The Glass of Fashion

by Cecil Beaton

  Today Balenciaga is a man of fifty-seven but appears much younger than his age. He has tired, yet bright eyes, and it is only when he fishes out a pair of rimmed spectacles that you realize he is myopic. His nose is beaked and Spanish, and his thin mouth has a slightly humourous, faintly sardonic smile that suggests a long-buried bitterness or an ironic awareness of human nature. In spite of the aloof pride written in its lines, the whole expression of the face is intensely human. His personality is somewhat suggestive of the bird kingdom. He is a natural phenomenon, yet there is a fleeting quality about him in repose, like a composed bird standing on one leg. Balenciaga is as we see him when he comes down from a branch to ruffle his feathers before returning to a solitary perch.

  True to his appearance, the great dressmaker avoids publicity and the attentions and claims of worldly women. He has no ambition to enlarge his kingdom. He enjoys life as only simple people can, and because of that simplicity he seems utterly rare and fascinating in the world of artifice in which he works. If his pride is softened, it is because it is attuned to the exigencies of the world: he has known hard knocks and has triumphed over them.

  In his work Balenciaga shows the refinement of France and the strength of Spain. His dresses have elegance and solidity: like their maker, they can mingle with kinds and keep the common touch. Balenciaga does not provide any startling changes. His is a slow and carefully worked out development. Whereas Dior’s dresses are most ingeniously and beautifully evolved from sketches, Balenciaga uses fabrics like a sculptor working in marble. He can rip a suit apart with his thumbs and remake or alter his vision in terms of practical at-hand dressmaking. It is even possible that he makes no sketches at all, relying entirely on the picture in the mind’s eye.

  Again, by contrast with Dior, Balenciaga’s dresses alter little with each season. His pendulum is more measured. Yet, paradoxically, his fashions are nearly always several years ahead of existing fashions. He is a real leader, and his dresses never go out of fashion, for they are based on a strong foundation. Other dressmakers may enjoy the trimmings of life, but Balenciaga, dour, Spanish, and ascetic, is a master architect, working along solid and enduring lines.

  In contrast to more feminine creations, this Spanish dressmaker’s work is altogether bolder, less compromising, and more masculine. If one looks at the art of dressmaking and strips it to its essentials, considering it in its simplest terms, then one must concede that Balenciaga is indeed today’s Titan among couturiers. His touch has the rugged, peasant-like sureness of the great artist.

  He is always certain of his effects. If he prescribes a short black sack of a dress for a beautiful or an ugly woman, if he sends her out with a flue brush sticking out at an unexpected angle from her pillbox hat, then his judgment must be respected.

  And respected it is. Like pilots who trust the complicated instruments on their dashboards to bring them through a difficult stretch of navigation, many women believe utterly in Balenciaga’s bold but unfailing talent and find themselves steered from danger to safety in the currents and eddies of contemporary fashions. His black woollen costumes, ceremonial sheaths of Byzantine embroidery, and extravaganzas of jet should be enshrined side by side with the peasant clothes, the sacrificial vestments and ceremonial robes to be found in our national museums, for they form a part of contemporary fashion history.

  Balenciaga will talk volubly, but he is fundamentally reticent. He has few but firm maxims, one of his tenets being that no dressmaker can make a woman chic if she is not chic herself. Nor does he believe in the chic that comes from following the mode of the moment. If a woman is courci—an untranslatable Spanish word which might best be described as “dowdy smart”—if she has a matching bag, dress, and handkerchief, she may achieve a smart vulgarity, which is scarcely what is desired.

  Balenciaga also believes that a lady of fashion cannot be elegant unless she patronizes a single dressmaker. And that dressmaker, to be true to himself, must remove himself from the constant flurries and competitive chirpings that flourish in the forest of the Place Vendôme.

  If asked what constitutes a distinguished woman, Balenciaga will slyly quote Dalí: “A distinguished lady always has a disagreeable air.” He makes a distinction, however, between distinguished and glamorous: it is his belief that the glamorous cocottes of yesterday have become respectable and are today’s distinguished ladies.

  But for Balenciaga life has irrevocably changed. Women no longer have the time, the utter leisure to seem as beautiful as they did in the early years of this century. We live in a different world. One age ended with the First World War—an age of elegance, presided over by Worth and Doucet. After that there was an age of chic, created, Balenciaga maintains, by Cheruit, who asserted not so much of a style as a certain piquancy and suppleness that made for chic. And still another age ended with the Second World War.

  Yet, like Dior, Balenciaga believes that the couturier must go in the direction that the times dictate. The dressmaker cannot do battle with his age but must rather allow his expression to find its appeal through the temporal mode. He must sense what is needed and how women are to look at a given moment. Balenciaga himself always makes a collection by considering that which is indispensable and not that which he would like to give. Yet somehow his creations always pass through the filter of a strong, unyielding Spanish personality, which brilliantly creates a solidity out of the fleeting and makes an enduring quality out of some temporal phase.

  Balenciaga does not try to follow the new season’s fashion, nor does he know what it is. He attempts, at best, to feel what a woman should look like at a given moment. In this attitude one senses perhaps that a Dior feels more impelled to observe the line of the mode from previous seasons and from other indications, rather than turn his back upon it and create a new expression. Balenciaga may be more conservative, but in the end he is oddly more daring than many of his French rivals.

  Sadly, this Spanish genius points out that modern women find it difficult to become refined. They cannot be elegant when they are in too much of a hurry. Yet in their favour he discovers that many modern women are aware of the dangers of being chi-chi or extravagant. They have no time to be chi-chi.

  Always Balenciaga will return to his basic assertion, emphasizing that a couturier cannot make the inner spirit of a woman but can only create the outward clotheshorse. The woman herself must have an inner quality that makes her wear her clothes well. As illustration, Balenciaga points out that you may put the same dress on two different women, and one will be vulgar while the other will achieve elegance.

  Balenciaga does not believe that women should vary their clothing often in order to be well dressed. Men, by contrast, wear the same several suits most of the time, yet they can and do manage to look elegant.

  If one could say that fashion is a serial story that never ends, then the good designers must invent new plot developments to continue the tale, and all good dressmaking must conform to the fictional pattern of fashion’s evolution and continuation. Balenciaga does not believe in the eternal novelty of the new, as so many fashion maniacs do. Quite the contrary: his plot developments must be integral with what has gone before, must stem from characters of fashion itself. Though he will sometimes make concessions, he never alters his basic thought. As an example of this, a year or so ago, when collection buyers complained to Balenciaga that certain of his clothes were much too loose, he adjusted and made alterations, changing the overfilled, untight look, but he did not for a moment give up his basic conceptions.

  Balenciaga’s colour sense is so refined, sharpened to such a remarkable degree, that he can unerringly scan four hundred colours and choose the right one for his purpose. It is Balenciaga’s belief that a dressmaker must be virtually scientific in the choice of the colours that support his inspiration.

  Behind his casual remarks about women, fashion, and the modern world, one senses a firm but vital thread of pessimism. This may, indeed, be the basis of Balenciaga’s unique creative
abilities. For that which is rooted in pessimism can never die. Though he believes that a grand way of life has disappeared forever, and though the money and splendour that created the atmosphere of a fabulous heyday of fashions are irrevocably gone, yet, like Dior, Balenciaga adjusts himself to the age and goes on creating what the age must have to reflect its true image of itself. Proud, Spanish, classical, he is a strange rock to be found in the middle of the changing sea of fashion, and one which will endure long after the capricious waves of the moment have done their best to dislodge him.

  Apart from the several reigning dressmakers who occupy the central throne, there are grouped about them, as for a photographic sitting, the creators of accessory fashions; and, still close to the throne, are the blood relations connected by the ties of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Femina, Mademoiselle, and the dozen-odd magazines whose important business it is to promulgate the modes of the moment. The feminine genii among these magazine editors are known, not perhaps by the person in the street, but by those whose relationships have ever involved them with the inner circles of fashion. Mrs. Edna Woolman Chase and Mrs. Carmel Snow for years have been seen in the front row at fashion openings, holding key positions as promoters through whose activities the changing trends and rulers are made familiar to the anonymous majority of women who accept, whether willingly or grudgingly, the dictates of the moment.

  Mrs. Edna Woolman Chase, more than anyone else, is a veritable fashion institution. Only recently, when Vogue magazine filed a court suit against a modelling school that, having no connection with the Condé-Nast enterprises, was taking Vogue’s name in vain, Mrs. Chase testified as a witness and told the startled judge, in answer to his question, that she had worked for Vogue since 1895. The magistrate lowered his glasses, peered over the top of his desk at her, and then murmured, “That is a very remarkable fact.” In the span of these fifty-odd years of tenure with Vogue Mrs. Chase has both directly and indirectly exerted a tremendous influence on changing methods of promotion and presentation, and the innovations that could be laid at her doorstep are without number. In spirit and character Edna Woolman Chase is a bountiful woman with valuable homely qualities, a warm heart and a fighting spirit that has often waged war against both chi-chi and the destructive persons or tendencies that have sometimes attempted to sabotage the principles she believes in. Now in her late seventies, she still takes an active interest in the magazine she has so courageously served in the course of its half century of life.

  Mrs. Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar served her apprenticeship with Vogue and the Condé-Nast publications, an apprenticeship for which she is always deeply grateful. Like a good vintage wine, Mrs. Snow becomes mellower and finer with each passing year. Today, with pale mauve hair and carnation cheeks, she is the rich fulfillment of the qualities she possessed at the beginning to make her an inevitable key woman. Mrs. Snow combines an Irish temperament with (and she has no French blood in her) a French intuition. Guided by her unerring instinct, she seeks and finds the tendencies of contemporary fashions before they have even made themselves apparent to many a professional eye. So attuned is Carmel Snow to her atmosphere that she often anticipates what other people are about to suggest, and can telepathically finish thoughts and sentences for them. Keenly appreciative and endowed with a quick intelligence, this director of Harper’s Bazaar will yet readily depreciate herself, insisting that she is illiterate and uneducated. But her literacy is that of her profession, and her education is the result of the French instincts that she has brought to bear in a world whose needs are too ruthlessly immediate to permit inefficiency. In that, Mrs. Snow has no cause for worry: her agile mind, like a salamander darting out its tongue to capture a fly, seizes impressions on the wing and incorporates them in a magazine whose consistent high standards have been an index for achievement to others.

  Madame Marie-Louise Bousquet, the French editor of Harper’s Bazaar, is like that magic ingredient which the Chinese have used for centuries to flavour soups and sauces. Without her, the world of fashion would lose an integral part of its mind and heart. Though she moves in an environment which has its silly and brittle aspects, Marie-Louise Bousquet has never lost her sense of true human values nor her high æsthetic appreciation. She understands artists’ problems and life’s cruelties; she has a great literary sense, inherited, perhaps, from her husband and the literary salons they promoted together during his lifetime. To fashion, Marie-Louise Bousquet is a brilliant asset, not merely because she is present at the birth of the new in the major and minor arts, but because she is often the midwife herself. This great French lady is an inspiration to those who come to her with creative problems a sort of fairy godmother. Beneath the outward trappings of her fashionable clothes, her institutional Thursday afternoon salons, and her own inward suspicion that she has, perhaps, sold her soul in order to earn a living in a world of transient values—beneath all this, Marie-Louise Bousquet is tragically individual, hewn out of granite qualities that endure and persist. In spite of her bad arthritis and a game leg, she is never rattled, putters about in her little car, and seems to be everywhere, posing hands on feverish brows, promoting kindness, friendships, helping to launch talent, and, in general, serving as the brilliant Florence Nightingale of fashion which she doubtless is.

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE GALLIC TOUCH

  REFERRING to our æsthetic and spiritual heritage from the golden age of Plato and Phidias, Shelley once said that we are all Greeks. It might equally well be said, “We are all Frenchmen.” For nearly three hundred years France has maintained a unique position as the centre of Western culture, fostering both the major and minor arts with an instinct, flair, and a creativeness that are distinctly recognizable as “the Gallic touch.” In poetry and perfumes, dressmaking and drama, interiors and ideas, the French seem to be continually effervescing with inspiration.

  It is no accident that they are past masters at the art of living. A truly civilized people does not scorn the minor arts, for it knows how important the manifestations of living can be, even when embodied in a less permanent form of expression than marble or indelible ink. France can rightly be as proud of the talents of her jewel makers or decorators as of a Stendhal or a Rodin. The porter who opens the gates and the good-natured and curious concierge knitting in her lodge have a respect for beauty in its many forms. Possibly for this very reason fifty million Frenchmen have maintained the lead in the refinement and perfection of the minor arts and have developed them to a brilliant degree.

  But whatever the causes of the phenomenon, it has proved a stimulus to foreigners. More than one expatriot has settled in Paris, absorbing and expressing this ability to a degree that sometimes surpasses the French themselves. Picasso is perhaps the most notable example in recent times. His debt to France is so great that we scarcely consider him a Spaniard except by the accident of birth; his cultural roots are unquestionably French. Yet there are other endeavours than in the fields of dressmaking at which the French, or the “naturalized” French, are equally adept, and they are as widely disparate as the making of jewellery and interior decoration.

  In jewellery Paris designers, typified in the designs of Jean Schlumberger and the Duke of Verdura, show more imagination and originality than in any other capital. Yet no one is more revered among the initiates for her extraordinary taste than the talented Jeanne Toussaint. In the course of the last three decades this birdlike little woman, with a beak of a nose, an exquisitely pretty mouth that hints of her sensitivity, and with chinchilla-coloured hair worn in the bobbed wisps of the twenties, has designed jewellery for the firm of Cartier. Her influence has encompassed the earth. She might have been an architect or a sculptor, an actress or a wonderful cook, but she has brought her original gifts to the handling of jewels. As a result of this love for strange settings and juxtapositions of stones, unique jewellery, never before seen, has made its appearance in the world of fashion.

  Madame Toussaint can unite different elements with an utter
ly fresh approach, yet her work is still bounded by the classical. Her sense of equilibrium and proportion is so strong that anything she creates represents safely good taste. For this artist, the stone itself is irrelevant: she does not consider it a jewel, a bijou, until it has been wonderfully set and presented. She is more interested in working with less expensive stones, and with yellow sapphires, tourmalines, amethysts, coral, and aquamarines creates colour combinations that have hitherto existed only in the jewels from India. Madame Toussaint can take First Empire tiaras, bracelets, or brooches from their heavy gold settings and make parures of a filigree lightness, with wonderfully mixed colours.

  MADAME TOUSSAINT

  Her jewel maker’s touch is a light one. Continuing in the vein of eighteenth-century brooches (with bunches of diamond flowers quivering on their taut wires), she has made diamonds flexible, hanging them in little fringes, stalactites or tassels, creating chains of diamonds that are as supple as the beads of a rosary.

  The Toussaint gift springs from an unswerving, granite-hard instinct, allied with irrevocable powers of decision. She knows exactly what she wants and, if she is convinced that one of her ideas is good, can never be influenced by any opposition nor swayed by any theory of public taste. This extraordinary independence insures the originality that is eventually claimed by the public.

  Madame Toussaint’s apartment, to which only a few enlightened souls are invited, reveals another aspect of her very sensitive but rugged feminine taste. No colour schemes assail the eye, nothing is blatant, no feature stands out; yet everything is calculated down to the smallest detail. Hers is a quiet authority that takes one into its confidence by degrees; one must seek out the details of a harmonious whole. This apartment is like a secret that only a few are privileged to share with its owner.