by Mary Blume
Florette on the scene
The old house of Callot Soeurs, with its crowded showroom in which furniture and rugs were on sale as well as clothes, was fading, so Mme Chelot and a friend opened their own small house, Marie-Henriette, off the Place Vendôme with a modern salon, Coromandel screens like Chanel’s, and a good clientele from Callot. There was one fatal problem: it was 1936 and the rioting in the nearby Place de la Concorde was scaring off foreign clients and buyers. Marie-Henriette closed and Florette went to see Balenciaga at the Avenue George V.
When Balenciaga opened, there were three vendeuses: Florette; the much older Marthe, who had dressed the relentlessly stylish Mrs. Harrison Williams at Paquin; and Maria. In couture tradition, each house had a vendeuse who had fallen on hard times and was invited everywhere because she had had malheurs and knew everyone. Maria was Balenciaga’s grande dame qui a eu des malheurs, a Spanish friend of his who had had an unhappy affair with a toreador. She wasn’t much at selling but she got around. Since they worked on commission the vendeuses were rivals. Florette was a very nice woman, but she could be tough when necessary, which was all too often.
By house custom the vendeuses were given two black work dresses a year from the previous collection, but they had to pay for the fabric. Their job was to sell, obviously, but it was a job that required a certain complicity with the client, which some carried to a form of mimesis or even—odd in view of the clients’ wealth and frequent bad manners—pity. Much later, the flinty-eyed Odette, for example, would remark on how sorry she felt for Liz Taylor, all dressed up and tearful as she waited in their hotel suite for Richard Burton to down another last drink. Florette had a favorite client, the Baroness Alain de Rothschild, but she served all comers equally. During our talks she never said “I sold a client a dress,” but instead “I made her a dress” or “I dressed her.”
“Just selling isn’t interesting, it sounds like a grocery store. A good vendeuse knows how to win the confidence and fidelity of her client. We were part of their lives, we often knew their husbands, their children, their best friends. They knew we wanted them to be at their best.” If they weren’t, Balenciaga blamed the vendeuse.
The directrice of the new house, brought in by d’Attainville, was the pretty Baroness d’Echtall, who was replaced after World War II by the redoubtable Mlle Renée Tamisier with her firm ways and granitic smile. It was Renée who ran the day-to-day operations, translating Balenciaga’s need for privacy into a house policy of paranoia. There were three ateliers: in tailoring, Denis, who remained until 1954, and in soft fabrics, Claude and Suzanne, who were there until the end. (Employees tended to stay as long with Balenciaga as they could.)
Balenciaga always chose his house models himself, the first and favorite being the alarming Colette, who only stopped modeling in 1954: bony and long-waisted (unusual for a French woman of that time), she would crash into the showroom like an invading army. Her jutting pelvic bones inspired Balenciaga’s early use of padded hips, while her long neck and curved spine were the origin of his famous set-back neckline and bloused back, which, with a semi-fitted front, was to be a boon to so many aging women over the coming years. (As Gloria Guinness later pointed out, the framelike neckline allowed women and their pearls to breathe, while the shortened sleeve uncovered their bracelets and the unemphatic waistline permitted them to “believe in a figure that perhaps they did not have”).
Like Vionnet, Balenciaga wanted his models to be remote rather than appealing, gazing over the heads of clients and casually carrying a card on which the number of the outfit—unlike other designers, he never gave his clothes names—was displayed. He invented a signature loping walk for them, long strides, torso tilted back, pelvis thrust forward. “They walk with a pleasant swagger—the likable swagger of the aristocrat,” Women’s Journal commented in 1939.
Colette, Balenciaga’s favorite model
I recognized the walk at once when I was strolling one day with the former Renée Bousquet, then nearly eighty. She was Basque and still a teenager when she left Grès, where she was not happy, for Balenciaga, where she was. In those early days it was an easygoing and happy place. “It was a family,” she said. “The Bizcarrondos were des gens parfaits, d’Attainville was adorable and animated the place, Balenciaga was very discreet and never forward in any way. He knew how to do everything, and he did.” His sense of humor in those times was a bit rough. When young Renée complained to him about a photographer’s wandering hands he simply burst out laughing, and when she told him she was leaving to marry a businessman, Henri Le Roux, instead of offering good wishes he told her she could come back if it didn’t work out. She did come back, some years later, but just to have Balenciaga meet her children.
M. Bizcarrondo took care of the house’s finances; his wife was a discreet and useful presence who helped Balenciaga smooth off his rough edges and who, after the success of the first collection, wrapped and delivered the orders with Florette. Although older than the Chelots, the Bizcarrondos often went boating with them (the Chelots were enthusiastic canoers—Payot even ordered a canoe from Canada—preferring the early spring when business was slow and the rivers of central France ran high). The Bizcarrondos, people said, were the heart of the house.
The Chelots were even friendly with Balenciaga. “In those days he was charming, we were a team,” Florette said. They dined often at Ramponneau, across the street from where Balenciaga and d’Attainville lived at 28 Avenue Marceau (the Bizcarrondos lived at number 26). “He liked his food, especially fish, which had to be perfect. He didn’t talk of much besides couture but he liked Payot, who spoke fluent Spanish, and I was quiet.” Before dinner he made them his dry martinis. “It was Balenciaga who taught me how. He would take a napkin on which he placed the ice cubes to dry them off so that there was no excess water. They were almost pure gin. Payot didn’t much like them. I did.”
The classic Balenciaga suit jacket
The new house had been registered at the clerk’s office of the Seine commercial court on July 7, 1937, modestly capitalized at 100,000 francs with Bizcarrondo holding 75 percent of the shares, d’Attainville 20 percent, and Balenciaga 5 percent. Its first collection was shown the following month, attended mostly by the press and department store buyers because private clients had no idea who Cristóbal Balenciaga was.
They soon found out who he was, but what he was became increasingly harder to define as his work became more original and unclassifiable. The default term is that he was very Spanish. Jessica Daves, the editor of Vogue, referred vaguely but authoritatively in a New York Times story on the closing of his house in 1968 to his “Spanish way of thinking.” Diana Vreeland, writing to “Darling Mona” (Bismarck) in 1973 about her Spanish-themed show at the Metropolitan Museum, “The World of Balenciaga,” said she had “Goyas, Valesquez [sic], Picasso, the armour of Charles I on a huge white horse—Flamenco music plays faintly and one hears heels and castanets clicking…” Marie-Andrée Jouve, in her 1989 book, detailed the influence of Goya and Velásquez and Zurbarán; Oscar de la Renta, who had worked briefly as a sketch artist for Balenciaga in Madrid, said that his work “remained to the core very Spanish.” De la Renta was talking about the exhibition of which he was honorary president, “Balenciaga: Spanish Master,” shown in New York and San Francisco in 2010–2011. The show’s curator and Balenciaga expert, Hamish Bowles, omitted the castanets but showed dresses before a photomontage of Getaria and made juxtapositions with Spanish painters, including the abstract shapes of a Miró with the famous four-sided envelope dress of 1967.
“To do a show based on the influence of Spain on Balenciaga is an idea like any other—one has to find a title,” Givenchy said of the exhibition. Of course Balenciaga was Spanish just as Dior was French and, for that matter, Ralph Lauren is American, but sometimes the Spanish label seems to be just that: a reductive way of positioning a talent too original for classification. He was Spanish, but above all he was Balenciaga.
Beginning wi
th his “Infanta” dress in 1939 he did indeed call on obvious Spanish references from the bullring, from regional costume, from famous paintings. But he hated bullfights and didn’t seem to have gone to the Prado except for one recorded visit, preferring flea markets where his excellent eye trumped the lack of education that made museums so trying. The Infanta dress, it can be argued, was a way of helping the press to define a newcomer, and if over the years he showed clothes based on a bullfighter’s hat or a flamenco dress, it was rare. As Pamela Golbin, who curated the 2006 Balenciaga retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, puts it, “He did do boleros, but in each show there were 150 or 200 pieces and if there were three or four boleros that didn’t mean it was all straight from Spain.”
The “Infanta” dress, 1939
Still, like all couturiers, Balenciaga needed the occasional showpiece as a talking point, and it was often based on a Spanish idea. “Don’t order that, it’s just for show,” he would sometimes tell his dear Spanish friend the Marquesa de Llanzol, and he may have been talking about the bullfighter’s jacket that he showed in 1946, which she ordered anyway. It was indeed a showstopper and a clever choice for that year, when the short jacket responded to postwar fabric restrictions, and its heavy embroidery was what he had been doing a great deal of under the sumptuary laws the German Occupation had imposed. It was surely intended as an attention-getting exception, not a trend.
Balenciaga’s own private collection of fashion books and fabrics ranged widely over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Since most of the antique costumes he owned had been picked up in Spanish flea markets, they are weighted toward Andalusian, Basque, and other regional designs, but he also found a fine black jacket made by a Philadelphia store called Homer LeBoutillier in around 1890, bright blue French breeches, or culottes, from 1785, a priest’s maniple, a piece from a richly decorated horse’s harness, and a pair of dainty embroidered mules.
Among other influences that have been discerned: Japanese woodcuts, paintings by the Impressionists, Bronzino and Lorenzo Lotto, and even George Cukor’s 1934 film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott: “I found the clothes very pretty, particularly a group of long-sleeved, tight-bodiced at-home dresses that reminded me of ‘Little Women,’” Bettina Ballard wrote of the first collection.
That show, relatively conventional and budget-conscious, introduced Paris to Balenciaga’s fine technique and impeccable taste. “The young Spanish couturier Balenciago [sic] produced a notable first collection,” said Women’s Wear Daily, while the New York Herald Tribune detected a Goya note and L’Officiel de la Haute Couture thought it rather Grecian. “Knowing journalists were already saying that this quiet Spaniard was bringing a stability and elegance to a disordered fashion scene,” the English journalist Madge Garland recalled much later.
The buyers bought, the magazines took pictures, Florette and Mme Bizcarrondo worked late to wrap and make deliveries, helped by a seamstress. It was a quiet triumph of just the right sort for someone who knew better than to try to rock the French fashion scene. “The first collection had nothing eccentric, it was sober and very well done,” Florette said. “But,” she added, “I found it a little bit dull.”
2
After his first Paris collection, Balenciaga said to Florette, “We must have an alternativa”—a bullfighting term, she told me, that meant the second show would have to be even better. Actually, an alternativa is the celebratory ceremony whereby a novice bullfighter becomes a full-fledged toreador: Balenciaga knew he had arrived. For the second collection, American Vogue hailed his “magnificent evening gowns” while Harper’s Bazaar, in a two-page spread, claimed “you could go down to posterity in any of these four Balenciaga dresses,” even though he used too much black for American skin tones. Florette added the Duchess of Westminster to her client list, and Gloria Rubio (who with her fourth marriage to the British banker became Mrs. Loel Guinness) was soon one of the house’s most durable big spenders. On Saint Catherine’s Day, the traditional couture fête for employees who are still unmarried at twenty-five, Balenciaga himself was feeling so fine that he not only attended the party but swept Florette into a showy paso doble. He danced very well, she said.
The year, unfortunately, was 1938 and nothing was right in the world, which only increased the need to make it seem as if something were. The attempt was fevered, overdone. The newest diet? Remain in bed and eat nothing but eight to ten oranges per day. The faces en vue? Daisy Fellowes, the Duchess of Windsor—hard-jawed, angular, and sleek with none of the hoydenish charm of earlier years.
Printed rayon dress, 1938
The great Paris World’s Fair of 1937, which opened, unfinished, a month late, closed with a deficit of 200 million francs, and in 1938 Prime Minister Léon Blum was axed. The fair, he had declared, would deal a death blow to fascism. It included massive Nazi and Soviet pavilions, a salute to the haute couture, which had ten thousand workers out of jobs, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dropping by to dance away all angst, and, in the Spanish pavilion, Picasso’s Guernica. For the writer Michel Leiris, Picasso was sending a warning: “Everything we love is about to die.”
In its sidelong way, fashion can be eerily predictive—after all, it’s about what will be and not about what is—and perhaps someone should have felt a warning earlier in the decade when Bavarian dress was the mode while Hitler’s power grew. English gentlemen wore lederhosen and women dirndls until Harper’s Bazaar sternly disavowed them—“we loved the dirndl well, but not too wisely”—after Austria was invaded. The cunningly daft inventions of Schiaparelli, a longtime antifascist, may have been a warning against the true lunacy to come, and even the early success of Balenciaga could owe something to a nervous wish for something fresh and new. Looking back, Madge Garland saw the fashions of the late 1930s as “absolutely frantic to explore every possibility and express every idea before it was too late. Was the play nearly over? Would the curtain come down soon?”
Very soon. There was a brief rush to being serious. In an article called “Why I Am Gorged with Glamour Photography,” Cecil Beaton declared in 1938 that “I want to make photographs of very elegant women taking the grit out of their eyes, or blowing their noses, or taking the lipstick off their teeth.” He didn’t, of course, and, whether on the edge of the volcano or not, the dance went on. “The spring season of 1939 was the gayest I had ever seen,” wrote Bettina Ballard. “There were garden parties or big cocktail parties every day and balls or some sort of spectacle every night for all of June and into July.” The loveliest was given by Harper’s Bazaar’s Louise Macy (always called Louie and later the wife of President Roosevelt’s adviser Harry Hopkins) with Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge as cohost. Macy, long on charm and short of cash (she had only $400 to spend), cajoled the French government into the loan for one night of a magnificent ruin, the seventeenth-century Hôtel Salé (now the Picasso museum) in the Marais, and got her friend André Terrail, owner of La Tour d’Argent, to donate food and wines. There were candlelit chandeliers and powdered footmen; guests wore tiaras, decorations, white tie and tails. Until six o’clock the following morning, the crumbling shell was a palace of dreams.
And then, soon after, on September 3, France and England declared war on Germany after the invasion of Poland and the hallucinatory period known as the Phony War began. “Gentlemen,” said the French diplomat and author Paul Claudel, “in the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and catastrophe, we may as well take a glass of champagne.”
Winter 1939, photographed by George Hoyningen-Huene
Catastrophe came eight months later when the Germans invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and, inevitably, France, although Maurice Privat’s annual forecast had predicted that there would be no war and that 1940 would be the Year of French Grandeur. Privat, a stubby little man in droopy mouse-gray socks, had a wide following and was the private astrologer of the future prime minister Pierre Laval.
Paris fell into a tense mix
of boredom and fear, and even the simplest words had no meaning. What sort of war might there be, Simone de Beauvoir asked her diary, and what does this word war really mean? There were no buses, and taxis had been commandeered to take troops, some in World War I uniform, to their posts. Nighttime was eerie, with car headlights, streetlamps, and blackout curtains colored blue to ward off aerial attack. Emerging from bomb shelters after an alert, Parisians could see their city’s placid wide sky and its lovely monuments unscathed: perhaps it was all just a bad joke, a gimcrack tinsel fake of a war? The gaiety may have been nervous, but at least Paris was still gay. Until it wasn’t.
Delightful luncheon parties replaced balls, and Daisy Fellowes displayed timely chic by appearing in a stunningly severe black suit. To save material the famous milliner Suzy made snoods instead of big hats. For fear of foreign spies, only French could be spoken over the telephone, and crossword puzzles were banned lest they contain coded messages. The wealthier quarters of Paris emptied as people fled south—for once it was harder to get first- than third-class train tickets—and from New York, Vogue’s editor, Edna Woolman Chase, cabled Bettina Ballard, “Send story on what smart women are wearing in air raid shelters.” Piguet was making jersey jumpsuits, Hermès offered leather gas mask covers as well as cashmere sleeping bags, Schiaparelli built muffs into the pockets of her dresses for standing in icy queues, and the best bomb shelter was at the Ritz with its fur-lined blankets. In the couturiers’ salons the collections went on as usual, attended for the first time by the dowdy wife of France’s military leader, General Gamelin. As a morale booster she was a flop, since she knitted through every show from a skein of khaki wool.