Creators

by Paul M. Johnson

  Balenciaga’s best days were in the 1950s, before the “cultural revolution” of the 1960s. He regarded making dresses as a vocation, like the priesthood, and an act of worship. He felt that he served God by suitably adorning the female form, which God had made beautiful. His approach was reverential, indeed sacerdotal. His premises reflected his own vocational tone. In those days, haute couture shops varied in atmosphere greatly. Molyneux tried to make his like an aristocratic London town house. You rang a bell and an English butler answered the door and ushered you in. Dior’s premises were grand but busy, with much va-et-vient, like a big salon on one of the hostess’s “days.” Dior himself, affable and gregarious, could be seen roaming about, wearing a white overall over his well-cut Savile Row suit. Bonjour, patron! sang out his women workers, always pleased to see him. By contrast, Maison Balenciaga was like a church, indeed a monastery. Marie-Louise Bousquet said, “It was like entering a convent of nuns drawn from the aristocracy.” Courrèges, who worked there, described the atmosphere as “monastic in both an architectural and a spiritual sense.” Emanuel Ungaro remembered: “Nobody spoke.” If it was absolutely necessary to speak, the voice had to be hushed or reduced to a whisper. Security was intense. It was difficult not just to get in at all but to move from one room to another, for all entrances were guarded by fierce females. There was a porter in blue, but the real keeper of the gate was a dragon called Véra. Indeed, it was a place of women—like a convent vowed to silence (as is usual in Spain)—but any women who were not models or seamstresses were dragons. Madame Renée was the head dragon, who ensured that patrons came only by appointment. Her saying was: Les dames curieuses ne sont pas bienvenue ici. Unwelcome—that was putting it mildly. The only dame curieuse who ever got past Véra and Renée was Greta Garbo. (She was dressed by the despised Hollywood couturier Adrien.) The impression should not be given that the place was drab. In fact the decorations in the window done by Janine Janet were the best in Paris, though they had nothing to do with women’s fashions, featuring birch sculptures of fauns, unicorns, and similar figures. Inside were tiled floors, Spanish-style; oriental rugs; damascene curtains; ironwork fittings; and a great deal of red Cordoba leather, varied with brown, black, and white leather in the showrooms. The elevator was lined with leather, too, and contained a sedan chair. Balenciaga did a limited trade in scarves, gloves, and stockings; but he sold only two (very expensive) perfumes: Le Dix and La Fuite des Heures. He gave the impression that he thought such things vulgar and irrelevant to his main work, and permitted them reluctantly, since they were highly profitable. He never did anything to court popularity. He never gave interviews (except once, to the London Times, when he had decided to retire). He never went out in society. There are virtually no photographs of him and none at work, though we know he wore black trousers and sweater and used a curious curved table on which to sew or cut material, with rulers and a square as aids. All the rooms in his atelier, as noted above, were closely guarded, and his own room was totally inaccessible except to the most senior staff. At one time it was widely believed he did not actually exist and that Balenciaga was a pseudonym.

  His remoteness was not a pose but part of his dedication to his art. He worked fanatically hard when he was actually in Paris. Each collection had between 200 and 250 designs, all of which he completed himself, since he had few trusted assistants and often turned down promising juniors, such as the seventeen-year-old Hubert de Givenchy. He had the manners of an old-fashioned cardinal under Pius XII. He was sometimes angry, but his anger expressed itself in irritable foot movements, never in violence of any kind. He never raised his voice. Indeed silence was his norm. Ungaro said: “There was something noble about him.” When he was satisfied with his designs, and the clothes were made up, each outfit had four fittings: one for materials, and three for shape, using models. In just one day he could get through fitting sessions for 180 outfits by dint of intense concentration and by working with a team who knew exactly what his gestures signified, for few words were spoken. It was said that he disliked women, but there was no evidence that he disliked them more than men. He saw them as racehorses: “We must dress only thoroughbreds.” He used to quote Salvador Dalí: “A truly distinguished woman often has a disagreeable air.”

  Yet he was a woman’s designer, through and through. His fundamental principle as a dressmaker was to make women happy. “He liked to make a duchess of sixty look forty, and the wife of a millionaire tradesman look like a duchess.” His clothes were, above all, comfortable to wear, an amazing fact—and it was a fact—considering their grandeur, their complexity, and the magnificence of their materials. His designs accommodated a well-rounded stomach, a short neck, and overly plump arms and shoulders, and left space for ropes of pearls and for bracelets. Comfort was achieved by great ingenuity of design and attention to what the duke of Windsor called the “underpinnings.” (But of course Balenciaga never used pins or extraneous stiffening of any kind.) Balenciaga argued that if a woman was comfortable in her clothes, she was confident; and if she was confident, she was at her best and wore her clothes with style. He said that some designers put a strain on the client so that she was glad to get the dress off at the end of an evening. He wanted his clients to be reluctant to part with their clothes, which had become an integral part of the body, a second skin.

  His second principle was permanence. While Dior made changes twice a year, Balenciaga was always fundamentally the same, especially in his splendid evening dresses, which were his specialty. A woman could buy one of them as an investment because properly looked after, it would last forever. In 2003, I saw a young woman of eighteen wearing a superb dress. “Is that not a Balenciaga?” “Yes. It belonged to my grandmother.” He wanted his dresses to be bequeathed, as they were in imperial Spain. In a sense he was antifashion. He was impressed by the way dresses, hats, and even accessories in certain old masters remained elegant after hundreds of years, and he constantly got ideas from them. From Velázquez’s Queen Marianna of Austria (in the Louvre) he stole the idea of a stiff bodice sliding out of the skirt. Another Louvre picture, La Solana, gave him the inspiration for an entire outfit: black dress, white lace mantilla, masses of dark hair with a huge pink satin rose planted in or on it. His favorite source was Zurbarán’s saints. He used the Santa Ursula in Strasbourg, the Santa Casilda in the Prado, and especially the enchanting Santa Maria (there are versions in Seville and in the National Gallery in London), seen by the painter as a rich bourgeoise, wearing her hat and dress with flair and carrying an enchanting straw shopping bag. That bag became, and remains, a classic. He borrowed the full-length pinkish satin twice from Manet’s Femme au Perroquet at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and he was not above raiding paintings by more vulgar artists, such as Monet’s Les femmes au Jardin at the Musée d’Orsay. But he was never a plagiarist: he transformed touches of the old masters into contemporary clothes, and women often did not “get” the reference until it was pointed out to them. One leading customer, who not only bought a dress but faithfully followed Balenciaga’s strict advice on how to wear it (or “present it,” as he said), was surprised to be told by a society magazine that she looked like Goya’s Narcissa Baranana at the Metropolitan Museum. I recall some critics in the 1950s who argued that Balenciaga, a “great artist,” was “above” his clients. They included Hollywood figures like Ginger Rogers, Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich, Mrs. Ray Milland, and Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock, as well as the superrich like Doris Duke, Margaret Biddle, Marella Agnelli, Mrs. Paul Mellon, Barbara Hutton, and Mrs. Harvey Firestone, as well as (of course) the duchess of Windsor and paragons of le gratin. But it was Balenciaga’s view that his clothes, properly put on (and it was rare for a customer not to follow his rules), raised the wearer into a classless, ageless empyrean, a superculture where a woman’s body, even if old and defective in places, entered into what he called a “mystic marriage” with his clothes. For this reason he did not, like some designers, expect a client to suppress her person
ality; he expected her to emphasize it—he rejoiced when a woman “added to” his work. Strict and implacable in many ways, he had a certain creative modesty which allowed him to see that his dresses only became alive when worn, and that the wearer was needed to complete the creative act.

  Balenciaga’s third principle was the central importance of material in his designs. Textile and lace manufacturers, embroiderers, and specialists in gauze and dyes lined up for appointments to see him and often collaborated with him to produce completely new, complex materials. He could dye himself, and often did. His skill at embroidery enabled him to pick out the occasional genius. He dealt with large firms and tiny Lyon or Como workshops alike, and to him a first-class textile creator was an equal. Gustave Zumsteg created for him in 1958 “Gazar” and in 1964 “Zagar,” a refinement, which miraculously combined fine texture, thickness, and stiffening so that Balenciaga could sculpture dresses made of it without artificial support. Lida and Zika Ascher from Prague made for him special materials, notably a mohair and chenille, ravishing and of incomparable luxury. But Balenciaga never allowed his sensuality to ignore practicalities. When Zika Ascher showed him a new blend of mohair and nylon thread, thick and spongy, Balenciaga admired it but asked, “Will it take a buttonhole?” “Oh, yes!” “We shall see.” He took the sample away into his sanctum and returned a few moments later, with a superbly sewn buttonhole—one of the most difficult tasks a seamstress faces, especially with intractable material. Gérard Pipart, inspecting it, exclaimed, “A buttonhole by Balenciaga! It should be framed.” The master gave his wan Spanish smile. He often sewed to keep his hand in, and for every collection he designed, cut out, sewed, and finished, entirely himself, a “little black dress,” usually of silk, sold like the others but never identified as his.

  Balenciaga used a variety of lace: chantilly, guipine, the heavy chenilles, and the so-called blond. Occasionally he reinforced the thread with horsehair. He patronized the best embroiderers in the world. In 1966 Lizbeth, head of her profession, made for him a pair of bolero pants with flowers of pearl and mother-of-pearl. The garment to which it belonged might last a millennium, if worn “with discretion” (a key couturier’s phrase). He discovered and often used an artist called Judith Barbier to create with him a fishnet cloak of knotted white velvet, using parachute silk to make pink-and-white flowers for the entire outfit. The finest of his creations were essentially cooperative efforts using textile creators and specialists like Barbier to bring to life his conceptions. Happily, many of these marvelous dresses are preserved (some were shown at a retrospective mounted in Lyon in 1985), so we can still see what marvels Balenciaga could create, with thick faille ribbed with velvet, lacquered satin sewn with tiny gemstones, organza sewn with Barbier flowers, Ottoman silk with gold embroidery, ostrich feathers on figured tulle, or a gold lamé sari he made for Elizabeth Taylor. Using such sensational materials Balenciaga also did many daring things, such as bunching a skirt or yoking sleeves so as to dominate both the front and the back of the garment.

  The essence of his creations was the work of human hands, bringing into existence the images projected on paper from his powerful and inventive brain. The archives of his firm survive intact, and they reveal the extent to which everything was done by hand: the exact sums paid by his celebrated clients; dates for fittings and deliveries, all entered in fine pen-and-ink; materials supplied in detail, and prices paid; and countless pieces of paper showing the process whereby each garment was created, in ink and pencil and crayon, with pieces of the material used pinned on by the master sketcher—a lost world of agile, tireless fingers, before the computer or even the typewriter took over.

  That world was disappearing even in Balenciaga’s lifetime. The death of Dior in 1957 was the final fatal blow. Dior was a man who loved rich food, he had fought a constant but losing battle against surplus flesh, and his heart inevitably failed. His funeral was a historic gathering of high fashion: only Chanel, who had returned from her exile in Switzerland and brazenly reopened her shop four years before, failed to pay tribute. On prie-deux, in front of the congregation, knelt two striking figures, symbols of a passing era: Jean Cocteau and the duchess of Windsor.

  After Dior’s death, Balenciaga seemed an increasingly lonely figure, working backward rather than forward. He was rich, with houses and apartments in Paris, at La Reynerie near Orléans, in Madrid, in Barcelona, and in Iguelda in his own Basque country. This last house was as near as he ever came to making a home. He designed beautiful dresses for the maidservants, sometimes sewing them himself. The centerpiece of the house was a vast antique wall table with his mother’s old Singer sewing machine in solitary state, beneath a vast and fearsomely realistic crucifix. His apartment in Avenue Marceau displayed his halfhearted collections: Spanish keys in gilded bronze, ivory cups and balls. There were eighteenth-century chairs in satin upholstery, dyed a certain dark green by the master himself. Balenciaga was seventy in 1965, and he found the 1960s increasingly unsympathetic as horrors of taste and behavior were unveiled. In the 1950s he had been generally regarded as the greatest dressmaker in the world. But he worked in fashion; he was fashion; and it is of the nature of fashion to turn every one of its heroes, sooner or later, into a museum piece. In the 1960s he was increasingly criticized. His dresses were said to be so overwhelming that they “dwarfed the woman.” He was “not for the young.” He refused to go into the pret-à-porter trade—“I will not prostitute my talent.” He hated miniskirts. He felt that “youth has no time for grand couture and the craftsmanship on which it rests.” He never commented, but he looked down his nose at designers like Yves St. Laurent, taking over at Dior, who was “trendy” (a new Anglo-Saxon expression that Balenciaga found abhorrent). In 1966, to defy the trend, he lengthened skirts, but the big New York buyers would not take his wares. In 1967 he appeared to capitulate by making short tutu dresses and trouser suits, and did good business. But in 1968 he was uncompromising again and sold nothing wholesale. His individual clientele flourished as ever, but he was himself an increasingly disillusioned and melancholy figure. The événements of 1968—the student revolt hailed everywhere as a new dawn—he saw as a display of savagery and an assault on civilization, a view which he shared with the perceptive philosopher Raymond Aron and which proved to be right. Balenciaga continued designing for a time, and it is significant that his dresses of the late 1960s—against the trend; “cut against the bias,” as he put it—are now the ones most admired, collected, and copied. But his heart was no longer in the game, and he found that the new tax rules and labor regulations made it increasingly disagreeable to run his business. Abruptly, like de Gaulle, he retired, shut down his Paris house completely (there was no possible successor), and returned to Spain. He died in 1972, sad and lonely, a great artist broken by the years, one of the many casualties of the lunacy of the 1960s—along with institutions such as the Society of Jesus, the old-style university of scholars and gentlemen, the traditional rules of sexual decorum, artistic reticence, and much else.

  High fashion, begun by Worth, essentially ended with Balenciaga’s retirement, and with it went a tradition not only of civilized, and occasionally inspired, design, but of craftsmanship of the highest possible standards. The fashion industry continues, polycentric and multicultural, and on an enormous scale as the world becomes wealthier and travel easier. But it is most improbable that the kind of dresses Balenciaga created in the 1950s and 1960s will ever be made again. They are, indeed, museum pieces to inspire women or, among the fortunate descendants of his clients, heirlooms to be treasured and, on grand occasions, flaunted.

  14

  Picasso and Walt Disney: Room for Nature in a Modern World?

  THE TWENTIETH CENTURY saw a transformation of our visual experiences comparable to the blossoming of the Renaissance in the fifteenth century. We saw many more things and saw them differently, both because they were different and because events and artists accustomed us to look with different eyes. Whether this process w
as benign or malevolent, creative or destructive—or a mixture of both—only the long evolving judgment of history will determine. It was certainly both exciting and disturbing. Much of the altered vision was due to technological change, especially the coming of cinema, television, videos, and digital cameras, and the rapidity with which all were made accessible to humanity everywhere. But these visual revolutions were compounded by artists who destroyed the tradition of naturalism, which had hitherto dominated the visual arts, and replaced it—as the prime source of beauty—with the expression of what was going on in their own minds. The interplay between the new technologies and the new individualism created a third element of visual change. In the twentieth century, then, new experiences for our eyes were the product both of relentless impersonal forces frog-marching humanity forward and of powerful creative individuals striving to wrest control of change in order to realize their personal ways of seeing things. Among this last group none were more successful than Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Walt Disney (1901–1966).

  A comparison of the two is instructive. Picasso was born two decades before Disney and outlived him by a few years, but both were essentially men of the twentieth century, outstanding creative individuals first and foremost but also representative figures. Each embraced novelty with shattering enthusiasm. But there were essential differences. Picasso came from Andalusia, on the periphery of the culture of old Europe, and he progressed first to Barcelona, Spain’s cultural capital, and then to Paris, for over 200 years the capital of the arts of Europe. Paris gave his ideas the resonance and the critical and commercial success that enabled him to carry through his revolution in art. No other center could have done this. And it should be added that Picasso’s successful charge against representative art was the last absolute victory Paris enjoyed in leading cultural fashion. If Picasso created shocking novelties, he did so in a traditional old-world manner—in an artist’s studio and in the familiar capital of art. Disney, on the other hand, was of the New World—a midwesterner from an agricultural background, who eagerly embraced both America’s entrepreneurial effervescence and the new technologies leaping ahead of popular taste. He went from the open spaces to Hollywood, not so much a place as a concept. When he was born, it did not yet exist. During his lifetime it became the global capital of the popular arts, thanks in part to his creativity. He made use of the new technologies throughout his creative life, just as Picasso exploited the old artistic disciplines of paint, pencil, modeling, and printing to produce the new. Paris and Hollywood: no two places could be more unlike; yet no two are so similar in the mixture of eagerness and cynicism with which they nurtured creativity, both vulgar and sublime. It is also notable that both men played roles in the tremendous and horrific ideological battles which characterized the twentieth century, at opposite poles of the axis of ideas. And the influence of both continues, in the twenty-first century, powerfully and persistently, raising a question: which has been, and is, more potent?