by Mary Blume
As a young man, his parents having denied him what they considered an ungentlemanly career in architecture, Dior took up undemanding studies in political science, which allowed him playtime with the brightest artistic figures in Paris—Cocteau, Bérard, the musicians of Les Six. He became a friend of Marie-Louise Bousquet, attended the better costume balls, including Louie Macy’s, and opened a briefly successful art gallery when his father’s finances failed. Having created costumes for the balls and for his friends’ private revels, he sold designs to couture houses after the gallery closed, and before working at Lelong he found a job at the house of Piguet, where Carmel Snow spotted and remembered his “Café Anglais,” a light herringbone wool dress with a schoolgirlish lace trim. By the time Dior went out on his own, not only was he a friend of le tout Paris, but Ballard and Snow had marked him as someone to watch.
After the war, Dior and Balmain decided to leave Lelong and open their own house. But Dior dithered and Balmain went on alone with six hundred thousand francs. Dior, on the other hand, was brought to the attention of Marcel Boussac, who gave him a terrific contract and six million francs in backing—ten times what Balmain started off with. That Boussac was a textile and press tycoon may be thought to have helped, especially in a time of fabric shortages, but Dior maintained this was not so. He always said that he was exceptionally lucky and used a bunch of astrologers to ensure that this continued, unfortunately failing to heed their final advice, which was not to go to Italy to diet. After his death, his otherwise hard-nosed business manager told Japanese television that it was because God needed Dior to dress His angels.
Planning his maison de couture at 30 Avenue Montaigne, Dior knew exactly what he wanted—Louis XVI as revisited in 1910, he said. His decorator friends helped create an enchanting jewel box with soft colors and toile de Jouy and vast bouquets by Lachaume and, later, by Paule Dedeban. From the start he chose a team of five confidants including technical staff (he sketched delightfully but was ignorant of technique); his in-house muse, a woman of uncertain origins and implacable chic named Mitza Bricard; and—this was a first—an American PR man. The buzz was well prepared (Dior is said to have exempted eighteen top buyers from entrance fees) and so intense that Life magazine wrote him up before he opened. The day, despite the cold, a newly announced cut in the bread ration, and newspaper and garbage strikes, was a triumph such as no one, least of all Dior, had imagined. Within days, a crusty old member of the Jockey Club was complaining that in forty years as a member he had never heard the name of a couturier mentioned but now on ne parle que de Dior. By 1949 the house of Dior provided 5 percent of France’s export revenue.
Dior stuck a flower in his lapel, hired a masseur, and went to the United States, where he delighted interviewers by showing them his good luck charms and was in turn thrilled when an immigration officer asked him where hemlines were going. No one until 1947 had paid much attention to hemlines, which suddenly became a worldwide obsession—“We waited each year for the announcement from Paris regarding next year’s hemline,” says a study of what ordinary Americans wore in the 1950s—that died only in 1970 when Women’s Wear Daily declared everyone would wear the midcalf midi skirt and no one did.
Dior was the man. Within months of his first collection he had signed with a stocking manufacturer, and Dior neckties, which he had never seen but which bore his name, were sold at B. Altman and Company, the fusty New York department store. Before long, his franchise extended to five continents and the house of Dior had exploded couture into the branding device that today gives us such curiosities as the YSL dual voltage travel plug and a fishing rod by Chanel.
As for his clothes, Chanel herself said he made women look like stuffed armchairs. Balenciaga said nothing and was among three thousand mourners at Dior’s funeral in 1957, but he could only have hated the restricting hourglass shapes, skirts stiffened with horsehair instead of being skillfully cut to the desired fullness, and the idea that each season must produce a marketable different look instead of evolving from the last.
Dior himself said that Balenciaga was the conductor and that other designers were mere members of the orchestra. Admiring a suit of Bettina Ballard’s, he told her it was so well made that it had to be by Balenciaga. “If only I were Balenciaga,” he once said and probably meant it, sort of, in that he envied the hush in which Balenciaga worked.
The two men were not competitors: they had so little in common that they had no need to see each other as rivals and they shared such friends as Mitza Bricard, who did some of Balenciaga’s hats. Dior was the decorator, Balenciaga the builder; Dior couldn’t do what Balenciaga did, Balenciaga couldn’t be what Dior was. Florette says that although no Balenciaga employees had been to Dior because they were banned from visiting other houses, they considered Dior a maison snob, by which she meant it was the latest house where everyone went, including Balenciaga’s customers. Dior lent or gave dresses to people who were en vue, which Balenciaga refused to do. Dior eagerly courted the press; Balenciaga never even had a press attaché.
At Balenciaga collections, Vogue’s Susan Train says, there was a cathedral hush while at Dior the conversation level rose when customers’ interest flagged. Dior was social theater, Balenciaga was serious stuff, says the writer and lecturer Rosamond Bernier: “His girls were often hideous, one was alarmingly wall-eyed, and they were told to look over the heads of people. At Dior, even early on, it was much more of a circus with everyone smoking furiously.”
Early Dior was irresistible, and if Florette’s sales remained steady, the earnings of the house of Balenciaga suffered from the New Look. The greater damage was to Balenciaga’s pride, according to Hubert de Givenchy. “When the New Look came in he went to Mademoiselle Renée, his directrice, and said I haven’t seen Madame X or Madame Y and Renée said Monsieur, they have gone to Dior. And he said, after all the trouble I have gone to they don’t even come by for a dress or two. It was his Spanish side. He said that’s it and he never again went into the salon to receive clients. People wonder about his mysterious side—that is the simple reason.”
The reason wasn’t quite that simple, although one can hardly expect Givenchy to mention it. Within a year of the New Look, on December 14, 1948, Balenciaga had suffered the greatest blow of his personal life when his longtime lover Wladzio d’Attainville died suddenly, aged forty-nine, in Spain. Dapper, charming d’Attainville had teased Balenciaga out of his shell and given him confidence. He made clever and amusing hats to enliven the sober dresses, he circulated in the salon and chatted to clients, his mother was photographed by Horst looking immensely distinguished (“Balenciaga,” said the caption, “designs at-home clothes especially for her”), he was amusing and mondain.
To this day, Florette says, no one is aware of the almost seismic impact of d’Attainville’s death: “If he had lived, the house wouldn’t have been so serious, it wouldn’t have had that weight. There was no one to lighten it up. Monsieur Bizcarrondo wasn’t capable of chatting to clients, I told him he should show himself more but he wouldn’t. Nor would his wife.” Devoted friends, if not socialites, the Bizcarrondos never left Balenciaga’s side during the first dreadful shock and found him a replacement companion, twenty-three-year-old Ramón Esparza, a pleasant and good-looking Spaniard with a cleft chin who worked with Balenciaga in the studio, made hats, and stayed in the background. “Esparza was very nice for Cristóbal, that worked out very well,” Luc Bouchage, a longtime friend, said. “He was warm and kept things going. He helped him enormously at work.” But no one could ease Balenciaga’s grief.
That grief was terrible, so deep that Balenciaga decided to enter a monastery in Sully-sur-Loire and close his house. “It would have been a catastrophe,” Florette said. “Everyone begged him not to because in the couture world it was like a beacon.” Among those who begged were Balmain and Dior. According to legend, it was the sight of a client in a poorly executed Balenciaga that made him pick up his scissors again.
Wladzio d�
�Attainville in the 1940s
Colette in the “collection of mourning”
The result was a truly awful collection. “It was a collection of mourning, all black, sad beyond belief,” Florette said. “We thought if that’s the way it’s going to be there’s no point in going on.” As it turned out, there was every point: his sorrow subsumed in his work, Balenciaga locked himself in his studio, and in the next decade he would produce the most brilliant clothes of his career.
* * *
By 1950 Balenciaga’s spring collection was hailed as spectacular by Vogue, Harper’s named him “the most elegant couturier in the world today,” and he became a regular on the covers of both magazines. In Elle, Alice Chavanne scraped up as many factoids as she could about the mysterious stranger who was so secretive and distant, she said, that people asked did he exist, while Carmel Snow, who knew very well that he did, noted that the winter collection was the success of the season, with a five-minute ovation although “the monk of the couture still refused to appear.” (Snow liked to use the word monk as shorthand to convey Balenciaga’s reclusiveness and deep vocation; it also suggested that he was out of everyone’s reach except, of course, her own.)
Balenciaga was no longer just a foreign dressmaker but was as present in his absent way as Dior: the top name in couture. Fashion was ready for him, wanted him, needed his opulence and civility, for France was entering upon what the historian Jean Fourastié called les trente glorieuses, thirty years of a prosperity such as the country had never known.
Balenciaga made French Vogue’s fashion map in 1948
In 1951 only one French household in twelve owned an automobile, and the Chelots, having acquired a secondhand Peugeot convertible, were among them (Florette says she was the first vendeuse to come to work in a car). They bought a small flat in the grand building on the Île St. Louis owned by Helena Rubinstein, a client, and where Mme Georges Pompidou, wife of the French president and another client, later lived. In their living room were a rather stiff portrait of Florette in a black jersey Balenciaga, a wishfully Louis XV commode from her mother-in-law’s Callot days, and a smaller version of the carved wood gold sunburst clock that decorated Balenciaga’s salon.
And then, M. Bizcarrondo having arranged easy credit terms, they bought their dream weekend house—la maison de bonheur, Florette called it—near the pretty village of Pacy-sur-Eure, on the route to Deauville: “All the people who’d spent the weekend in Deauville would stop by for a drink on the way back.” Once when Florette was flaming some bananas (Payot usually did the cooking, and very well) she looked out the kitchen window and saw Balenciaga, who was out on a drive with Esparza, peering through the glass. “He was roaring with laughter at the sight of me at the stove.” He was less amused by her larky plan to buy a motorboat and commute to work from the Île St. Louis. “Monsieur Balenciaga said it wouldn’t do at all.”
The 1950s seemed to have taken place on a sunny afternoon, the writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick later said, and in Paris there was a sense of renewal and youth. Fresh blood was welcomed and enriched by the fact that prewar old blood was still around. In the space of one spring afternoon in 1951, the ambitious and beautiful young American composer Ned Rorem met Jacques Fath, Picasso, the costume designer Valentine Hugo, and Luis Buñuel. He had already met the composer Henri Saguet, the writer Julien Green, Cocteau, Marie-Louise Bousquet and Marie-Blanche de Polignac, and later, with his patroness, Marie Laure de Noailles, he attended a Balenciaga collection where she noted approvingly of one particularly fragile gown, “I can see myself drunk in that one.”
Even Balenciaga became relatively expansive and, despite his aversion to being photographed, had posed for an advertisement for his perfume, Le Dix, named after his address on the Avenue George V. (His sculptural hand was placed, as it often was, in front of his slightly receding chin.) He went to at least one of the balls that started up again after the wartime hiatus—they were a useful guide to what women were wearing—and he was caught up in the web of Marie-Louise Bousquet, perhaps because she was inescapable and amusing, perhaps because he wanted to please Bousquet’s boss, Carmel Snow. It was at one of her Thursday afternoons that he met the English director Peter Brook and his actress wife, Natasha Parry.
Sailor shirt, 1955
Bousquet had glommed on to the Brooks at once as the brilliant new couple, he a boy genius in London and the director in Paris of a pleasingly scandalous production of Genet’s Le Balcon, she a beautiful film star. “It was a time when Noël Coward called us dreamboats—we would get postcards Dearest Dreamboats,” Natasha Parry recalled, laughing. They were also a lot more than mere dreamboats, and Balenciaga caught that at once and did something remarkable and grand. On that first meeting, with the shy person’s sudden boldness, he offered them the use of his country house, La Reynerie, near Orléans.
Balenciaga’s sketch of La Reynerie, with blouse design at right
“He was someone fine and sensitive and quiet,” Brook says. “The purity, the finesse of the human being—that was it. Somehow we met and somehow we became very friendly, but it wasn’t in any way a sort of enthusiastic gushing friendship, it was just a refined meeting out of which he did this thing which they said had never happened, ever, he said why don’t you come to my house, there’s a manservant who will look after you and it’s at your disposal and so we went for a week or so.”
It was, Brook says, “the most beautiful house, everything exquisite, a beautiful green garden all around and everything impeccable, just high style.”
“The long dining table, a wonderful cook, we just sat there and ate the best cheese soufflé and listened to Brahms, the first piano concerto,” Natasha Parry adds. “It was like a fairy tale, so exactly what we longed for, so exactly. The walled garden and the beams … We sent Balenciaga the most beautiful present we have ever given anyone, ever, a Ming horse from Spink’s in London.”
They didn’t see Balenciaga again as they commuted between London and Paris, but when their daughter Irina was born in 1962 he sent them an antique silver christening cup. When in Paris, Brook attended Balenciaga’s collections as a necessary part of the arts scene: “I was very interested because there was this thing of the everyday and then there was style, something that was endlessly changing, and a sensitive person, the couturier, would have a sense of these invisible waves.” What was changing, and what remained, was endlessly interesting, he says.
“When we first came here from England this was a Proustian world. It was highly attractive. It wasn’t snobbery in the low sense of the word but it was—I remember there’s a line from Cocteau, The Infernal Machine, in which Oedipus says to Jocasta something like ‘Who can resist silver and gold?’—and coming from England, from the roughness of war, the good roughness of the war in that old-fashioned England, here there was a living refinement. Quality and charm, not as today an effete thing. The high social level was enormously attractive and alive.”
Not all was right in the world, but for a time it was a lot righter than it had been. Balenciaga was at the top of his game, his solitary work in his studio during the war having given him a mastery of his craft that no one could equal, his hands so deft and swift (some people claimed he was ambidextrous) that they could execute his wildest fancies, and some would be wild indeed: the one-seam dress, the no-seam coat, the uncanny four-sided “envelope” dress, the impractical sweeping trains, the emphasis on a graceful back, rather than frontal, view. No one was ever so classic and yet so eccentric in the dictionary sense of being far from the ordinary center.
He loved putting in pins, Florette said, and allowed no one else to do so in his presence. To Chanel he was the only couturier: “Only he is capable of cutting material, assembling a creation and sewing it by hand. The others are just designers.” Temperamentally so different, Chanel and Balenciaga were close friends, until they weren’t. They dined together at Allard, exchanged gifts, and talked a lot about sleeves. The sleeve was, as is well known, Balenciaga�
��s obsession: everyone connected with the house remembers anguished cries of la manga and the awful sound of the master ripping one out at the last moment.
The “envelope” dress
“The sleeve was a mania with him and always a problem,” Florette said. “In those days the buyers came by ship and their orders had to be ready to leave with them, not on the next ship. Once I had a huge delivery and I saw he was taking apart the sleeves of a dress I had to ship that night. I said, Monsieur Balenciaga, you can’t do this, they have to be there at six p.m. He said, they can’t leave like this, and kept on working. I finally started to cry and he said I was bad-tempered—et en plus elle a un mauvais caractère—and kept right on pinning.”
Balenciaga’s sleeves were constantly rethought and resculpted; Chanel’s never changed but were, he thought, well conceived even if she made things easy by using malleable soft tweeds for her jackets. (John Fairchild says he saw her draw blood with her scissors while fitting a sleeve on a model.) Her high, narrow armhole made the wearer look vulnerable and tender, which was pleasing to her clients since they were neither. The two friends fell out dramatically over an interview with Chanel in Fairchild’s Women’s Wear Daily, Givenchy says.
“Chanel did something very bad. She had promised John Fairchild that she and Balenciaga would be photographed together in the Bois de Boulogne or some such place. She said to him, Cristóbal, I’d like to have my picture taken with you. He replied, Coco, with pleasure, but it’s just for the two of us, right? No, it’s for a newspaper. Which one? Women’s Wear. He said not on your life because, between us, he loathed Women’s Wear. She found herself in a bit of a jam with Fairchild so she gave an interview in which she said nothing but horrors about Balenciaga, about his homosexuality, how he knew nothing about women’s bodies which was why he dressed them as he did. Dreadful things. Cristóbal, who didn’t speak English, knew nothing about it, but Esparza, who did speak English, read it to him one day.