by Mary Blume
I wonder about this, having spoken to Balenciaga models from the 1930s, the 1950s, and the 1960s, all of them very good-looking, even now. Some, it is true, had been chosen by Balenciaga simply because they resembled major clients (Givenchy called one of them “Moonface”), but the reputation for odd looks was probably due to the overpowering influence of Colette, still at work after nearly twenty years and still preceded by her lantern jaw as she flung the curtain open and crashed into the salon. “She had great authority and chic,” Florette said. “She walked in like a grenadier, as if she wanted to kill everyone. The way she would come to a halt before clients! One was afraid. Poor thing, she was madly in love with Monsieur Balenciaga, she did everything she could…”
If Balenciaga kept his distance from the vendeuses and had endless technical quarrels with the ateliers, to the house models, who were as passive as sleepy kittens, he was benign. “If a girl fell ill he would send her a basket from Fauchon,” says Danielle Slavik, a model in the sixties. It was a dull and indecently underpaid job: the girls had to clock in at nine and wait in the two models’ cabines for the two-hour daily showing at 3:00 p.m. Before that, they might have a fraught fitting with M. Balenciaga, which could last for hours, or be called on by vendeuses to model an outfit for a client. Mostly they sat waiting, doing astrological charts and knitting. “They taught me how to knit,” Florette said.
In the 1950s Balenciaga brought in a house model, Nicole Parent, who stayed only a couple of years because she had other fish to fry but who represented a new style for him: the sassy gamine. Clearly, although it was not something he would admit, Balenciaga must have been influenced by Dior’s delight in Zizi Jeanmaire, and like her, Nicole was a dancer. She was in a popular revue and thought a bit of moonlighting would be fun until her show went on tour to the United States. She came from a good family (her brother was the architect Claude Parent, mentor of Jean Nouvel), and she wandered in to Balenciaga to see if she could earn pocket money as a model.
“When I came to that house, I said to myself, What an atmosphere, it’s like a convent. I was in black, in a very tight suit and carrying a long umbrella, which was much done at the time. Alexandre did my hair and my face was covered in paint, like a stolen truck. I was sent to Véra, who sent me to Salvador, whom I adored. He laughed at the sight of me and then sent me to M. Balenciaga, who had me walk and said I would do. I didn’t even know the dates of the collections, but he was about to start work on one.”
The next step was Mlle Renée, who appreciated her dancer’s discipline and was understanding about getting her out for curtain time. “But Florette was my sunshine,” she said, “always gentle and kind.” Nicole could—and still can in her eighties—get by on two hours’ sleep, but sometimes she would curl up under a clothes rack for a nap. “Florette would say, Don’t disturb her, we’ll get someone else to show the dress.” The two women remained friends well into this century, with Nicole in a pilot’s leather helmet driving Florette to lunch at the Interalliée Club in her Morgan 4/4 sports car. (She also has a pilot’s license and a black belt in judo, and she only gave up her splendidly customized Harley 883 at the age of eighty-one.)
With Balenciaga her relations were uniquely relaxed, even cheeky. “One day at a fitting I was sighing a lot and he raised his eyes and said, What is it, don’t you like what I’m doing? I figured I had nothing to lose, so I said no. Dead silence, then he said, Why? Because it makes me look wider than I am tall and anyway I only like black. Me, too, he said.
“Another time he put me in a flowered dress—I hate that—in satin, with crossed straps in the back. He said, You don’t like this one either—why? I don’t like the fabric and I have shoulder blades that stick out so the straps won’t work. He took that one away, too.”
Nicole Parent on her customized Harley 883
She even dared a joke during one of the last rehearsals before a collection. “We started at six and I had to be at the theater at eight. He knew it although it wasn’t I who told. I was showing a suit with three-quarter sleeves and had forgotten the gloves. He said, Fetch the gloves, but I, in a hurry, just pulled the sleeves down to my wrists. He stared, then he started to laugh. He, whose sleeves had to be correct to the millimeter!
“After that, he only made me either very theatrical clothes or young things in cotton, not that I was the youngest but because of the way I moved, and he gave me a shorter hemline than the others.” It was Balenciaga’s first attempt at a youthful look, however constrained by the heavy elastic foundation garments he always made his models wear to ensure a smooth line. “It may be that I lightened up the place,” said Nicole.
* * *
All was ready, then, for the collections to be seen, first by the buyers and the press, then by private clients. The salon—painted a nondistracting white, with gray carpeting—which comfortably held about thirty people, was stretched to its limits at collection time with the addition of the extremely uncomfortable little gold chairs that couturiers rented by the dozen from the house of Catillon.
The buyers, representing international clothing manufacturers and department stores, were the least desirable and the most rewarding: only at Balenciaga did they have to engage to buy, as an entrance fee, two outfits sold at a much higher price than private clients paid. But unlike the other houses, Balenciagas came in the appropriate fabric, not in muslin or in a paper pattern, and Balenciaga himself checked each one before delivery. The one thing orders lacked was the Balenciaga label, which, once the outfits were copied, usually in a cheaper fabric, and offered for sale, would say, for example, By Balenciaga for Saks Fifth Avenue. The money taken in from the buyers alone covered the cost of the collection; gains from private clients were pure gravy. According to Women’s Wear Daily (August 1, 1959), Balenciaga had the highest net profit in the haute couture.
Some of the buyers were distinguished and mannerly; others, in their white neckties and pinky rings, were skilled thieves, secretly sketching details during the collections. “It wasn’t pleasant but one had to take away the paper,” Florette said. “There was that peephole in the curtain and Balenciaga always had his eye to it. He saw everything, everything.”
“The worst were the Italians,” Odette said. “They would send you off to look for something so they could be alone with the dress. Buyers? They were just copyists.”
The commissions Florette got from buyers’ purchases accounted for a large part of her excellent earnings. She gamely dined with them or went to the Crazy Horse Saloon, the new upmarket strip club oddly located next to Balenciaga, and she learned never to leave them alone with a rack of dresses: “You know, those people were really very gifted. You would show them a model and they would hold up their fingers to measure the length or width of a collar. Sometimes I said, Wouldn’t you rather I just brought you a tape measure?”
The big private clients, on the other hand, strode into the salon as if half the world belonged to them, which in many cases it did. They were not those Parisians who found Balenciaga a bit too foreign but the international crowd whom Truman Capote called Swans. Though they weren’t young, they had allure. God, Capote added, may have given swans good bones but “some lesser personage, a father, a husband, blessed them with that best of beauty emollients, a splendid bank account.”
Mona Bismarck, as she had recently become when she first went to Balenciaga, was the most splendid of all. Born in 1897, two years after Balenciaga, she had dressed at all the great houses from Fortuny and Vionnet to Schiaparelli, who made her a dress in cellophane, and with her third husband (there were five), the utilities tycoon Harrison Williams, was the talk of New York in the 1920s and 1930s. She was mentioned in a Cole Porter song (“What do I care if Mrs. Harrison Williams is the best dressed woman in town”—“Ridin’ High,” 1936), was named best-dressed woman in the world in 1933, and she made a total of fifty appearances in Vogue (one was a photograph just of her shoes).
During the Depression, which somewhat reduced Harrison’s
fortune of $680 million, the couple took what he called an “economy flat” in the Hôtel Lambert in Paris, one of the city’s greatest buildings and later the home of the Baron and Baroness Guy de Rothschild. In their Fifth Avenue mansion, Mona’s Christmas tree was hung with ermine tails to match the white walls.
When Mona came to Balenciaga, brought by Florette’s client Barbara Hutton, Florette naturally hoped to capture her for herself, but she stayed with the elderly vendeuse Marthe, whom she had known at Paquin. “Mona was loyal, you know—once she found something she liked she stuck with it,” Gore Vidal said. He became a close friend during her later years in Capri, where she gardened in terrific long linen shorts by Balenciaga fastened by an oversize button on the side. “She had the legs of a young boy,” Vidal said.
Her body, lean and slightly androgynous, was like a perfect version of Balenciaga’s favorite model, Colette. She was particularly suited to Balenciaga’s satin hostess gowns with the wonderfully draped backs that Cecil Beaton emphasized in his portraits of her. The voluminous and grand hostess gown of the time was, of course, ideal swan attire: it was worn only when receiving at home and indicated that the wearer was a cut above her guests since they were only passing through and the perfect setting they were dining in was all hers. Power dressing at its most refined.
Cecil Beaton’s view of Mona Bismarck at home in Paris
Barbara Hutton, always the princess
With her shortish silvery hair, aquamarine eyes, and wonderful bearing, Bismarck had, Beaton suggests, an icy perfection. Like the Duchess of Windsor’s? I asked Gore Vidal. “She had that side but she had that height,” he said. “The duchess was smaller than anybody, she couldn’t really make a great impression, except novelty. And she was funny, the duchess. Mona was droll, which is quite different. The stories that would come out…” He does not remember seeing her in her fabulous emeralds: “With those eyes, why wear them? It would be gelding the lily, as Darryl Zanuck would say.”
There was nothing droll, or even funny, about Florette’s major client, Barbara Hutton, the wasted Woolworth heiress who grew up motherless and with the taunts of underpaid striking Woolworth employees in her confused head. She was given to statements like “Look at the stars, they are free for everyone,” spent, drank, and drugged prodigiously, was heedless but not unkind, and had so many husbands that for simplicity’s sake Florette just referred to her as Princess except when she telephoned for a chat at four in the morning and Florette would gently remind her, “But Barbara, I have to get up and work.”
In one day she ordered twenty-nine outfits from Florette, another day it was thirty-one. She had total recall of every collection and never needed to see a dress twice. The fittings took place in her second-floor suite at the Ritz, the grandest the hotel had, which was flanked by suites for her ex-governess, Germaine (“Ticki”) Toquet, and for Margaret Latimer, who had been her son’s baby nurse. In the hall were Vuitton trunks stamped with her various married names.
“The fitters were Denis, whom she adored, and I also gave her Suzanne because the orders were so big and Suzanne was so quick,” Florette said. “We would arrive at noon and spend the whole afternoon, Barbara drinking from a glass of water, which was gin.” For the great Beistegui ball in Venice in 1951, Barbara had Balenciaga dress her as Mozart at a cost of $15,000 (Yves Saint Laurent’s annual salary as chief designer at Dior was $14,000). Balenciaga also made her a ballgown for that night encrusted with jewels. It was so heavy she couldn’t stand in it, even when leaning on a chair, Florette said. She had gone along to help, but not of course to go to the ball, spending the day at the Lido with Miss Latimer.
Barbara Hutton places an order
Another Hutton-inspired trip took Florette by train to Switzerland to bring her some of her emeralds for a ball to go with her green and white Balenciaga. “I had to get them from Cartier’s safe—a huge necklace, a ring, earrings, a tiara. I was worried about customs so I told the conductor I had the flu and spent the trip in bed with the tiara in my handbag, the necklace under the covers, which I had pulled up to my chin, and wearing the ring.”
Barbara clearly was fond of Florette and offered to buy her a house in the country: “She was rather hurt when I told her I already had one.” They were born one day and one year apart and exchanged birthday presents, Florette usually receiving a Cartier pin and giving—“what do you give someone like that?”—a big bouquet from Lachaume.
“We are so much alike,” Barbara liked to tell Florette. “We both lost our mothers young.” She meant well but was unaware of the effrontery of saying that to an overworked woman with aching feet, and Florette, as she told me the story, seemed unaware of it as well.
For the most part, the clients were well behaved, and if they weren’t, Florette set them straight, like the American woman she threw out and only readmitted when the woman’s husband pleaded and gave her a crocodile handbag as a bribe. And then there was the infernal (Florette’s word) Lady Roote, a motor tycoon’s wife who used the pseudonym Lady Ann to throw customs inspectors in austerity Britain off the track and whom Florette also evicted. “One day I had enough and said go over to Givenchy, he has more time than I. She was back in ten minutes. To get there, which was just across the street, she’d had her chauffeur drive her in her Rolls.”
I don’t know how you could stand those people, I once said to Florette. “I don’t know either,” she replied, “but they could stand me. C’est drôle, n’est-ce pas?”
The newly rich with their barky voices were trying, but the solemn atmosphere of the house discouraged tantrums and in any case no woman, however spoiled, is at her best in her underclothes under the cool appraising gaze of a fitter and vendeuse. Florette was always smiling, giving confidence. It wasn’t that all her geese were swans but she wanted them to look their best (and would be blamed by Balenciaga if they didn’t). Florette liked steering clients and giving counsel. “It is odd because, even with people who knew exactly what they wanted, I always talked with them about why they wanted a particular dress. It’s important to do that. The other vendeuses just wrote down orders.”
The information she got was undoubtedly useful to Balenciaga and avoided such gaffes as the night when five women, including the Duchess of Windsor, appeared at a ball wearing the same Balenciaga. (None of them was Florette’s client.) There were certain dress codes: one did not, and still does not, receive at home in a suit, which is only for street wear; an afternoon dress was often black, a cocktail dress more important and recherchée. Clients who could only buy one number chose black because showier dresses could only be worn two times, three at most.
Sometimes clients attended the collections with their husbands or lovers and the atmosphere could be pure Feydeau with someone like André Dubonnet skipping between past and present mistresses while prospecting for new ones. Florette enjoyed mildly flirtatious badinage—“none of the other vendeuses had so many men”—and was flustered only once, when she found herself in a fitting room with Rita Hayworth’s glamorous husband, Aly Khan, helping him off with his trousers because he had lost a fly button.
“No one had as good a time with the clients as I did,” she said. Once when she was awed by an English duchess—“the English are not easy to defrost”—Balenciaga said to her, “They are women, just like you. Be natural.” She was, and her inborn friendliness enabled her to hit the right note between intimacy and service. “After all,” she said to me one afternoon, “to a degree we were just ladies’ maids. You had to remain somehow in the background. I was the vendeuse whom they thought of as perhaps more than a vendeuse, something of a friend perhaps. But I was not their intimate.”
In the confines of the fitting room, however, she was. The Countess du Boisrouvray would sing “Frou-Frou” every time she tried on an evening gown and Florette would sing along with her, the two rolling their r’s as one did in the Belle Époque. The daughter of the Bolivian tin magnate Simón Patiño, the countess went to Balenciaga every morning a
t eleven, and while she bought prodigiously, she didn’t entertain a lot, according to her daughter, Albina, sometimes dining alone in her superb hostess gown. Albina, whose outfit of choice is jeans, says her mother was shy of Parisian society, though she duly gave a garden party each spring in her great town house on the Rue Perronet in Neuilly, paying the nuns who lived next door to pray for sunshine.
Florette’s clients included Payot’s old acquaintance the Begum Aga Khan and five or six Rothschilds, of whom her absolute favorite was the Baroness Alain de Rothschild, a sweet and beautiful woman who was painted by Balthus in a black Balenciaga coat. Over tea in her home with Florette long after Balenciaga closed, she fondly told me of taking her young son to Balenciaga, where Florette had five clients at once in five fitting rooms. “He noticed she had a different voice and a different manner with each of them. Pure theater,” the baroness said.
The Baroness Alain was referred to as the Baroness Alain. Her sister-in-law Cécile de Rothschild, while also a baroness, was Mlle Cécile and just plain Cécile to Florette in the fitting room. Cécile was a tall, handsome woman with a brusque manner who sometimes came to fittings with her friend Greta Garbo, who bought nothing. “One day Cécile was saying Florette this and Florette that in her deep voice and Garbo said, You mustn’t use that tone with Florette, you see how nice she is with you.”
Florette and Cécile shared a passion for gardening and all her life Florette kept a set of gardening tools Cécile had given her. She also gave Florette an insight into the lives of the very rich: “I was always very open with her, more than with the Baroness Alain because she had her outspoken ways. One day I said to her how can you and your friends spend a fortune on a dress that you wear only once, and you aren’t even that clothes-mad. For me it’s fine because it’s how I earn my living, but it seems a little outlandish. She said, Florette, you don’t realize that with the life we lead—the servants, the houses, the upkeep—the money we spend on clothes is just a drop in the bucket.