by Mary Blume
“I had never thought of that,” Florette said.
* * *
It wasn’t his lustrous clientele that made Balenciaga world famous: it was the press, whose task was impeded by Balenciaga’s distrust, which Mlle Renée and Véra, her enforcer, made unpleasantly clear. The French fashion press, not in the thrall of department store advertisers and still in the 1950s thinking in terms of readers who sewed or had little dressmakers, was not as urgent about the collections as the Americans and, although respectful, not as keen on Balenciaga. His most eager promoters were those Guelphs and Ghibellines of the fashion press, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, always referred to as the Bazaar, and in terms of column inches Balenciaga was the chief beneficiary of their rivalry.
The work of this deeply serious man elicited the giddiest prose; the excitement is palpable: “by evening, this pneumatic look becomes almost airborne: taffeta as thin as burned paper,” “the drama, the discipline,” “beautiful, seductive, full of easy luxury,” “the quick tang of prophecy,” “the woman who owns a Balenciaga, the woman who has never worn an original—both have been converted to the greatness of The Idea.”
Diana Vreeland was not yet a power in the 1950s—Florette barely remembered her—and her eccentricity was not compatible with Balenciaga’s, being exuberant while his was deeply inhibited, but she praised him in her memoirs as the greatest dressmaker who ever lived: “One never knew what one was going to see at a Balenciaga opening. One fainted. It was possible to blow up and die.” The big players were Bettina Ballard at Vogue and Carmel (the accent was on the first syllable) Snow at the Bazaar. Ballard had been a friend of Balenciaga since 1937, but the brilliant Snow was mad for him and praised him not only in her pages but in her annual lectures at the Waldorf-Astoria to the influential New York Fashion Group.
Ballard was a lady, Snow ladylike with her soft Irish accent, blue hair, and great personal chic. She claimed to be the discoverer of Balenciaga, said that he fitted her clothes in his Avenue Marceau apartment and tended to have a proprietary air, stating in her memoirs that she had introduced Givenchy to Balenciaga (the two men were clearly too polite, or prudent, to say they had already met). Snow truly believed that Balenciaga’s trademark suit with the loose back, semi-fitted front, and standaway collar had been designed especially for her “since I have no neck.” She drank a great many of his—or anyone’s—martinis. After a well-oiled lunch she would often doze off during the collection, snapping to, so myth had it, when the best number came past. “It wasn’t the best number,” Florette said, smiling.
It is striking to read the fashion editors’ reports today and notice that almost all the attention was focused on Balenciaga’s coats and suits, partly because these are what interested professional buyers, partly because mere words, even when studded with dashes and four dots, could not convey the austere extravagance of his evening wear: “Balenciaga pours deep purple chiffon into a now-billowing, now-undulating flow. Draping sweeps the shoulder and—with the first step—cascades into a floating panel that reveals the knee. The effect: effortless of mood as Venus rising from the sea…” Evocative, surely, but what is the Bazaar talking about?
Ballard left Vogue after she failed to be appointed editor when Edna Woolman Chase, who had been there since 1895, finally retired in 1951. Snow was deposed at the age of seventy in 1957. By then a new crop of photographers had come along who did more for Balenciaga than words ever could. The Bazaar’s Richard Avedon photographed models in Balenciagas but his style was a bit too antic, while Vogue found a perfect match in the sensitive stillness of Irving Penn. Penn had come to Paris for the first time in 1950 and in his old age still spoke with wonder of the magical light in his rented studio and of his first photos with his wife and model, Lisa Fonssagrives. If it was only Penn who was able to capture the sculptural quality of Balenciaga’s clothes, it took Fonssagrives to dissipate their solemnity: no model has ever been so lovely and amused.
A variation on Balenciaga’s trademark supple suit
Karl Lagerfeld, then a German teenager, saw his first Balenciaga in a Penn photo of Lisa in the September 1950 Vogue (he had never before seen Balenciaga, Penn, or even Vogue) and suddenly sensed there could be a life for him in fashion. The overwritten caption meant nothing to him, but the image “was a triumph of real elegance,” he later said. “I could feel by instinct that this was the right vision, the vision to follow.”
Irving Penn’s 1950 picture inspired a young Karl Lagerfeld
It all should have been wonderful, and it was, except that Penn hated the house of Balenciaga and dealing with “those women in black, my enemies,” he told me many years later in New York. If he was going there to buy a dress for an advertising campaign they smothered him in politeness, but to photograph clothes for Vogue he had to go to the Avenue George V (other couturiers let the dresses go for photo sessions) and use the back door. “So we wouldn’t run into customers,” he explained. “Everyone else,” he added, “came to Vogue with bells on.”
* * *
One day, when Carmel Snow was having lunch with Balenciaga at the Grand Véfour, she saw Paulette Goddard and Anita Loos at a nearby table with the aged writer Colette. Knowing how much they admired Balenciaga, she beckoned her two friends over to the table. “When I performed the introductions,” she wrote, “without a moment’s hesitation, without even glancing at each other, both women curtsied to Balenciaga as Englishwomen curtsey to royalty.”
That’s the sort of thing that happened to Cristóbal Balenciaga in the 1950s.
The tradesman in him had to be pleased and the artist gratified, although he was incapable of satisfaction, always believing he could do better. The reaction of the man himself remains opaque, one reason being that he was so rarely around. He would prepare the collections in Paris, and then when they were over go to Spain to recuperate and to oversee his Spanish houses. The Spanish collections were labeled Eisa rather than Balenciaga but were identical to the French. “The Spanish premiers came to Paris,” Florette said, “but they didn’t know how to give that petit chic parisien. The clothes were less effective and, since the fabric used was Spanish, cheaper.” Balenciaga had flats in Barcelona and Madrid and, in Igueldo, in the Basque country near Getaria, a beautiful and simple very Spanish house, with dark furniture smelling of beeswax and his mother’s sewing machine displayed as if it were a work by his friend, the sculptor Eduardo Chillida. “Cristóbal and Chillida were Basque, both had that strong and true side,” Givenchy says.
In the winter, Balenciaga added ski trips combined with visits to his sinus specialist in Zurich. Apart from what duty required and friendship rewarded, he made no attempt to be part of the Paris social scene. His apartment on the fifth floor of a stolid 1882 building at 28 Avenue Marceau, around the corner from work, had mostly Louis XVI furniture upholstered in dark green, and white curtains. He would have preferred the stronger Régence style but knew it wouldn’t go with the building’s ornately plastered ceilings. He met many artists through the printer and gallerist Aimé Maeght but did not collect paintings, although he did have a rather muddy Braque seascape. He preferred antique Spanish silver and old bronze keys—objects that, like Chillida’s sculptures and, for that matter, his own work, were textured and tactile.
Balenciaga relaxes at winter sports
Although pictured as solitary, he did have friends such as the worldly jeweler Jean (“Johnny”) Schlumberger, who sent him Bunny Mellon as a client. “With friends he was very open, very kind,” said Schlumberger’s companion, Luc Bouchage. “One looked forward to an evening with him.” Dinners were in the Avenue Marceau. “The food was always wonderful, French and very good, although there was very little wine served and the glasses were small. People complained.”
Balenciaga made Schlumberger copies in blue of the short white smock he always worked in, and he would take Schlumberger’s sister, Jacqueline, off to Igueldo and make clothes for her. Always happiest when he was cutting or pinning or sewing, he e
njoyed the visits more than she did. “She used to say there were so very few people around, it was a very strict atmosphere, rather lonely at times,” Bouchage said.
The invisible waves of creation that Peter Brook spoke of were never still. Balenciaga’s sleeves were, of course, endlessly inventive from the start of the decade. There was the melon sleeve of 1950, falling from a dropped shoulder in folds like the skin of a plump shar-pei puppy, the bell sleeve, the tulip, the kimono, and what Women’s Wear Daily in 1951 hailed as a sleeve “with chicken-leg fullness.” The same year Vogue cited the Chinese lantern sleeve and the enigma sleeve, wisely perhaps not attempting to describe them though labeling them IMPORTANT. But Balenciaga hated novelty for its own sake, and his line developed consistently and organically.
In the profitably dystopian fashions of our times, it is hard to imagine an approach whose aim, and achievement, was quite simply beauty: a beauty that because it evolved naturally could endure. The barrel line of 1947, expansive at the waist and gathered at the hem, became the loosely fitted suit (1951) and the classic tunic (1955), which became the sheath, still a basic form today, which then transmuted to the cleverly built sack dress of 1957—infamous when cheaply copied worldwide—and then in 1958 became the lightweight fluted trapezoid called the baby doll.
The twin-seamed sleeve
The melon sleeve
The sack dress
The baby doll dress
One might not wish to look like a baby doll, but from its fluting Balenciaga developed the wildly beautiful ruffles that would enhance the drama of his evening wear. And all women benefited—and benefit still—from the principal achievement of his 1950s lines: the elimination of a tight nipped-in waist and the smoother, more yielding silhouette that still obtains today. Balenciaga, Emanuel Ungaro said, is conjugated in the present tense.
He worked closely with his favorite fabric manufacturers, his eye so precise that he never ordered a centimeter too much (if a client’s body required even an extra fifty centimeters, the order had to be signed by Balenciaga himself). With Gustav Zumsteg in Switzerland he developed his favorite fabric, gazar, a nubbed silk based on cotton bandages that took Zumsteg three years to perfect and that fell in the deep, rich folds that Balenciaga sought. His tweeds came from England, lightened when American clients complained that they were too warm for central heating, and his prints from Lyons.
One flowered print worn by the hefty and garrulous Margaret Biddle was alone proof of Balenciaga’s genius, a friend, Garith Windsor, told me years ago: “She kept talking and talking and out of boredom I began counting the cabbage roses around her waist. When I added them up, I could hardly believe it.” Give me an imperfect body and I will make it perfect, Balenciaga used to say. “A bit pretentious,” Florette said, “but true.”
His workday began with his Basque secretary, Gérard Chucca, announcing, “Monsieur is here.” In the studio Gérard was always at his elbow taking notes, as were Esparza and Gérard’s partner, Fernando Martínez, who sketched his ideas (Balenciaga sketched badly). The machine-gun rattle of Balenciaga losing his temper in Spanish was shattering, a favorite epithet being cursi, which journalists translated as “vulgar” but which seems to suggest something worse, piss-elegant or downright common.
Odette, Lili’s assistant, sometimes found it all too Spanish. The one French habitué of Balenciaga’s private domain was the Basque André Courrèges, whom Balenciaga soon encouraged to open his own house, generously giving him backing and clients after asking Courrèges to find a replacement, which took three years. The replacement was Emanuel Ungaro. This did not mean that Balenciaga liked what Courrèges did on his own: some years later, when Nicole Parent was at the movies with another former model, they realized when the lights came up that Balenciaga was seated nearby. “I said to him, And here I am wearing Courrèges. Courrèges, he said, let me see. He looked me over. My God, that is ugly, he said.”
Change was in the air, not only with the opening of Courrèges. In 1955 Karl Lagerfeld got his first job, at Balmain. In 1957 Yves Saint Laurent began his short stint as chief designer at Dior. And in 1953 Hubert de Givenchy met Balenciaga at a party given by Condé Nast’s Iva S. V. Patchévitch in New York, having tried earlier in Paris and been thrown out by Mlle Renée. Givenchy had just opened his own small house after making accessories for Schiaparelli’s boutique. He was twenty-six years old, well-born and poised, immensely tall, and so handsome with his shock of dark hair, blue eyes, and noble nose, said the Balenciaga model Danielle Slavik, that traffic stopped when he crossed the Avenue George V.
After that meeting, Balenciaga invited Givenchy to have lunch at a New York restaurant, L’Aiglon. “I remember that just as I remember everything he said, so great was my affection,” Givenchy recalled. “He started to tell me about his life. He said, You know I don’t look at fashion magazines much, but I find in your work a freshness and charm. He spoke of an organdy scarf with a lily of the valley motif. That he remembered that touched me.
Balenciaga at a fitting, with Emanuel Ungaro at left
Hubert de Givenchy
“Little by little, from this friendship grew something much bigger.” Givenchy respected Balenciaga’s honesty, the discretion that people mistook for secretiveness, his naturalness. “He had the simplicity he always kept of a man born poor in a little village. He was perhaps impressed by his clientele but he always remained what he had been, close to his family and to the way he had been raised.” He teased Givenchy for being so costively comme il faut. “He would say to me, You have an upbringing that says you must be this, you must do that. No, be natural, be simple, be honest, don’t make complications.”
One Sunday in Spain, Balenciaga took Givenchy to his empty atelier. “There were all those dummies of Spanish women who, like anyone at a certain moment in life, Spanish or not, had bent backs and sagging bosoms. Esparza was there and we passed the pins—they had to be passed in a certain way and we couldn’t pass them fast enough—and we could see the woman starting to straighten up. It was wonderful to see little by little, and just with pins, the body rebalance itself. It was plastic surgery to the highest degree.”
Givenchy’s own technique was not strong, and he told Balenciaga he would like to study incognito in his Barcelona atelier. “He said—he was a man who always spoke the truth—That’s useless, don’t try for the impossible. You have taste, Hubert, your taste will get you through life. You have premiers—he did, by the way, give me two of his—and the ones I gave you will help with your technique. With your taste, you will give them ideas and you will learn from them. It’s too late for you to pick up the craft, but watch them and learn.”
Which Givenchy did, and one can imagine Balenciaga’s pleasure as mentor to this dazzling young man. But in the house of Balenciaga the effects were devastating, and at least four of his associates spoke to me of Givenchy with bitterness. The crisis apparently came when Balenciaga decided to give Givenchy funds to move his couture house to larger premises across the street from Balenciaga on the Avenue George V. One might think that what Balenciaga did with his money was his own business, but there was talk that he had been manipulated by his new friend. Nicolás Bizcarrondo, Balenciaga’s cofounder and financial director, advised Balenciaga not to make the gift, with the result that Balenciaga simply threw his old friend and benefactor out. Bizcarrondo, his grand-niece says, never recovered. Asked about the split, Givenchy says he knew nothing about Bizcarrondo, who had already left when he met Balenciaga in 1953. But legal records show that Bizcarrondo went in 1955.
Nicole Parent remembers crying when she bade the Bizcarrondos good-bye, and Jean-Claude Janet said that Balenciaga came over to explain himself—“like one side in a divorcing couple.”
Givenchy got his new building, and of the three original partners, d’Attainville, Bizcarrondo, and Balenciaga, only Balenciaga was left to enter the new decade, his last as a designer, on his own.
5
Balenciaga could do as he plea
sed, and he did. In 1956 he barred the press from his collections until the commercial buyers and clients had seen them. What was viewed as high and mighty behavior was based on Balenciaga’s fear of copyists: during the four-week press ban, orders for manufacturers could be made and safely delivered. The move was not entirely reasonable, since buyers were just as larcenous as the press, but buyers bought, while Balenciaga never could see much use in the press. Givenchy joined him in the ban.
The New York Herald Tribune’s feisty Eugenia Sheppard, who was once bounced from the house for referring to Balenciaga as the Big Daddy of the Haute Couture, reacted by interviewing buyers in the Ritz bar after they had seen the show. “Well, it was gay at the Ritz and don’t think black marketing reporting can’t be fun,” she wrote on August 1, 1957.
More significantly, the ban meant that Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar had to cover the collections twice, the first time writing on the other designers, the second—a month later—on the two rebels. Givenchy benefited from being seen alone with the couture’s top name, and since fashion editors had to pad out the first article, they allowed more space for younger designers such as Yves Saint Laurent, giving them a boost that otherwise might have been seasons in coming.