The Great Fashion Designers

by Brenda Polan

  But it quite quickly became clear that the emphasis of Parisian couture had shifted. Although the private clients were still important, it was the sale of toiles to ready-to-wear manufacturers, especially those in America, and the granting of licences that would refuel the industry and boost France’s economy. In the wake of Christian Dior’s New Look, Grès adjusted her style, nipping waists, rounding shoulders, making longer, fuller skirts. She even introduced an interior corset made for her by Alice Cadolle, which allowed her to create strapless Grecian dresses which were a great success in the 1950s. Although the New Look was partially intended to promote the greater consumption of fabric, Grès’s natural propensity to use it by the tens of metres was hardly appropriate for mass manufacture. She could not, however, compromise her artistic integrity.

  Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Grès was to reinterpret the high-waisted neoclassical gown again and again, but she also developed more geometric shapes in stiffer, heavier fabrics which were less sensuously seductive but more imposing. What these had in common with the Grecian dresses was the way in which they proceeded from a three-dimensional sense of the body. Her fashion sense remained acute through the 1960s, when she designed op-art dresses and flower-power gowns for rich hippies, and the 1970s, when she was able to exploit fashion’s nostalgia for the 1930s with updated versions of her own best pieces.

  In 1979, she did relent on her refusal to create a ready-to-wear collection, but it lasted only two seasons. Two years earlier she had told Marian McEvoy of Women’s Wear Daily, ‘Couture always gives the ideas to prêt-à-porter. The prêt-à-porter designers are always influenced by the couturiers. I feel that prêt-à-porter has indeed given the woman in the street a better, neater appearance, but couture is the creative key. It is a grand work—it is truth—couture brings something to the world.’

  Grès continued to design couture clothes of great beauty which kept pace with fashion and modern concerns (she developed less formal daywear and youthful leisurewear) but failing to make a go of her ready-to-wear line was only one of her mistakes. She was, says Mears, too influenced by Muni and by an employee named Mufthah, whose decisions embroiled her in legal actions that lasted years. Gradually, the press coverage grew less and less as the perception of her significance waned.

  Grès did, however, become active in the politics of the industry, succeeding Lucien Lelong as president of the Chambre Syndicale in 1972. In 1983 she sold a controlling interest in her house, which eventually became wholly owned by the Japanese company Yagi Tsusho. Alix Grès retired after presenting her spring 1988 collection. She settled in her second home in Saint Paul de Vence with her daughter, Anne, who later moved her mother to an inexpensive nursing home in the Var, where she died in 1993, penniless. Anne hid her mother’s death for more than a year. Mears concluded that the daughter, described as immature, simply wanted her famous mother all to herself at last.

  In 1998 Hubert de Givenchy, who had befriended Grès in her declining years, acquired Alix Grès’s personal collection, 300 dresses, he wrote in the introduction to The Givenchy Style in 1998, ‘beautiful enough to go mad over.’

  Further reading: Patricia Mears’s Madame Grès: Sphinx of Fashion (2007) is the definitive read.

  PART 3

  1940s–1950s

  Introduction

  This period in fashion can be looked upon as elitism’s last hurrah. At its start couture was dominant, spawning myriad watered-down copies; at its end mass-produced ready-to-wear, specifically designed for the young, was where innovation was happening, and a new breed of art-school trained designers was poised to make its mark. The Second World War naturally imposed stagnation; materials and labour were needed for other, more pressing purposes, clothing was rationed and fashion, for most people, became an irrelevant frivolity. In France, however, frivolity became an act of defiance, and Paris couture, so important not just in terms of exports but also as a symbol of French identity, fought hard to stay alive and functioning. Before the fall of France in 1940, the couturiers who had been called into the army were given two weeks’ leave to design and make their collections before returning to the front. At the spring collections the Americans placed a huge number of orders. With the occupation of Paris its couturiers could no longer export to most of their usual markets: many moved to Vichy France; Charles Creed moved back to London, Mainbocher and Charles James abandoned Europe entirely to return to New York, and others, led by Lucien Lelong, chairman of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, began the long struggle against the Nazis’ efforts to relocate the industry to Berlin or Vienna.

  The couturiers of London and New York now eclipsed those of Paris. The Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers (ISLFD) was led by Molyneux and included Norman Hartnell, Elspeth Champcommunal at Worth, Digby Morton, Peter Russell, Bianca Mosca, Victor Stiebel and Hardy Amies—who doubled as a Secret Service agent. In compliance with the Utility Clothing Scheme introduced by the British government in 1942, the ISLFD created austerity couture—clothes that were functional, warm and skimpy. In America couture was led by the Hollywood designers Adrian and Omar Kiam, as well as Charles James. Norman Norell showed his first collection in 1940, and Claire McCardell seized her moment, removing shoulder pads and redirecting fashion towards comfort and ease of movement, becoming the most celebrated exponent of the first truly American style of dress, the mass-manufactured genre of designer sportswear. In her wake, Rudi Gernreich further developed the deconstructed, athletic, natural body shape that epitomised the relaxed, outdoors lifestyle of his adopted California.

  At the end of the war the French government made it a priority to re-establish the country’s pre-eminence in fashion. Coco Chanel, in disgrace because of her liaison with a German officer, was in exile in Switzerland but Balenciaga, Grès, Schiaparelli, Lelong, Fath and Balmain were back in Paris. However, it was Christian Dior who made modernity redundant when, in 1947, he introduced the New Look based on belle époque styles. Retrograde as it was, the New Look and its celebration of the hourglass-shaped female body captured the mood of men and women in the aftermath of a devastating war. The men returning from the battle front had witnessed things many could never bear to speak of. They needed the comfort of conventional relationships, they needed their jobs back from the women who had been enlisted to replace them—and they needed children to replace the depleted populations.

  The resulting baby-boom generation fuelled economies in which there were jobs for all, particularly in a burgeoning media and a democratised fashion industry. The ultra-femininity of their mothers’ clothes was replaced by an ethos based on the simplicity of children’s and men’s clothes. Couture, with its high-priced, labour-intensive clothes, was under threat from a ready-to-wear, factory-produced, throwaway culture that wanted something new and cheap every Saturday. The youthquake movement spawned the miniskirt, which sprang from the mods on the streets of London to the imaginations of Mary Quant in London and Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges in Paris. Couturiers such as Chanel, Schiaparelli and Hubert de Givenchy scurried to keep up, introducing boutique lines and moving into prêt-à-porter. The scene was set for a massive paradigm shift.

  15 CRISTOBAL BALENCIAGA (1895–1972)

  Balenciaga is without doubt the designer’s designer, the most frequently credited by other designers as inspirational, the man even Chanel grudgingly admired (the only male couturier thus honoured) and Christian Dior graciously acknowledged as his master. This serious, shy and retiring Spaniard was a technical genius, the architect of cloth, conjuring flattering, dramatic shapes. He was also the most remarkable of far-sighted innovators, capable of sensing shifts in society’s mood. His pre-war collections prefigured Dior’s post-war New Look, and after the war he resisted Dior’s retrospective fantasy and worked towards a crisp, pure-lined modernity. Cecil Beaton, who in 1954 casually referred to Balenciaga as ‘the greatest dressmaker of today’, also wrote: ‘If Dior is the Watteau of dressmaking—full of nuances, chic, delicate a
nd timely—then Balenciaga is fashion’s Picasso. For like that painter, underneath all his experiments with the modern, Balenciaga has a 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.’

  Colin McDowell, in McDowell’s Directory, asserts, ‘He is unquestionably the greatest designer of the twentieth century’, and Francois Boudot does not hesitate to write in awestruck hyperbole about Balenciaga as an artist. ‘You may have thought you were looking at a Zurburan, a Velazquez or a Goya, but it was always Balenciaga. Discouraging imitators, he created his aloof garments in an atmosphere of secrecy and calm for a small and elite number of wealthy beauties who saw him as a cult figure.’ As his self-appointed acolyte and lifelong friend, Hubert de Givenchy was to say in 2006, ‘Balenciaga was like his clothes, perfection. He is still my god.’

  Cristobal Balenciaga Eisaguirre was born in 1895 in Guetaria, a small Basque fishing village. His father, the captain of a pleasure boat, died while Cristobal was still a child and his mother, Martina Eisaguirre, supported her three children by working as a seamstress, an activity for which her younger son developed a passion. The story goes that this untypical boy was forward enough to admire the Drecoll tailleur worn to church by an ageing local aristocrat, the Marquesa de Casa Torres. Her interest piqued, the Marquesa discovered that the thirteen-year-old’s ambition was to be a couturier. She gave him a length of expensive fabric and the Drecoll suit to copy. Balenciaga described how petrified and yet how elated he was. He found the courage to cut into the cloth and, whatever the quality of the resulting outfit, the Marquesa was gracious enough to wear it. She became his first patron, arranging his apprenticeship with a tailor in San Sebastian.

  In 1919, Balenciaga opened his own atelier, Eisa, in the town which was becoming the favoured resort of the Spanish royal family and its court. He established a Madrid branch in 1932 and one in Barcelona in 1938, employing members of his extended family to run them. His workroom staff were trained to high standards of traditional craftsmanship, and he visited Paris regularly as a buyer, attending shows and buying toiles, which he then translated for his own customers. Lesley Ellis Miller emphasises one other background factor that contributed to Balenciaga’s unique and uniquely rigorous approach to fashion. ‘His appreciation of art was similarly formed. In all parts of Spain, painting and sculpture are accessible to everyone in the churches and in the streets—as well as in art galleries and museums. Immense baroque churches dwarf the tiniest villages, and their interiors often contain elaborate chapels and overpowering altarpieces.’

  Balenciaga was a devout man, and the church and its grandly modelled spaces, its monumental images, its sculpted draperies, and its lavishly painted, richly caparisoned saints would have lodged themselves securely in his receptive visual imagination—a semiotic language to be used in his search for an imposing beauty infused with dignity and meaning.

  His colour sense, however, was simultaneously subtle (his range of greys, browns and blacks was a focus of press wonder) and bold, in their depth and richness often reminiscent of late Renaissance or baroque religious paintings. He would hazard unusual colour combinations that worked in a most spectacular way: ginger and bottle green, greige and granite, black and brown, honey beige on black.

  Balenciaga moved to Paris in 1937 establishing a couture business on avenue George-V with two partners, one with Basque connections. Some commentators have suggested that he was escaping the dangers and uncertainties of the Spanish Civil War (both Madrid and Barcelona were under siege from 1935, and San Sebastian fell to Franco’s forces in 1936), but it is likely that Balenciaga intuited the economic stagnation and isolation—and consequent poverty—that would follow a Franco victory. He tried London first but could not get a work permit and took the advice of Madge Garland, the fashion journalist and later educator, that he would be better received in Paris.

  He was by no means in exile—he was able to run his business in Spain from 1940 on—but, as he told Prudence Glynn of the Times in an interview conducted in 1971 after his retirement, ‘Paris used to have a special ambience for fashion because it contained hundreds of dedicated craftsmen making buttons and flowers and feathers and all the trimmings of luxe which could be found nowhere else.’

  He stayed open through the war, supporting Lucien Lelong, head of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, when the Nazis attempted to move the French couture industry to Berlin or Vienna, standing up to ‘six enormous Germans’ with the suggestion that ‘[Hitler] might just as well take all the bulls to Berlin and try to train bullfighters there.’

  Although his circle of friends included the artists Braque, Chagall, Picasso, Miro and Palazuelo, he did not collect their work. Bettina Ballard, editor of Vogue, described his preferred decor as ‘simple, almost austere’, the atmosphere of the couture house as ‘convent-like’. Photographs of his Spanish country home in Igueldo, however, show the dark carvings of traditional Spanish furnishings and religious antiquities.

  After the war the French government concentrated on reviving the couture, levying a tax on all exports so that the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne and its members could afford to mount the shows that would bring back the customers from around the world. Its reasons were only partially economic; Paris was couture and couture was Paris. The restoration of couture was essential for the restoration of a humiliated nation’s self-respect. In the absence of Chanel, whose wartime collaboration with the enemy meant a necessary self-banishment to Switzerland, it soon became clear that two giants were to bestride fashion’s next decade, Christian Dior and Cristobal Balenciaga. They were very different giants.

  As Claire Wilcox wrote in 2007, ‘Dior, an intuitive man, developed an extraordinary sensitivity to the climate of the day. Although shy and nervous of his own innovations, he moved quickly … The fanfare with which his first collection was met on February 12, 1947, set the designer on an upward spiralling path upon which innovation was vital in order to maintain media interest.’ Part of that innovation was commercial—the necessity of ready-to-wear collections and licences. ‘Balenciaga, in contrast,’ wrote Wilcox, ‘was resistant to the idea of producing luxury ready-to-wear on the grounds that only haute couture, to which he was totally dedicated, could meet his own exacting standards. He was a traditional man who built his work gradually, developing his ideas over two or three years.’

  Gustav Zumsteg, the Swiss textile manufacturer, relates in the catalogue to the 1985 Hommage à Balenciaga exhibition in Lyon, that Balenciaga often repeated to him that a good couturier had to be an architect, a sculptor, a painter, a musician and a philosopher, all in one person. Otherwise he would be unable to deal with the different problems of planning, form, colour, harmony and proportion. In fact, Balenciaga, in his white coat and in the hushed, monastic atmosphere he preferred, must have been the ultimate nightmarish controlling boss. He involved himself in every stage of the process from first sketch and choosing, cutting and pinning the fabric through fitting, sewing, re-fitting, unpicking, remaking to meet his exacting standards of perfection, choosing accessories and supervising every last detail down to choosing and drilling the mannequins for the fashion show. Prue Glynn’s interview reveals that his staff referred to him as ‘the Master’.

  His method, a subtle progression over his three decades of dominating couture, was a gradual refinement, paring away extraneous detail to achieve the impact of a pure line and a breathtakingly simple sculptural shape that cocooned the body as lightly as a whisper—however structured they might look. ‘Balenciaga’s clothes are the most extraordinary things,’ reflected Hubert de Givenchy in 2006. ‘He designed clothes that moved around a woman’s body, caressing it … A dress of Balenciaga moves like the wind.’

  Although his daywear always aimed for ease, his evening wear was the most glamorous, the most lavish and the most imposingly Spanish in P
aris, often relying on some serious under-structure for its grand-entrance effect. But the battle for the headlines was then, as it is now, won in the trenches of chic daywear. Balenciaga did not name his collections for a new look as Dior did, but the fashion press identified new shapes and proportions as they evolved. In 1947, when the New Look was claiming column inches, Balenciaga’s sac or barrel-line jacket, slightly bloused to the hip, was preferred by many fashion editors to Dior’s fitted jacket with its corseted nipped-in waist. Balenciaga gradually developed the cocoon jacket (1947), the box jacket (1949), the middy line (1951), the tunic line (1955), the sack or chemise (1957) and the empire line (1958).

  However 1947 was difficult for him. His nephew, Agustin Medina Balenciaga, described Balenciaga’s reaction when many of his clients deserted him for Dior.

  At the beginning of his career and during the war, he was not only designing but interacting with everyone socially as much as possible. He had a strict sense of what was right or wrong and felt betrayed if someone left him for another designer. He was dismayed when many longtime clients rushed to the house of Dior after the success of the New Look in 1947. From then on he became more selective as to whom he would trust. Ultimately he would concentrate on his work and not care about the opinions of a larger social group. However if one was fortunate enough to be included in the circle around him, one enjoyed a real intimacy with him, and his friends took pleasure in his sly sense of humour and irony.