ball. Mary Quant, the putative inventor of the miniskirt, had opened Bazaar, her King’s Road boutique, in 1955, and by 1967 there were more than two thousand small fashion shops in London describing themselves as boutiques. France was way behind. The word boutique may be French but the idea of helter-skelter cheap fashion in kooky little shops was not. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had presaged the youthquake in all its delicious permissiveness when he told the British people, “You never had it so good.” In the suffocating rectitude of General de Gaulle’s presidency, such an idea, and such grammar, were unthinkable.
In 1964 a Frenchwoman named Geneviève Antoine Dariaux published a book called Elegance, an immensely detailed guide to wearing the right thing, from gloves to pet dogs, but it was already outdated because women now wanted to do the wrong thing. In France, pert little women had practiced their facial expressions—the sidelong glance, the adorable moue, the fetching tilt of the head—until they became second nature. (France, it may be said, is the country of second nature.) Suddenly they had to learn to add spontaneity to their wiles, and to grow longer legs. They began the sorrowful search for youth.
Brigitte Bardot had already announced in 1959 that haute couture was for grandmas, but she was shocking by habit and an example to no one. Couture’s solemnity was now relieved by such designers as Emanuel Ungaro, who refused to show evening clothes in his first collection in 1965 because “I am a man of this age and I will design for women of this age,” and by André Courrèges, who seated clients on stools instead of little gold chairs and had models in his signature white space-age miniskirts dance out to pop tunes. Balenciaga had helped Courrèges from the start and had sent him three clients, including Florette’s Begum Aga Khan, a majestic figure with, says Coqueline Courrèges, thighs like bayonne hams. The Begum was pleased with her Courrèges coat; another Florette client, Cécile de Rothschild, was so offended when Courrèges opened one of his white cube stores opposite her mansion on the Faubourg St. Honoré that she tried to have it shut down.
Balenciaga reigned, although veneration replaced excitement and the word great was diminished by its new modifier, “still.” His apartness was seen as Olympian: “Why should he bother dressing the world at this point?” asked Women’s Wear Daily in 1965. “Vicariously, he does dress a lot of the world when you see how his ideas filter down.” The same year, WWD published photos snatched of Balenciaga going to work—no fewer than eleven nearly identical pictures of a dapper man in a tilted soft black hat and “legendary one-button overcoat,” with a small map inserted to show his two-block itinerary between home and work. The word youthful began to appear in journalists’ reviews of Balenciaga, but youthful is not the same as young. Over in swinging London, sassy Queen magazine published black-bordered pages in 1964 proclaiming that Balenciaga—and haute couture in general—was dead.
Women’s Wear Daily still stalking Balenciaga in 1965
For a few years the old and the new coexisted pleasurably, the new throwaway culture inspiring Cecil Beaton to praise new objects in cheap plastic: “Even the tray you put your drinks on. It becomes a pleasure just to be sitting with four or five people because it all looks so delectable. It takes the place of going to galas and balls,” he told me in a 1967 interview on his way to a ball. But it was all changing irrevocably and in every way. The photographer David Bailey says that haute couture as a driving force was dying at just about the time that fast motorized cameras came in: “The dress was a stately sculptured thing before.”
Looking at the Metropolitan Museum’s 1973 Balenciaga retrospective, Kennedy Fraser wrote that the exhibition was
a forceful reminder of the speed with which fashion has moved since Balenciaga’s reign … By the end of the sixties, youth dominated fashion and democracy had come to it, with its attendant choice or confusion, depending on your point of view. Balenciaga’s designs are those of an authority, aimed at mature women with a distinct position in the world … It is not that the Balenciaga clothes could never be worn by young women, but, rather, that they could be worn with great distinction by those who were no longer young.
Young women were going elsewhere. The Baroness Alain de Rothschild still came to Avenue George V, but her daughter, Béatrice, wasn’t interested; the Countess du Boisrouvray continued to sing “Frou-Frou” with Florette, but Albina, her daughter, became a journalist and film producer with no time for fittings. Audrey Hepburn greatly admired Balenciaga and he adored her, even offering to lend her his flat to escape paparazzi, but it would have been unthinkable for her fawnlike body to be dressed by him rather than in Givenchy’s slim and cool designs. Already, a decade earlier, Natasha Parry, who, with her husband, Peter Brook, had delighted in Balenciaga’s hospitality, never coveted his clothes: “They were so grown-up,” she says. When Balenciaga, seeing the writing on the wall, unwisely included short shorts in his last collection, Claudia Heard de Osborne, who might have known better given her age, put in an order. Danielle, the model, told me that she would not have been caught dead in them, even at Cannes.
And I, probably the only Balenciaga client who was there to economize, thanks to Florette’s bounty, sometimes had the disloyal desire to go elsewhere, specifically to the new Saint Laurent Rive Gauche.
Saint Laurent’s first Rive Gauche boutique opened on September 26, 1966, on the rue de Tournon, in the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris, with Catherine Deneuve as its godmother. Other haute couture designers had boutiques selling separates and accessories, but Saint Laurent was the first to create a complete second line, less expensive but equally chic—le smoking, which he had introduced in his latest couture collection, was among the Rive Gauche’s first top sellers. Other boutiques offered clothes that were amusing but ill-made (one didn’t have to go to design school to cut a miniskirt); Saint Laurent, with his haute couture training and his background as Christian Dior’s successor after the designer’s death, invented classy French ready-to-wear. It wasn’t a question of spinning off more profit, he explained: ready-to-wear was right for the times, for the giddy costume party that was the sixties.
He was the first modern celebrity designer in that he was marketed as much for his persona as his work. Everyone knew that he always named his dogs Moujik, that he used the pseudonym M. Swann when checking into hotels, and that he partied wildly at Régine’s; and everyone had seen Jeanloup Sieff’s photograph of him in the nude to advertise his men’s cologne. In full public view the once beautiful young man disintegrated into a wobbly wraith, fueled by drugs and drink so that he could design two couture
collections and two ready-to-wear collections every year. Until, in 2002, he no longer could.
Since each line had to be different from its predecessor, he was a scavenger, a magpie of marketable ideas and the inventor of the quotation-crammed retro look. In hectic profusion he showed clothes influenced by Piet Mondrian, czarist Russia, Morocco, Japan, Spain, Ludwig of Bavaria, Marlon Brando. Tuxedos, pea jackets, safari jackets dictated a new view of femininity; the fact that the safari jacket was inspired by the Afrika Korps of World War II and that he was roundly criticized for a collection based on the German Occupation didn’t seem to matter, because questions of taste were considered square. (New York fashion editors, after all, were gushing repellently over “poor-boy sweaters” and “fun furs.”) “He understood his times very well, and didn’t like them,” his partner and Svengali Pierre Bergé has said. His clothes were beautiful and skin-deep.
Saint Laurent mentioned Balenciaga’s technique respectfully but found him “insufficiently influenced by life,” and Bergé claimed to have dined with Balenciaga at the modish Francine Weisweiller’s. Not so, says Givenchy, adding rather tantalizingly, “Cristóbal did make remarks about other designers, but I wouldn’t repeat them out of respect for his discretion.”
The student uprising in Paris in May 1968, always referred to as les événements, or “the events,” gave Saint Laurent a delightful frisson and Balenciaga a scare. “Today, real fashion comes from the young people at the barricades,” proclaimed Saint Laurent, omitting to add that he was on holiday in Marrakesh at the time. Balenciaga was in Spain and, like his clients, viewed the photographs of burning cars as the end of the world. It wasn’t: the revolution ended as soon as the government took gas off the ration and everyone went off for the long Whitsun weekend during which seventy people were killed in road accidents while, by official count, only one had died during the events. But it was the end of the house of Balenciaga.
