by Mary Blume
At the house of Balenciaga, the crucial designer, born three years after Balenciaga closed in 1968, was Nicolas Ghesquière, very gifted and in tune with the times. “My biggest challenge now,” he told Women’s Wear Daily on March 1, 2005, “is to make Balenciaga become a brand, and give the feeling that we can feed the stores like a brand.” By the time he quit Balenciaga late in 2012, the brand had sixty-two branches, including eleven in China. Ghesquière’s well-judged ready-to-wear had its outrageous side, a requisite for publicity reasons, and almost as an insurance policy he used the Balenciaga archive for what he called his Édition line. (It is now respectable, even fashionable, to copy, quote, or, in current parlance, “reference” past designers’ ideas.) A degree of Balenciaga influence is clear in several designers today. “I think that the sculpted style of Balenciaga has had a certain revival,” Menkes says, “but not in the same way, firstly because you cannot get the same effect of stand-away tailoring in ready-to-wear because the whole point is that it follows the contours of a specific body. Secondly because in this body-conscious era, the idea of clothes that create a ‘bubble’ around the female form does not seem quite right. But the nobility of Balenciaga and the big gestures are interesting for designers to follow using new high-tech fabrics.”
In 1973, when Diana Vreeland launched her Balenciaga show at the Metropolitan Museum, the New York Times headline said THE ERA OF BALENCIAGA: IT SEEMS SO LONG AGO, and Calvin Klein was quoted as remarking, “Most of it looks out of date.” In the strictest sense it is, in a day when plastic surgery replaces sculptural scissors, when glitz trumps allure, when the fake becomes desirable if it is termed faux, when Balenciaga’s severe Spanish word cursi connotes something merely twee, and when Tom Ford can tell London’s Sunday Times, as he did in 2008, “Over the years I’ve learnt that all this stuff we do is a bunch of crap.”
The renewed interest in Balenciaga these days is thanks in part to Ghesquière’s headline making—$101,370 one season for an evening dress—and to his marketing savvy in making a handbag the key fashion accessory with his “It Bags,” said in 2006 to account for 35 percent of the house’s earnings. That same year he co-curated the long-overdue Balenciaga retrospective in Paris (coolly taking one floor of the exhibition space for himself). So, ironically, Balenciaga is back on the map, even if most people have never heard of Cristóbal, and more marketable than in his lifetime.
The cherry on the cake was the opening in the summer of 2011 of a museum devoted entirely to Balenciaga in his home village, Getaria. Long delayed by an embezzling former mayor who gave the commission to his architect boyfriend and caused several accessories to disappear, the opening was attended by Queen Sofía of Spain and the international press. The museum, located in a hefty glass addition to the home of Balenciaga’s first patron, the Marquesa de Casa Torres, and curated by Miren Arzalluz, has twelve hundred Balenciagas dating back to 1912, which will be shown in rotation in six-month-long exhibitions. Givenchy served as founding president, donated many of the clothes, and got such friends as Bunny Mellon to contribute over two dozen more. Sonsoles Díez de Rivera also gave all her Balenciagas, but only on loan. “I keep them there as if it were my cupboard, that way I can get them if I want to wear them,” she said.
Getaria had prepared for the museum by finally putting up the plaque to mark Balenciaga’s birthplace, and the current mayor reckons that, like Frank Gehry’s Bilbao museum, it will bring many tourists. In museum entrance fees, books, and obviously as merchandise, Balenciaga sells. It is a world counter to everything he lived and expressed in his clothes, but perhaps he would be pleased that instead of just a handful of rich clients and fashion editors, young people at exhibitions all over the world can now marvel at his work, can see the richness of his imagination and the rigor of his technique, can sense the probity behind the grand gesture. “When he left the world of haute couture, something stopped, perhaps a way of writing with scissors and cloth,” said the master embroiderer François Lesage.
For some today, Balenciaga will be a fashion discovery; for others he is more precious. When I asked Albina du Boisrouvray, the former client who now devotes herself to children living in misery, why she had troubled to go to the Bismarck Foundation show in 2006, she replied, “One needs to replenish the sense of beauty, harmony, and lightness in order to heal the soul. That is why I went.”
Balenciaga has been called a visionary, which in its proper meaning has nothing to do with seeing the future: in its true old sense it suggests imagining the impossible. Balenciaga made the impossible possible, if for what could only be a brief time. His clothes do not evoke nostalgia because nostalgia is a lightweight emotion, but they do inspire respect, a nearly unknown word in the throwaway world of fashion. With respect goes, somehow, a degree of hope, as John Berger says at the start of this story: “the supposition that, despite everything, a melody can be looked for and sometimes found.” Balenciaga, François Lesage thought, had put a touch of eternity into his work.
Cristóbal Balenciaga in 1962
Sable-lined Donegal tweed coat, 1962
Wool crepe daytime dress, 1968
Flounced gazar evening dress, 1965
Silk evening dress, 1965
Evening dress with trademark silk bow, 1966
Evening dress with trademark silk bow, 1966, detail of neckline embroidery
Embroidery by François Lesage, sweet peas by Judith Barbier, 1964
Daytime hat, 1950
NOTES
PROLOGUE
“the master of us all”: Cathy Horyn, “When Paris Was All That Mattered,” New York Times, July 6, 2006.
“Do not waste yourself”: Musée Historique des Tissus, Hommage à Balenciaga exhibition catalog, Lyons, 1986, 38.
He was, says: John B. Fairchild to author, New York, 2010.
when Louis XIV’s finance minister: Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 23.
toilettes politiques: Lucien François, Comment un Nom Devient une Griffe (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 17.
Barthes, whose article on Chanel: Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion, translated by Andy Stafford (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 107.
in 1936 a policeman refused: Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 85.
(it has been estimated…): Hommage à Balenciaga, 122.
“If a woman came in”: Diana Vreeland, D.V. (New York: Knopf, 1984), 106.
when his close friend Hubert de Givenchy: Hubert de Givenchy to author, May 2006. All Givenchy quotations are from this interview and another in October 2010.
Mrs. Paul (“Bunny”) Mellon: Letter to Renée Tamisier, 1968, Balenciaga archive, Paris.
Gloria Guinness wondered: Metropolitan Museum of Art, The World of Balenciaga, Metropolitan Museum exhibition catalog, 1973, 15.
Claudia Heard de Osborne: Myra Walker, Balenciaga and His Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 53.
Pauline de Rothschild: World of Balenciaga, 19.
a collaborator remembers: Hommage à Balenciaga, 42.
Only a few years ago: Lesley Ellis Miller to author, London, 2005.
Florette Chelot, his top vendeuse: Florette Chelot to author. All Florette Chelot quotations are from interviews 2004–2006.
1
a contemporary poet: Richard Sieburth to author, e-mail, 2010.
“In the center of a street”: World of Balenciaga, 18.
a young Basque curator: Miren Arzalluz, Cristóbal Balenciaga: The Making of a Master (1895–1936) (London: V&A Publishing, 2011), passim.
three existential questions: Paddy Woodworth, The Basque Country: A Cultural History (Oxford: Signal Books, 2007), 9, 13, 14.
The Basques’ language: Ibid., 9.
one of his models was astonished: Danielle Slavik to author, Paris, 2008.
a lifelong friendship with Madeleine Vionnet: All Vionnet quotes are from author’s interview, 1966.
“no one has car
ried the art”: Cecil Beaton, The Glass of Fashion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954), 295.
by the age of twenty-one: Hamish Bowles, Balenciaga: Spanish Master (exhibition catalog) (New York: Skira/Rizzoli, 2010), 6.
The economy, mismanaged: Anthony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 (London: Phoenix, 2006), 18–20; Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (London: Penguin, 1965), 186.
Europe’s youngest general: Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (New York: Basic Books, 1994), xviii.
Franquists used live bodies: Beevor, Battle for Spain, 73.
whom Vogue’s Bettina Ballard: Bettina Ballard, In My Fashion (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1960), 110. Unless otherwise noted, all Ballard quotations are from this book.
She refused on the grounds: Edmonde Charles-Roux, Chanel and Her World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), 208.
“It was this that made the thirties”: Janet Flanner, foreword, Salute to the Thirties (London: Bodley Head, 1971), 4.
(As Gloria Guinness later pointed out…): World of Balenciaga, 16.
“They walk with a pleasant swagger”: Women’s Journal, September, 1939.
The former Renée Bousquet: Renée Le Roux to author, 1986 and 2004.
Diana Vreeland, writing to “Darling Mona”: Letter, April 23, 1973, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky.
Marie-Andrée Jouve: Marie-Andrée Jouve and Jacqueline Demornex, Balenciaga (London: Thames & Hudson), 1989, passim.
Oscar de la Renta: Oscar de la Renta to author, New York, 2010. De la Renta had gone to Spain in the early 1950s to study art and found work at Balenciaga making sketches to send to clients, which is done today with videos. The Madrid house, he says, was as forbidding as the one in Paris, and he was terrified whenever Balenciaga passed. Told by Balenciaga that he would need another year in Spain before being ready to move to the Paris house, he left and joined the house of Castillo.
As Pamela Golbin: Pamela Golbin to author, Paris, 2006.
“Don’t order that”: Sonsoles Díez de Rivera to author, telephone, 2010.
Balenciaga’s own private collection: Cristóbal Balenciaga Collectioneur de Modes exhibition catalog, Musée Galliera, 2012.
“I found the clothes very pretty”: Ballard, In My Fashion, 110.
“Knowing journalists”: Madge Garland, The Indecisive Decade: The World of Fashion and Entertainment in the Thirties (London: Macdonald, 1968), 125.
2
Gloria Rubio: Obituary, The Times (London), January 26, 1962.
The great Paris World’s Fair: Shanny Peer, France on Display (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 40; Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (New York: Knopf, 2000), 576–79.
For the writer Michel Leiris: Peer, France on Display, 47.
“we loved the dirndl”: Paris Fashion, edited by Ruth Lyman (London: Michael Joseph, 1972), 107.
Looking back, Madge Garland: Garland, Indecisive Decade, 125.
Cecil Beaton declared: Shots of Style: Great Fashion Photographs Chosen by David Bailey, exhibition catalog, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1985, 24.
Maurice Privat’s annual forecast: 1940 Prédictions Mondiales: Année de Grandeur Française (Paris: Editions Medicis, 1940), passim.
What sort of war: Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life (London: Penguin Books, 1962), 402.
For fear of foreign spies: Ibid., 384, and Ballard, In My Fashion, 150.
Edna Woolman Chase: Ballard, In My Fashion, 146.
Schiaparelli built muffs: Weber, Hollow Years, 266.
the dowdy wife of France’s military leader: Dominique Veillon, La Mode sous l’Occupation (Paris: Payot, 1990), 29.
General Gamelin, hero of: Weber, Hollow Years, 256, 273.
reliable carrier pigeons: Ibid., 255–56.
the first government minister to flee Paris: Herbert Lottman, The Fall of Paris, June 1940 (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992), 228.
“What is the worst thing”: Weber, Hollow Years, 24.
As Robert O. Paxton: Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: The Old Guard and the New Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 227.
Sometimes the work was: Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 263.
“I used my power as a shield”: Paxton, Vichy France, 358.
“Abandoned populations”: Thomas Kernan, France on Berlin Time (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1941), 13.
“With a regiment of young men”: Ernst Jünger, Journaux de Guerre (Paris: Julliard, 1990), 455.
the Germans made their first major move: Nearly all the information on the German takeover of the haute couture comes from two sources, Dominique Veillon’s La Mode sous l’Occupation and a typed manuscript by Lucien Lelong held by the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture and translated by Susan Train. Lelong’s manuscript was clearly written to explain and defend the couture before the courts that had been hastily set up to hear and judge accusations of collaboration with the Germans. No one in the couture, according to Veillon (230), was charged.
according to Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge: Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge to author, 1987.
“There was a social custom”: Marcel Haedrich, Coco Chanel: Her Life and Secrets (New York: Little, Brown, 1972), 190.
Christian Dior said to his friend: Pierre Balmain, My Years and Seasons (London: Cassell, 1964), 78.
“They thought I was Irish”: Baroness Alain de Rothschild to author, Paris, 2006.
Carmel Snow’s fitter: Penelope Rowlands, A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and Her Life in Fashion, Art and Letters (New York: Atria Books, 2005), 312.
In the only interview: Prudence Glynn, The Times (London), August 3, 1971.
“The mental malnutrition”: Lee Miller’s War, edited by Anthony Penrose (New York: Condé Nast Books, 1992), 111.
The Germans set back Paris clocks: In the murky Occupation period even the question of whether the Germans set clocks ahead or back is unclear, further complicated by the fact that the Germans were on summer time, which France had not yet adopted. A man who lived through the period and the historian Richard Cobb in French and Germans, Germans and French (Boston: Brandeis University Press, 1983), 132, both maintain that clocks were set ahead by one hour, but I have preferred Thomas Kernan’s version (France on Berlin Time, 21) since he was writing at the start of the Occupation.
“The entire gait”: Lee Miller’s War, 69.
Christian Dior wrote in his memoirs: Christian Dior, Dior by Dior (London: Penguin Books, 1958), 4.
a respected British historian adds: Anthony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris After the Liberation: 1944–1949 (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 305.
“I am not unhappy here”: Frederic Spotts, The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 21.
Young Philippe Jullian: Philippe Jullian, Journal 1949–50 (Paris: Grasset, 2009), 54.
One morning, two men: Laurence Benaïm, Marie Laure de Noailles: La Vicomtesse du Bizarre (Paris: Grasset, 2001), 321.
“The victory would efface”: Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 12.
“It is not that France had behaved the worst”: Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005), 815.
Carmel Snow, worried about competition: Rowlands, Dash of Daring, 300ff.
“I enjoyed seeing my name”: Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, 24–46.
Le Théâtre de la Mode: Théâtre de la Mode, Fashion Dolls: The Survival of the Haute Couture, edited by Susan Train and Eugène Clarence Braun-Munk (Portland, OR: Palmer/Pletsch Publishing, 2002).
3
“We felt we had a right”: Marie-France Pochna, Christian Dior: The Biography (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2008), 165. Much of the material on Dior comes from this book and from Dior’s memoir, Dior by Dior.
when the wearer of a cri
nolined ballgown: Pochna, Christian Dior, 185.
“I loved, loved, loved”: Polly Mellen to author, telephone, New York, 2010.
who looked, according to Cecil Beaton: Beaton, Glass of Fashion, 292.
(Jacques Fath…): Lyman, Paris Fashion, 177.
(Dior is said to have exempted…): Ibid., 148.
Within days, a crusty old member: Beevor and Cooper, Paris After the Liberation, 314.
By 1949 the house of Dior: The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947–57, exhibition catalog, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2008.
“We waited each year”: Ellen Melinkoff, What We Wore: An Offbeat Social History of Women’s Clothing, 1950 to 1980 (Whitby: Quill, 1984), 27.
Dior himself said: Lesley Ellis Miller, Balenciaga (London: V&A Publishing, 2007), 16.
which Balenciaga refused to do: Balenciaga was known to break his ban on lending or giving dresses, and during the wan postwar period Mlle Renée lent or gave steep reductions to good-looking and well-connected young Americans. Among the beneficiaries were Rosamond Bernier, then starting off at Vogue; Maggi Nolan, who had a social column at the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune; and Susan Mary Alsop, who paid $50 for the dress she wore to host Paris’s first postwar ball, at the Pré Catalan (Susan Mary Alsop, To Marietta from Paris [New York: Doubleday, 1994), 82–3].
At Balenciaga collections: Susan Train to author, Paris, 2010.
Dior was social theater: Rosamond Bernier to author, New York, 2009.
