by Mary Blume
Like other neutral capitals in wartime, Madrid was lively and luxurious, with the Allies and the Germans vying for Spain’s support—glamorous spies (including, reportedly, Chanel for the Germans and the actor Leslie Howard for the British); Archbishop (later Cardinal) Francis J. Spellman on a friendly visit from New York to Franco; a screening of Gone With the Wind at the American embassy (the French didn’t get to see it until after the Liberation); and, from 1943, a fashionable branch of Horcher, the best restaurant in Berlin. Unseemly, yes, but so gay.
One day I dared ask if she thought Balenciaga had collaborationist sympathies, and it was the only time I saw Florette cross. “You simply do not understand,” she said.
She was right. I did not, and do not, understand the period and am not sure that anyone can who did not live through it. I do not understand how it is that during years of asking I have never found a Parisian who, on two sunny July mornings in 1942, noticed fifty city buses carrying 13,152 Jews, guarded by French police, to their eventual destruction. And I do not understand, although I have searched the official archives, who Florette’s client Mme Kiraly really was and what happened to her.
Mme Kiraly was a beautiful blonde—“rather like Grace Kelly,” Florette recalled. She spoke French with a slight accent (the name is probably Hungarian), was awfully nice, and first appeared at Balenciaga on September 13, 1940, to order a fur-collared coat, a beige suit, and a black chiffon dress. She came back on September 27 for another number, and became a regular and frequent customer. On December 15, 1941, she asked to have riding breeches made, one pair for a boy and one for a girl—to my mind they were for the children of the German officer who was probably keeping her—and the orders came regularly until October 28, 1943, when she brought in a white coat and four suits to be refitted. She never picked them up.
A few months later, when Florette applied for a travel permit to go skiing, she found herself under arrest. She sent word to M. Bizcarrondo, who learned that Florette had been taken because her name figured in Mme Kiraly’s address book. When the police were told that Florette was just a vendeuse, she was released. Mme Kiraly was never heard of again.
Florette believed she must have been a secret agent for the Allies. She thought Mme Kiraly had probably been taken to 93 Rue Lauriston, the notorious torture center of the so-called French Gestapo, a bunch of jailbirds who not only helped the Germans in their filthy work but also dealt in gangland trafficking and blackmail. Their specialty was an early form of waterboarding—“the place with the bathtubs,” Florette called it, and shuddered.
All Parisians knew about, and were terrified by, 93 Rue Lauriston, a pockmarked brownish building near the Trocadéro. So notorious is the address that as recently as 2009 there was a failed attempt to change the house number from 93 to 91 bis. As if that would make a difference.
By 1943, when the Rue Lauriston was at its malign height and Mme Kiraly disappeared, the tide was changing for the Germans, and for Vichy, which simply meant that life became harsher, reprisals more cruel: the hands of the authorities became heavier as their nerves frayed. The effect on Parisians that Lee Miller noticed a year later on returning to Paris after photographing the war for Vogue must already have been evident: “The mental malnutrition of the past four years has sapped their strength. They are overdosed with self-preservation and underfed with self-sufficiency.”
But how to be self-sufficient when everything depends on red tape and standing in line and when everyone is watching everyone else? When propaganda newsreels were shown in cinemas, the lights were brought up to deter anyone from whistling or booing or simply reacting. The Germans set back Paris clocks to run on Berlin time and everything felt slowed down: so many hours had to be spent on the business of daily life.
Shoes were the greatest clothing problem, since there was no leather and even a repair required a coupon. Varieties of wooden platform soles were introduced, the most flexible being a German import with the unfortunate name of Smelflex. “The entire gait of the French woman has changed with her footwear,” Lee Miller noticed. “Instead of the bouncing buttocks and mincing steps of ‘pre-war,’ there is a hot-foot long stride, picking up the whole foot at once.”
Since only one hairdresser in Paris had dryers (the heat being generated by sturdy young men on stationary bicycles), women wore turbans or pompadours, with their hair trailing in the back. They were doing their best but looked so strange that an odd theory grew up: Frenchwomen had uglified themselves to mock the enemy. Some of the very young, the so-called zazous, accessorized wildly, and with victory in sight there was a move to mocking extravagance despite restrictions, but the theory is nonsense—there isn’t a Frenchwoman alive who would choose to be seen at a disadvantage—even though it became an enduring myth. Christian Dior wrote in his memoirs that wartime styles “originated in a desire to defy the forces of occupation and the austerity of Vichy,” while a respected British historian adds, “During the Occupation, even Communists had regarded Parisian fashion as a weapon of Resistance.” Thus the Parisienne, born to preen, became a heroine of sorts, and when Dior invented his extravagant New Look in 1947 he made a point of saying it was a reward for her wartime sacrifice.
Among the beau monde, the constraints were fewer. Florence Gould and Marie-Louise Bousquet entertained usefully and parties went on with some changes in cast. The butler of Robert de Rothschild, whose house had been requisitioned for a Luftwaffe general, said to Jean Cocteau, “I am not unhappy here with Monsieur le Baron, I mean General Hanesse. He receives the same people as Monsieur le Baron.” German repression was sometimes a thrill. Young Philippe Jullian, a would-be writer up from the provinces and making a splash with his drag impersonations of society ladies, noted the plus side of the curfew: “People arrested after its expiration were taken to police headquarters to spend the rest of the night. Many people who didn’t know each other made contacts that were pleasant and useful.”
The Duchesse d’Ayen, from French Vogue, went to 93 Rue Lauriston to try to find her kidnapped husband, who was locked in the basement, although no one told her. He died in a German camp and she spent several months in solitary confinement in Fresnes prison wearing the beige jersey Balenciaga dress she was arrested in. Other society ladies “resisted” by speaking French with a British accent when chatting with German officers. Marie Laure de Noailles, with her wildly transgressive gene pool, as usual did as she pleased. Her father had been an immensely rich Jewish banker, while her mother was descended from both Proust’s model for the Duchesse de Guermantes and the Marquis de Sade and was the first woman to say merde in polite society.
One morning, two men whose raincoats and dark hats identified them as French Gestapo came to Marie Laure’s sumptuous mansion on the Place des États-Unis. She received them in bed: “Gentlemen, has no one told you to remove your hat in a lady’s bedroom? Emma, bring me my tea.”
Finally, on August 25, 1944, Paris was liberated and everyone, except for those who had reason to hide, united in its explosions of joy. The Noailles had lunch at home with the Faucigny-Lucinges and, having first closed the shutters against the noise, went out to join it, catching a glimpse of the politically elastic Jean Cocteau as he waved victoriously from a tank. Florette and Payot bicycled to the Place du Trocadéro to celebrate; Balenciaga invited the Bizcarrondos and Pierre Balmain to dine with him and d’Attainville in their flat on the Avenue Marceau, where they listened to the bells ringing all over town and heard “La Marseillaise” sung for the first time in four years. “The victory would efface our old defeats,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote. “It was ours, and the future it opened was ours, too.”
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“It is not that France had behaved the worst. It is that France mattered the most,” the historian Tony Judt wrote of the defeat. And so it was for the liberation: there were other cities that had suffered more or that were more strategic, but Paris mattered the most. The news of its liberation set church bells ringing from London to Mexico City. Parisia
ns were scarred, some forever, but the city was miraculously intact under blameless blue skies: there was every reason to celebrate, and everyone did.
And yet the autumn and winter following the liberation were in many ways the harshest as the war continued in Europe. Bread rationing came back—rationing in general continued until 1948—and there were power cuts, no buses, and no shoes, even with wooden soles. The New Year’s message from the minister of the interior was grim: “1945 will be the hardest year of all, that of the final stretch.”
But by October 1945, American Vogue was able to publish six whole pages of drawings of Paris fashions, even if the clothes themselves could not yet be imported, and six months earlier Philippe Jullian attended the Balenciaga collection: “A desire to applaud after each dress,” he wrote in his diary. “One can imagine the joy of a Manet or a Whistler before such elegance.”
Unmindful of conditions in Paris, Vogue’s Edna Woolman Chase cabled Lee Miller from New York to criticize the lack of elegance of her fashion reportage and wondered if Solange, Duchesse d’Ayen, in the Paris office couldn’t find higher-class models—society ladies perhaps? Miller sharply replied that maybe the duchess, having lost her husband and only son, didn’t have the heart to think about fashion shoots.
Bettina Ballard returned from service with the Red Cross to visit the duchess, who told her how, in solitary confinement at Fresnes, she had danced rumbas, tangos, waltzes, and even the Charleston to keep her circulation going although she had never been much of a dancer. The Balenciaga dress she wore and slept in for months had, she reported, been cleaned and looked very good again. Her russet hair, Ballard noted, had grayed and, if she seemed much smaller, her eyes were larger. “Looking at her I felt I was seeing a ghost,” Ballard wrote.
French Vogue’s editor, Michel de Brunhoff, was likewise diminished, having lost his only son. Ballard made the rounds of couture houses, starting with Balenciaga, whom she had known from before the war. His salon looked dingy and there were strange customers paying in cash with big banknotes. They were black market wives, he explained with some distaste, buying at any price even models that were too small. Balenciaga himself, she wrote, “seemed very little touched by the war, or, for that matter, by the liberation. He wasn’t at all surprised to see me there. As always, he led his own secluded life, busying himself with the only thing he really knew anything about—clothes.”
Carmel Snow, worried about competition from Vogue, beat Ballard to Paris despite travel restrictions, having asked Louie Macy to get her husband, Harry Hopkins, to pull strings in Washington. Snow managed a circuitous route that took her via Caracas to Dakar to Madrid, where she had dinner with M. Balenciaga, as she still called him, and went with him to the flea market. She then took the train to Paris with a box of chocolates Balenciaga had given her, her only food on the twenty-four-hour trip. Snow’s real friendship with Balenciaga, which she seems to have regarded as a romance, only began in August 1946, when Marie-Louise Bousquet took her to dine in his apartment: “This was the first time I had really talked to Balenciaga—and how we talked! It was enchantment all around.” They had no common language, Snow’s French being merely confident and Balenciaga’s English nonexistent, but her chauffeur, ordered for ten, had to wait until two in the morning.
Balenciaga with Carmel Snow
As one combustible French government followed another, the sole novelty in a ravaged world was the eruption of a new and, as it turned out, highly exportable intellectual wave, existentialism. Neither Jean-Paul Sartre nor Simone de Beauvoir was quite sure what people meant by the term, but they delighted in their celebrity. “I enjoyed seeing my name in the papers,” Beauvoir admitted, “and for a while the fuss about us and my role as a ‘Parisian figure’ gave me a great deal of amusement.” French intellectuals seemed the spokesmen for the age and once again, briefly, Paris was the cultural capital of the world.
Culture also meant couture, as it had throughout French history. As Beauvoir shrewdly explained: “Now a second-class power, France was exalting her most characteristic products with an eye to the export market: haute couture and literature.”
Haute couture’s move happened in the Chambre Syndicale, far from the cafés of St. Germain des Prés, when Lelong and Robert Ricci, son of the couturier Nina Ricci, dreamed up an improbable and triumphant scheme: a traveling show to display to the world the newest and best of French design. The clothes were shown on wire figurines 27.5 inches high in magical settings by top decorators, designers, and art world figures—Christian Bérard, Jean Cocteau, Boris Kochno, Emilio Terry, Georges Wakhévitch, Georges Geffroy—and the display was called Le Théâtre de la Mode. It opened the evening of March 27, 1945, in the Louvre’s Pavillon Marsan as Allied troops were plunging into Germany, and it eventually toured through Europe and the United States.
The clothes displayed on Eliane Bonabel’s wire figures were of astonishing precision and detail. Each outfit was made in exact replica of the collection’s model—hand-stitched buttonholes that could be unbuttoned, real pockets, shoes, feathers, gloves, handbags that opened and were fitted with tiny mirrors, hats, and real hair coiffed by specially made minicurlers.
A Balenciaga, 27.5 inches high, shown at Le Théâtre de la Mode
The effort was intense, the quality amazing. All the couturiers participated, and thanks to Bérard’s artistic direction the effect was hailed as pure magic, more indelible than one would think. The Théâtre de la Mode was brought back in another successful traveling show that opened at the Louvre in 1990 and was the subject of an article in American Vogue by Edmund White in 2006. What is left of it is in a museum, Maryhill, in Washington State.
Its practical results were equally satisfying. Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland were photographed admiring the exhibition in New York. At its opening, the New York Herald Tribune said it spoke of “the heroism of a city that in spite of terror and suffering saved itself, while preserving alike its good taste, its loyalty to beauty, and its indefatigable skills.” More usefully for the export market, Tobe Coller Davis, in her influential Tobe Report, recommended that everyone in the retail and fashion business see the show: “Make no mistake about it—Paris is still the magic five-letter word.”
Balenciaga contributed four models to the exhibition. There were more from Lelong, including two that seemed especially fresh and new. Although unattributed, they were by one of Lelong’s assistants, and his name was Christian Dior.
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After the celebrations, the hangover. Victory had been grand but life was threadbare and wan. Wartime restrictions dragged, shortages increased. Surely some relief was coming, was in fact deserved. “We felt we had a right to indulge ourselves,” Pamela Churchill Harriman said later, and indulgence arrived precisely on February 12, 1947, in the midst of one of the coldest winters in history, with the first collection of Christian Dior. Skirts so full—twenty meters instead of the three that rationing required—that they knocked ashtrays off tables in the spanking new muted-gray salon; nipped-in waists and pert busts; the rustle of taffeta, which some of the younger fashion editors had never even heard; gracefully long hemlines: a flirty, pouty, enchanting artifice that was totally Parisian and thus universally admired. Dior had called his line Corolle, after the petals of a flower, but Carmel Snow, who knew something big when she saw it, gave it the name that endures: the New Look.
Never before or since has a fashion collection had such impact. It was denounced as wasteful and immoral; it required the wearing of painful waist cinchers, complicated fastenings, and a degree of fortitude when the wearer of a crinolined ballgown weighing sixty pounds attempted to dance. One woman made the long boat trip from Argentina simply to see the collection, and found the salon overheated. “I loved, loved, loved the New Look,” the New York fashion editor Polly Mellen recalled many years later. Balenciaga was bemused: What was Christian thinking of? he wondered as he helped Bettina Ballard into a dress that had thirty buttons running down the back.
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p; What Christian was thinking of, Dior explained in his memoirs, was happiness. His clothes were a reaction to the grim wartime years and his success, he felt, was because he brought back the neglected art of pleasing. “The prime need of fashion is to please and attract,” he wrote. Balenciaga had already shown the narrowed waists, rounded shoulders, and fuller skirts that helped define the New Look, but Balenciaga was not out to please.
Dior was by all accounts an adorable man who looked, according to Cecil Beaton, like a bland country curate made out of pink marzipan (Jacques Fath, seeing a threat to his flamboyant fashions, described him as resembling a notary from the provinces). He set the best table in Paris, dying, aged fifty-two, at a slimming spa in Italy from a lifetime’s surfeit of dishes like baked oysters in béchamel sauce and beef filet layered with slices of melting foie gras. He had led a happy sunlit childhood in a much-loved and ugly mansion in Granville in Normandy, the son of a fertilizer tycoon, one of France’s richest men until he lost it all in 1931, and of a very loving mother. He was incurably nostalgic all his life.
Balenciaga’s nostalgia, if indeed he had any, could not be based on dappled trees and starched housemaids and soft settees. Growing up in a humble village where fishermen faced the threat of sullen seas, where women wore black and the local church, oversized and dark, spoke of duty and sorrow, he may have had that one enlightening encounter with the marquesa in her lovely Drecoll (or Redfern or Worth), but his was a harsh and rigorous childhood that left no room for misty memories.
Perhaps a tough start can be liberating. It must mean something that the three most radical couturiers of the twentieth century—Vionnet, Chanel, and Balenciaga—were the only ones to be born poor. They were driven and bold, not raised among genteel niceties, and thus free from the constraints of bourgeois habit and tradition. Unlike them, Dior was not an innovator, nor did he see himself as one. In his own words he was a reactionary, looking back to re-create gentler days. Born in 1905, Dior wrote, “I thank heaven that I lived in the last years of the Belle Époque. They marked me for life.”