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

by Mary Blume

  While we talked about being a vendeuse, I could see that she was developing a new perspective on the job. I don’t think that earlier she would have said that vendeuses were a form of personal servant and I am sure she would not have announced one day, “Quite honestly, I did that job because I was put into the métier, but had I had the chance it isn’t what I would have done. I think you have to make yourself care about it because it really isn’t a very pleasant world.”

  Surely not, but she performed with a sort of glow that her favored clients remembered. One afternoon she asked the Baroness Alain if she might bring me to tea, and I was touched to see the closeness and affection between the two women, the differences in status so well understood that they became irrelevant. The baroness was tall, charming, and still beautiful; she had had a bad automobile accident four months earlier and was in a neck brace, which she concealed with a striped shirt collar worn with the wings turned up and a ribbon around her throat. Her jacket was black and her trousers red. I thought she looked like a Directoire dandy but Florette told me later that with that collar she looked like Lagerfeld.

  The baroness talked about Balenciaga’s leather-lined elevator (“a very beautiful elevator, grand luxe”) and the clear shadowless lighting of the salon. “I remember that lighting. Balenciaga knew how to live, how to place things, there was a great simplicity made from elements that were precious. It was serious because la mode was important then. Now it is important because it brings in a lot of money, while then it was important for itself and it was to be respected.” She couldn’t recall how she came to Florette but it was, she said, love at first sight. “She was formidable because she knew at once what one wanted, what one liked. It was easy with her, I didn’t order ten or twelve dresses at a time like some people but she knew what I might need because she knew how I lived.”

  She spoke of her favorite Balenciagas—a beige lace evening gown over a flesh-colored base and a pink chiffon dotted in black. “And in the back there was a tiny velvet bow, really tiny. What was fascinating about it was just that little black velvet bow, so small among all that chiffon—that was what made it amusing.” And she showed me, hanging in a corridor, the portrait by Balthus, painted in 1958, in which she wore a black Balenciaga coat: “Three months of sittings, every morning. I wouldn’t have chosen anyone else.”

  The one regret, mildly expressed, was that Florette had never introduced her to Balenciaga, whom her sister-in-law Liliane had met at winter sports in Davos and talked about a lot. “He didn’t want to see anyone,” Florette replied, and the baroness said, “It’s all right, it’s just that it would have been nice.” After we left I asked Florette why she hadn’t made the introduction. “I could have, but I wasn’t going to irritate him with clients,” she said. “He would have done it if I’d asked, he wasn’t really sauvage.” When I commented on the baroness’s elegance, Florette sighed, “Yes, but those red trousers!”

  She did the same thing soon after when we went together to the Mona Bismarck Foundation in Paris for the opening of an exhibition of Mona’s Balenciagas curated by Givenchy. It was slightly time-warp, filled with the sort of formerly beautiful and still chic women in dark pantsuits who clearly knew how to hold a cigarette, make graceful hand gestures, have flings. Then Albina du Boisrouvray, daughter of the “Frou-Frou”-singing countess, appeared and she and Florette fell into each other’s arms. Albina has founded a worldwide charity for AIDS children in memory of her only son, killed in a helicopter crash, and funded by the sale of her mother’s jewels (for a reported $31.2 million) at Sotheby’s, as well as her art collection and real estate holdings. (Her mother’s Balenciagas she gave to the nuns next door who had been paid to pray for sun at the countess’s garden parties.) Albina’s own interest in fashion, in view of the life she leads, is minimal. For the Bismarck show, Florette had spent thirty minutes on her makeup, refused to check her mink blouson, and was wearing black kid gloves “for Monsieur Balenciaga because he hated it if we didn’t wear gloves.” She was delighted to see a few old friends, “but my God, la petite Boisrouvray, did you see how badly she was dressed!”

  Givenchy’s Bismarck Foundation show, which included forty Balenciagas that Mona had left to him and seven borrowed Balenciaga bridal gowns, was held in the spring of 2006, succeeded by a spurt of worldwide exhibitions. “For the next four or five years there will be Balenciaga, Balenciaga, Balenciaga everywhere,” Givenchy said.

  The major event, shortly after the Bismarck show, was the first Balenciaga retrospective to be held in Paris—thirty-four years after his death—at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Florette threw herself into helping its young curator, Pamela Golbin, whom she liked very much, and, as one of the last survivors of the house of Balenciaga, was flooded by requests for interviews. She was on Spanish and Japanese television and enjoyed every minute of it. “Years ago, Payot had an astrologer do my chart and she said I would find fame in my old age. I never thought she would be right.”

  The Arts Décoratifs show opening, on July 5, 2006, was a glossy Parisian moment, attended by Mick Jagger, Hugh Grant, Martha Stewart, and a crowd of international fashion groupies. I went the next day with Florette, she, after much deliberation, having chosen to wear—it was a very hot day—a cap-sleeved Balenciaga dress in lime green shantung. She was vivacious and charming with the television cameramen, most of whom she knew by then, at the entrance but became increasingly quiet during the show. The taxi ride home passed in silence.

  The show was perhaps a bit too stately, the dresses stiff. When I suggested to Florette that we go again, she refused and said she hadn’t liked it at all: “Those glass cases, like coffins.” Like coffins. She had given so much—too much—to bringing it all back and was saddened and bewildered that somehow none of it was right, was enough. It was all finally and fatally dead. And so, within a few months, was she.

  The decline was rapid—she never even got to use her walk-in bathtub—and her physician proved unworthy of her longtime trust. “Doctor, you have let me down,” she sadly told him. She, who was so meticulous, suffered from the medical disarray as much as the pain from what was probably a stomach cancer, and although she tried to be bright during visits, she was beyond consolation. I had to go to New York, and on November 16, 2006, I telephoned to wish her a happy birthday. Her niece, Anita, answered and said that Florette had died that morning. She had just turned ninety-five.

  She was buried in Saint Cloud, next to her mother-in-law and Payot. Her squabbling nieces and nephews did not get together over the funeral announcements, which meant that Alaïa was invited to the ceremony but neither Benoît Gaubert, who had known her from childhood, nor her Balenciaga friends were even aware she had died.

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  Over the years, Balenciaga sent Florette picture postcards from Spain and, for the New Year, the traditional stiff white card with a stiff handwritten message. But one year he wrote, “What can I wish you, you who have everything?”

  Perhaps this was just a reflection on her own completeness, perhaps there is a rueful suggestion of what he had missed because of the ravening demands of genius. Not that he would have used the word genius, just as he never used the word art about his work. His word was métier—skill, or trade—and the motor of his life was an exalted view of that work.

  To Balenciaga, his work revealed God’s hidden harmony, Father Robert Pieplu said when he delivered his funeral elegy on March 29, 1972, in the church just up the street from the Avenue Marceau apartment. Wearing the cassock Balenciaga had made for him, he urged his gathered friends to build a harmonious world through their own work.

  In the winter world of retirement, Balenciaga had seemed lost. He dabbled in Madrid real estate, as he had since the 1950s, buying, developing, and selling apartment buildings. Givenchy says he would keep the penthouses for himself, spend one night, find the noise intolerable, and move on. He scoured Spanish stores for antique Cuenca carpets, piling them up in the Madrid flat that he finally chose so that, says
Givenchy, they resembled the pastry called a mille-feuille.

  An undated letter in his firm rolling script to the Marquesa de Llanzol in which he complains about the apprentices he was working with suggests that he may have had a project that was never realized, and he did make the occasional dress or modification (la manga!) with the help of his Madrid seamstresses, as well as the bridal gown for Generalissimo Franco’s granddaughter. “Now I’m a housewife, a stand-in, a messenger boy and a bore,” he wrote the marquesa, “but it is best that I realize all this and I am calmer but, at the same time, more annoyed.”

  The unsinkable Claudia Heard de Osborne tried to cheer him up in Madrid in 1969. “Cristóbal came every evening to the Ritz and dined with me. He looks good and is the same person. He and I always cry, though, before the evening is over.” This he really didn’t need.

  Newly restless, he seems to have begun to travel. In a Women’s Wear roundup after Balenciaga died, the New York designer Chester Weinberg recalled spending a few weeks with him the previous year in Greece: “The way he responded to antiquity was amazing—he was like a present-day extension of what we were looking at. He was a most gentle, simple, honest, creative man.”

  Givenchy refuses to believe that such a trip took place, but Weinberg had added a clinching detail: “He also made the best martinis.”

  When in Paris, Balenciaga kept up with his employees. He sent a note to the mannequin Danielle when she left Givenchy for Chanel in 1971 to wish her good luck. “How he heard about it I cannot guess,” she said, “but how kind of him that was.”

  “One day after the house closed I ran into him, looking less soigné than usual,” Florette told me. “He had let his hair get curly and he was carrying a long metal pot to cook fish in, he who never carried anything. He said he was going to cook a fish that night for friends. He seemed rather pleased with himself to be doing this and for carrying a package, but at the same time a bit embarrassed that I should see him.”

  He usually cut a distinguished figure in a sober dark suit relieved sometimes by a bow tie. Givenchy thinks his clothes were made in Spain. “I at that time dressed in London, at Huntsman, and was terribly pleased with myself. Obviously when I went to lunch with him I wore my latest from Huntsman. Cristóbal would say the fabric is good, but the sleeves! After lunch he would get on a stool, have his manservant bring a pair of scissors, and undo the sleeves. One day it was a camel hair jacket, another a camel hair coat. He said, You are too tall to wear a coat without a half-belt. He started to undo the hem to see if there was enough fabric, and there was. He gave me a raincoat to go home in. When he died, Gérard, his secretary, called and said, There are four or five ensembles in his workspace that are so big they must be yours, may I send them over to you? I found them with their sleeves just pinned and the coat with its undone hem. But that was Cristóbal.”

  He would often drop by Givenchy’s studio and once was turned away by an employee who failed to recognize him. Occasionally he would give advice. “One day,” Givenchy said, “I was with a model named Beryl, a very pretty girl, and it was in the last days before the collection. I was working on the wedding dress, because you usually do that last, and I just couldn’t get it right, I was so tired. Suddenly Cristóbal said, Suppose you did this, put that there? After two or three hours I saw the mannequin was beginning to fade and nothing was right—I think probably the design wasn’t very good—and then Cristóbal said, Stop, just leave the dress as it was, it wasn’t that bad. It will be perfectly all right and the other things I’ve seen are very pretty. Come back with me and have a dry martini.” Givenchy had two.

  After so many years of doing maybe 150 fittings a day, seated on a stool with his arms raised to the level of the mannequin, Balenciaga had problems with his back, and his fingers, because they were no longer at work, began to stiffen. “The doctor told him, You must get modeling clay and use your hands,” Givenchy said. “Imagine, Balenciaga with modeling clay!”

  Clearly at loose ends, he gave the only press interview of his life, choosing to speak with Prudence Glynn of the London Times, whom he had never met. Her short article, printed on August 3, 1971, was headed BALENCIAGA AND LA VIE D’UN CHIEN, a dog’s life being how he viewed his trade: “Nobody knows what a hard métier it is, how killing is the work under all this luxury and glamour.” The interview, which took place in his Paris apartment, is frustratingly short on quotes, but Glynn was totally charmed. He was, she says, tall and handsome and he smiled a lot: “The one thing I had never imagined this great austere figure to be was funny, but he is, and his eyes twinkle with spirit. He is not waspish and tells stories against himself equally easily.” She quotes none of them but includes Balenciaga’s praise of the recently deceased Chanel, ranking her at the top with Vionnet and the now forgotten house of Louiseboulanger. “Chanel took all the chi-chi and fuss out of women’s clothing,” he said.

  He had attended Chanel’s funeral a few months earlier, and the following year, on March 23, 1972, his own attenuated existence ended after a sudden heart attack in Javea, Spain. The news made the front page of The New York Times.

  Givenchy flew to the burial in Getaria with his companion Philippe Venet and Emanuel Ungaro in an aircraft chartered by Balenciaga’s fabric manufacturer friend, Gustav Zumsteg, and at the graveside he found the Marquesa de Llanzol, her daughter Sonsoles Díez de Rivera, Ramón Esparza, and the Balenciaga family. Most probably Balenciaga had gone to see about buying property on the Costa Blanca when he was stricken. It seems unconscionable that a seventy-seven-year-old man would not have left a will, but Balenciaga did not, or, as some people darkly say, a will was never found.

  In a version contested by the Balenciaga family, Sonsoles Díez de Rivera says that on his last trip, Balenciaga went to a notary on his way to Altea, near Javea, wrote a will in which he left everything to Esparza, and said he would sign the will upon returning from Altea. Since he never returned there was no will, and his family became his sole heirs.

  The modest Esparza, left in the cold, sued the family unsuccessfully and was sufficiently embittered when he died in 1997 to leave his slim archive to New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology rather than to a Spanish institution. It was a sad end for someone who had been at Balenciaga’s side for more than twenty years. “He was always with him,” Sonsoles says. “He helped Balenciaga a lot, I suppose, but he was very limited because after Balenciaga died when Esparza came to Madrid and called my mother she would always immediately send him to me—I can’t stand him, she would say, I can’t understand what Cristóbal saw in him, he’s boring, he has no conversation.”

  A newer, less civil era began: Balenciaga without Balenciaga. Although he had told Givenchy and others that he wanted his name to die with him, the family decided otherwise and in time he became a brand, a word that he would not even have recognized. It began when the family decided to continue the Spanish operation with ready-to-wear, perfumes, and accessories under the leadership of Balenciaga’s niece, Manuela. To a degree it was a reasonable decision since Balenciaga’s brother, Juan Martín, and several of Juan Martín’s children (he had nine) had been working in the Spanish houses during Balenciaga’s lifetime. According to a grandnephew, Agustín Medina Balenciaga, a management consultant in his early fifties, they are a very close-knit clan sharing a certain remoteness, deep Catholicism, and nimble hands.

  Balenciaga’s beloved house in Igueldo burned down in about 1985 as a result of what Agustín says was probably an electric fault inflamed by layers of wax on its well-polished furniture. The properties in France and Spain were sold, as were the Cuenca rugs. Some personal effects remained in the family (Agustín has a lamp from Igueldo on his desk) and while the Braque and a Giacometti drawing were sold at Sotheby’s Monaco, Balenciaga’s paintings by Bernard Buffet were kept by his heirs. (Why on earth Balenciaga owned works by this painter who was merely fashionable is one of his many mysteries. He even broke his no-gifts rule and gave a yellow sari to Buffet’s wife, Annabel,
to wear to a Lido opening. Unfortunately, Elizabeth Taylor attended the same event in the same sari, and she had paid for hers.)

  The post-Cristóbal ready-to-wear line was designed in Madrid and it failed to make waves. In 1978 a German company bought the perfume and ready-to-wear rights, according to Agustín, and in 1982 bought the rest. Ultimately the Balenciaga name was bought by Gucci, and when that company was taken over by the French tycoon François Pinault, it became part of his vast PPR empire. “It is true that it was a pain in our heart, we thought that Balenciaga would not like selling his name,” Agustín says. “But we were the inheritors, it was our business, too.”

  Under Cristóbal, so obsessed by privacy, the house of Balenciaga seemed like Hamlet without the prince; now it is Hamlet without Hamlet. The name, depersonalized, is world famous thanks to urgent brand management. “Brand recognition is the vital issue,” as the fashion editor Suzy Menkes, the sharpest observer of the scene, wrote in the International Herald Tribune in March 2010, adding a couple of months later, “the era of the star designer picked to create buzz and shake up the system in a venerable house is over.”

  In other words, the designer is expendable: the pen that signs a licensing contract is more powerful than the well-placed pin.

  The one designer unbowed by brand management is Karl Lagerfeld, the astute whirligig who has moved beyond product to become a brand himself. He is not only creative director of the house of Chanel, he is KARL, a living logo whose carefully etched black-and-white silhouette is chased for autographs on every continent and applauded by passersby on Mercer Street in SoHo. “I don’t want to be real in people’s minds,” he stated in a 2007 biopic by Rodolphe Marconi. “I want to be an apparition.” One such apparition is on a Karl teddy bear made by Steiff in 2008. His designs, often illustrated by a stylized self-portrait, range from pens to Diet Coke bottles to sneakers to an inexpensive Karl fashion collection available only online. He publishes books, takes photographs, made newspaper drawings for France’s last presidential campaign, and did the commentary on French TV for Prince William’s wedding. There is no conflict between Brand Karl and his day job because he is his day job, and there are surely more people in the world today who know Karl’s name than Coco Chanel’s.