The Glass of Fashion

by Cecil Beaton

  He was then asked to submit sketches for the fashion pages of Figaro, and there his work began to appear regularly. In 1937 Dior met Robert Piguet, who asked him to take a job as a “modeliste.”

  Dior spent two years at Piguet’s, until the advent of the war. Here he considers the most valuable thing he learned was “how to suppress.” Piquet knew that elegance lay in simplicity, and he taught this lesson to Dior.

  Piguet was amused at Dior’s concern for technique and coupes savantes. Today Dior feels that Piguet had no right to criticize, and emphasizes that it is only through technique that fashion can be profoundly modified.

  During the German occupation of France Dior spent a long time in Provence, marking time. For two years, like many others, he returned to the earth, got up with the birds, and cultivated his garden. He continued, however, to sketch for Figaro and finally was able to return to Paris, where he worked as modeliste for Lucien Lelong.

  At Lelong’s, Dior learned the importance of what he today considers to be the essential thing in dressmaking: the eccentricities and behaviour of different dressmaking fabrics. “With the same idea and the same fabric,” Dior admonishes, “a dress can be a success or a perfect failure.” A knowledge of how to direct the natural flow of cloth is imperative; and a good dressmaker always submits to the natural bent of wool, organdy, velvet, or whatever material he happens to be working with.

  At Lelong’s, Dior, together with Pierre Balmain, shared the responsibilities of creating Lelong’s collections. The two dress designers were friendly enough, though Balmain was ambitious and dreamed of opening his own establishment. His reveries were catching, and Dior began dimly to entertain similar notions.

  After the liberation of France, Balmain opened his own successful dressmaking house. Dior, whose timidity had led him to believe he would work with Lelong forever, became more and more dissatisfied and felt ever less free. Though his friendship with Lelong was great, he had no choice but ultimately to leave and create his own headquarters.

  One the eve of the New Look, Dior maintains that he had no idea he was about to start a revolution. He could scarcely foresee the reception that would be accorded to him, having merely done his best according to his beliefs. No doubt many women all over the Western world, plagued by clothing rationing and high cost of living, cursed him for what they considered wanton fantasy. But to Dior, the image of the wilfully spiteful designer is pure legend. It was the times, as much as his own ingenuity, that launched fashions on a more feminine trend, and he feels he was merely the instrument by which to express what the ladies unconsciously felt.

  A few designers have the gift of expressing themselves in words, and Dior is one of these exceptions. He is something of a philosopher in his own right, and his observations about fashion and the present epoch are shrewd and just. It is his firm belief that “dressmaking is, in the machine age, one of the last refuges for the human, the personal, and the inimitable.” He regards the exercising of his profession as a “sort of fight against the demoralizing and mediocre influences of our time.”

  THE NEW LOOK

  In answer to the inevitable question as to whether there is a logic to fashion, Dior will reply affirmatively. He points out that each age seeks its image, the mirror of that image being the mirror of truth. The long skirts and bouffant thighs of his New Look were merely an expression of what his intuition told him was needed. “By being natural and sincere,” Dior says, “one often creates revolutions without having sought them.” Thus the styles of the twenties showed the influence of machines, as did Léger’s paintings of the same period. But today, Dior feels, the robot woman makes us afraid. Our contemporary problems have brought us face-to-face with an uncultured and hostile world, have forced us to take stock of our traditions and our culture and to reaffirm human values. That is why the mode in women’s dress has become increasingly feminine.

  Dior is perhaps the last of the great couturiers, fighting valiantly to maintain creative values in a sombre epoch of history. He believes that luxury is as essential to anything which the West prizes. “Everything that goes beyond the simple fact of food, clothing, and shelter is luxury. Our civilization is a luxury, and it is that we are defending.” These words seem to echo those of another brilliant dressmaker, Mainbocher, when he says: “I do not consider dressmaking an art, but it is as important as cooking or living.” In the face of impossible odds, Christian Dior continues to create, refusing to throw up the sponge. “Things are always falling apart,” he sighs. “Our simple duty is not to yield, but to be an example, to create in spite of everything.”

  Create he does, and always with a practical mind. To the ladies who think that dressmakers are expressing wanton personal taste, Dior replies sharply, “I risk the salary of nine hundred persons in making a collection.” Knowing this, he can never do anything wilful or perverse. No matter how much a collection may seem to be a free expression of the dress designer’s fancy, it has all been carefully thought out and executed with as much precision as a master chess game. Each dressmaker strives to interpret, through the personal prism of himself, the mass taste of the moment, anticipating that taste before it has even taken form. Dior stresses that “the atmosphere of the times is an essentially unknowable element, but it is very important.” The success of a play, a party, a political event, an exhibition, a king’s visit—all of these things can explain and even predict a fashion.

  It is inconceivable to Dior that anyone could believe the principal designers plot together to decide what the following season’s collection will be. “How could you imagine personalities so totally different,” Dior asks, “using working methods so diverse, and then bending to a common rule and taking a decision so far in advance?” This, he claims, would be to deny the very essence of fashion and dressmaking. On the contrary, the dressmakers work in great and indispensable secrecy. The spirit of novelty is the very spirit of fashion itself. And for inspiration the dress designer either travels, withdraws to his country house, or “just feels fabrics.”

  Yet each season there is a spirit of fashion. Dior maintains this spirit is created by the public, though the public may be unaware of it. The atmosphere of the moment, the choices made by the fashion magazines, the successes of the previous season—all these things have influence. Wittily Dior turns an epigram: “The couturier proposes, but the ladies dispose.” It amuses him to observe that the same models are always taken up by the different fashion magazines; and then, modified, amplified, deformed, or exaggerated, these models become everybody’s fashion the following season. Once the mode is thus propagated and has become so widespread that it affects everyone, it ceases to be timely and is already passé.

  In this analysis of fashion Dior is possibly exercising professional discretion. Actually dressmakers have often accused one another of stealing ideas and are frequently at needle points with one another. They are apt to hate their genus and seldom meet one another, for jealousy, envy, and rivalry consume them. With few exceptions they are a tiresome, unreliable brood. Almost all inarticulate, they have never invented their own vocabulary, and their abuse of the French words chic and élégant have almost robbed these adjectives of their significance. Dressmakers will described a dress or a coat as a “little nothing”; and it is their cousin, the vendeuse, who has created the cliché, “But, modom, it is so much ‘you.’ ”

  Only the “hands” have their language, the language of the pins. Like tramps who chalk good or bad signs on walls so that others may benefit from the luck of a night’s lodging and a gift of bread or, conversely, may avoid angry dogs and strict police; or like hotel porters who, by their manner of pasting the labels on departing travellers’ trunks, inform others of the likelihood of tips, so, too, the ouvriers can give their initiates the instructions for a certain garment in the making and, no doubt, with the help of a few extra pins, also provide a character sketch of its prospective owner.

  DIOR EVENING DRESS

  Yet Dior’s analysis of th
e way in which the spirit of the new fashion spreads is accurate. It is perfectly understandable the different dressmakers can pick up the same message from the jungle drums of fashion, just as Indian tribes far up the Amazon will know of the advent of a white explorer weeks before he arrives at their village. In this case the fact that the skirt will be raised four inches, is signalled by jungle wireless and appears simultaneously in the following season’s collections of different dressmakers.

  Little does the woman of fashion realize all that goes into the making of a collection. A year previous to any given season, fabrics have already begun to be woven in Lyons, in northern France, in Switzerland, in Milan, and on the farthest isles of Scotland. Sometimes the dress houses suggest certain colours or weaves to the fabric makers. Dior himself tells a charming story about visiting Madame Brossin de Mere in Switzerland. “How I would love it,” he exclaimed, “if you could create a fabric like those roofs!” The roofs in question were of scalloped grey slate. Three months later Madame Brossin brought Dior a delightful embroidered organdy covered with his roofs.

  After the weaving of the stuffs, the salesmen, like Chinese illusionists, come to the great house and spread out, fanwise, bolts of dazzling materials and colours. It is, Dior says, “like a fireworks display.” Unconsciously the dress designer begins to discover his favourites, but only after his choices have been made does he perceive the dominating colours which will turn out to be next season’s “fashionable” ones.

  Though Dior is, at first, almost drowned in a sea of fabrics, he must resist temptation and set aside those which are too impractical. It is then that he begins to think of the possible dresses that can be made.

  A collection, Dior says, is made up of few ideas, a dozen at most. This seems paradoxical, coming from a man whose fecundity seems to dazzle the fashion world with every season. But, he admits, one must know how to vary the ideas, how to adapt and impose them on the public.

  Once his final sketches are finished, they become blueprints for the ultimate creations. His three collaborators, the Mesdames Bricard, Marguerite, and Raymonde, take over. The ateliers are set in operation, and under the hawklike eyes of Dior and the three fates, the collection must be finished in six or seven weeks, with not a minute to spare. “There is no doubt,” says Dior, “that any object created by a man’s hand expresses something, and, above all, the personality of he who made it. It is the same in dressmaking.” What Dior did not add is that dressmaking, like the theatre, is a collective art: many hands work towards one final expression, which must yet be that of the playwright or the designer himself.

  Once the dresses have been made, there follow showings, first for the press, then for the buyers. The curtain of grey satin opens, the first mannequin enters the room, and the excitement of an opening begins. Each model has a name and a number which are announced in English and French by a female barker. Unlike the press, the buyers must pay a fee to see the collection, though this fee is an advance on what they may later prudently purchase. The sum is asked to compensate for their photographic eyes, which are often capable of copying the ideas of certain dresses. Many buyers, of course, are eminently ethical and have a respect for the couturier’s work; they know that that work represents time, labour, money, and love. But others, though they often buy certain models, will rip and tear seams, altering to suit their fancy. To protect themselves as much as possible, the dressmakers “filter” those buyers who are allowed to see the collection. This may seem humiliating, but everything is done to avoid copying. And copying, for Dior, is tantamount to stealing: however much of an honour it may be to the dressmaker, it costs him money. He is still badly protected against this organized pillage and must do his best to circumvent it.

  Dior, like any dressmaker of note, has, of course, his special clients, women of means who order their dresses from him alone. Dior humorously divides them into various categories: the woman who is insane for dresses; the woman who is never contented; the woman who does not know what she wants; and the perfect client, who knows what she wants and how much she can pay for it.

  Dior stresses that, though the average person regards the professions that cater to ladies’ fashions as compounded of insanity, perversity, pipe dreams, squandered money, and just plain silliness, they are in reality, behind their façades of perfumes, of organdy and mannequins, commercial enterprises where the least yard of mousseline become a figure on a page, where the collections of each season become the francs and the sous of hundreds of employees who cater to that amorphous monster, the general public of women.

  In the world of present-day dressmakers, Balenciaga stands apart, like some Elizabethan malcontent meditating upon the foibles and follies of fashion, yet committed to acting and creating in the very world which he regards with a classical Spanish eye. He is so much the opposite of a Christian Dior that they might well be placed at the far ends of the dressmaking world; yet each has a respect for the work of the other, and each is unquestionably a genius of contemporary style. If Dior is the Watteau of dressmaking—full of nuances, chic, delicate, and timely—then Balenciaga is fashion’s Picasso. For like that painter, underneath all his experiments with the modern, Balenciaga has deep respect for tradition and a pure classic line. All artists who, apart from their unique personal gift, are also mediums transmitting the message of the art of the past inevitably are timely as well as timeless.

  Unlike Dior, Balenciaga knew, even as a small boy, that he wanted to be a dressmaker. But though he pursued the vocation for many years, it was only in 1938, at the age of forty-two, that his star rose, calm and faithful as the Dog Star itself, over the skies of Paris fashion. Success came late, perhaps too late, to Balenciaga, though it may well be that this very tardiness of recognition accounts for his unique place in contemporary fashion. Balenciaga belongs to no clique, plays nobody’s game but his own, steadfastly refuses to commercialize either himself or his talents, pays little attention to the seasonal changes of styles, and pursues a solitary creation of values which have won him the respect, admiration, and patronage of those who know modern fashion intimately and can recognize his unusual genius.

  Born in a small fishing village on the Basque coast of Spain, Balenciaga’s personality gave early evidence that he was destined for a career other than that which his background might ordinarily have dictated. His father was captain of a pleasure boat, catering to the simple outings of simple people. He could not help being amazed by the son who, at a tender age, showed little inclination to swim and fish or lead the life of the peasant children. Balenciaga preferred, on the contrary, to “sew like the women.” His father threw up his hands in horror; but his mother, sensing perhaps the future that was already being prepared within him, protected the boy and allowed him to continue with his hobby.

  In the small Spanish community there was little opportunity for an embryo dressmaker to see any fine ladies of the outside world. The one exception, perhaps, was an elderly marquesa, a former great beauty who owned a large house on the hill and whom the dreamy Balenciaga could admire from a distance in church, or fleetingly when she passed in a carriage. One Sunday morning, among the crowd that poured out from the church following Mass, Balenciaga watched the aging Marquesa descend the worn stone steps, wearing a tailleur of white tussore and a straw hat enveloped in a maroon veil that tied under her chin in a bow. Unable to restrain his admiration, the youth murmured aloud, “How elegant you are!”

  The Marquesa paused and looked intensely at the boy in the hard Spanish sunlight. Surprised at such a remark from what was evidently a peasant boy, she must have found her curiosity piqued, and began to ply Balenciaga with questions. She quickly discovered his interest in sewing and his nascent æsthetic abilities which were fervent and manifest, however mawkish their expression might be. As a result of this meeting the Marquesa decided, shortly afterwards, to bestow upon Balenciaga the great honour of allowing him to copy her Drecoll suit. She gave the boy a bolt of material and lent him the original creat
ion that he had admired so much.

  The young Balenciaga was petrified and in a state of great elation at the same time. The prospect of copying a suit by Drecoll was a rare one; but supposing he should ruin the Marquesa’s expensive material? With fear and trembling he executed his copy, and the Marquesa paid the crowning tribute to him of wearing it. Balenciaga admits today that the copy was no great shakes; but it marked a conspicuous beginning and gave him the confidence and growing sense of ambition which he needed.

  The following year the young dressmaker, scrubbed and shining and fortified by a modest sum of money in his pocket, went off to Paris for an Arabian Nights visit during which he watched the collections of Doucet, Drecoll, and Worth, where he sat rapt in wonder. When his money ran out, Balenciaga returned home, happy in the conviction that he would become a great couturier. But the Basque Dick Whittington had a long and hard road to travel before he was to become the lord mayor of contemporary fashions.

  Luck played a great part in the career of this Spanish genius. Balenciaga has always been clever enough to seize his opportunity when it presented itself. He knew how to ride the tide that comes in the affairs of men, and in this was served well by his direct simplicity of spirit. It is not often reflected upon that only complicated people are unable to collect their winnings when the wheel of fortune stops at their number. But Balenciaga was not complicated in that sense: he knew how to claim what was rightfully his.

  He started his first dressmaking establishment in San Sebastian on a ridiculously small sum and with pathetically limited materials. It took many years of hard work to compensate for his background, his early lack of opportunities and education. Slowly Balenciaga acquired what his native intelligence needed; eagerly he seized his luck as it presented itself to him. And in 1936, past forty years old, he set up shop in Paris on ten thousand pounds of capital. Perhaps the difficulties of commercial success had held him back for too long; his success had come, but it was as ashes in his mouth and could not be like the heady wine of a youthful acclaim.