by Mary Blume
For the moment, Balenciaga had no serious competitors. John Fairchild, who had come to Paris in 1955 to lighten up his family’s trade journal, Women’s Wear Daily, with fashion gossip, made a habit of stalking him, and in 1962, after tracking Balenciaga for two years, he published seven photographs—“the first pictures in ten years by any publication anywhere in the world”—of Balenciaga with Esparza in Madrid’s flea market. “Balenciaga is still king,” the text read. “Where he steps, the rest of fashion follows.” The same year, even France-Soir snapped him on the Avenue George V wearing his white work smock. “This isn’t a barber,” explained the caption. “This is Balenciaga, the mystery man.”
He was producing more accessories, not only as a profitable sideline but in order to give a total look. His gloves, Givenchy says, were better than those from Hermès, and Florette showed me a truly wonderful pair of hers: the softest suede, called peach skin, or peau de pêche, in a rich deep blue—total luxury with an easy air because the fingertips were slightly blunted and the cuffs were loose, rather like gardening gloves. Balenciaga showed the first patterned tights, the orthopedic-looking laced shoes and high boots still worn today, and, because he thought no outfit complete without a hat, the pillbox that Givenchy used so effectively on Audrey Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
His colors became more and more brilliant. “You’ve never seen such colors,” Diana Vreeland wrote, “you’ve never seen such violets! My God, pink violets, blue violets!” In 1965, the year of Saint Laurent’s primary-colored Mondrian line, Balenciaga showed unimagined combinations of bottle green and ginger, camel beige with charcoal gray, black with brown. At one Balenciaga show, Vreeland says, “Audrey Hepburn turned to me and asked why I wasn’t frothing at the mouth at what I was seeing … Across the way, Gloria Guinness was sliding out of her chair onto the floor. Everyone was going up in foam and thunder. We didn’t know what we were doing, it was so glorious.”
Daytime wool ensemble with straw hat, 1961
The grand gesture as summarized by Penn
“Balenciaga is still king”
As usual, Balenciaga was obsessively perfecting his line rather than changing it with each season. The physical wear and tear was great—after a full day of 150 fittings he would sometimes go back to his studio and work into the night—and was only bearable because he spent as much time as he could in Spain, supervising the Madrid and Barcelona houses and, above all, recovering in Igueldo, where his sister Agustina acted as housekeeper until her death in 1966. Givenchy remembers going with him to the local market to watch him happily debate in Basque with the fishmongers. “Everyone knew him and called him Cristóbal. He would look under the gills and say no, no, that’s not fresh, it wasn’t caught last night.” One of the bawling fishwives, Balenciaga told Givenchy with his charming smile, was a big client at his Barcelona branch.
In Paris he walked daily up the Avenue Marceau to his parish church, Saint Pierre de Chaillot (Balenciaga made the cassock for its priest, Father Pieplu, as he had for his priests in Spain). Sometimes he would call Givenchy at five o’clock, telling him to stop work and come along. “I am a Protestant but I felt honored to go with him,” Givenchy said. As Balenciaga’s last living intimate he is our closest connection to him, eager to equate Balenciaga’s justesse of line with his honesty: “For me he was un homme parfait, he had an integrity such as I have never seen.”
But even Givenchy is sometimes troubled by this luminous man’s darker shadings. He still shudders when he speaks of two of Balenciaga’s terrible rages, one as a mourner at the funeral of a friend who he felt had cheated him, when Balenciaga suddenly began to shout, and in the Madrid workroom when he let loose at a seamstress who had forgotten to hang her measuring tape around her neck: “She wasn’t young and she wept. He wouldn’t let up.”
Givenchy is most vivid when he speaks of how the truth of the man was expressed in the smallest details. “I saw the most beautiful breakfast tray in my life in his house. The tray was simple, with a linen mat of the most extraordinary quality, a bit rough, and a china cup of beautiful volume. The butter dish was eighteenth-century glass, the milk pitcher was Spanish, more sturdy than refined. Everything was true, was honest, was solid. He never chose anything chi-chi. Everything had a huge force, a personality that was reflected in everything, because even the linen had a rough side. It wasn’t Porthault, it was Balenciaga.”
As keeper of the flame, Givenchy doesn’t like Balenciaga to be viewed as dour or opaque and insists on his love of laughter and his marvelous smile. He enjoyed dishing with Marie-Louise Bousquet and Mitza Bricard, Givenchy says, and he didn’t always dress in black. “He liked good food and gave amusing dinners. Greta Garbo came, and once I saw Luis Mariano there, all in white.” Luis Mariano was the star of popular operettas at the Châtelet, a Liberace figure with capped white teeth and a slick black hairpiece. Givenchy raised his eyebrows, to which Balenciaga replied, “But he is charming, very religious, and very correct. And he is Basque.”
The essence of Balenciaga
Except for rare obligatory events, Balenciaga was in no way part of the Paris scene and had no wish to be. In her 1956 book Paris à la Mode, Célia Bertin found the clothes of “Christobal” [sic] Balenciaga difficult and austere: “The style of the Spanish couturier is that of a closed universe, without apparent connection with everyday life, without even much regard for Parisian forms and faces.”
Many of his clients were French because a well-dressed woman had to have Balenciagas, but his often-severe lines were at odds with the Parisian love of decorative dresses made to flatter and charm. He was more an international than a French couturier, and the French couture, which had welcomed such foreigners as Schiaparelli and Molyneux before the war, was now more chauvinistic, facing competition from Italy and the United States. Spain, fashionable in France from the days of Empress Eugénie through Salvador Dalí, was seen in the dwindling Franco days of the 1960s as a poor and backward country, a cheap supplier of domestic help and not a source of the new.
At least two French fashion chroniclers cruelly mocked Balenciaga’s pronunciation of the word tissu as tissou. His Spanish accent may be one reason people always said he spoke very softly. Paris society is a self-regarding minefield through which Dior and Balmain knew how to undulate. Balenciaga never made a faux pas because he never made a pas at all.
Balenciaga (left) fits Mme Zumsteg at La Reynerie
The women he really liked to dress, French or not, were oddly enough small, plump, and middle-aged—Mme Bizcarrando, Mme Maeght, Mme Kandinsky, the widow of the painter, Mme Zumsteg, and Janine Janet, his window dresser. They were part of his experiments in sculpting form: “Monsieur likes a bit of belly” was the saying in the house.
Their roly-poly bodies told him how to confer, or to enhance, beauty. From such unlikely shapes, and from the precision he had already reached in his coats and suits, Balenciaga invented for his lissome swans evening wear that was abundant but cut by a geometer’s hand: the most spectacular evening clothes ever seen, said Vogue, meant to sweep through a room with a certain majestic calm. There was vinelike green embroidery traced on a heavy satin dress with a scattering of brilliant orange flowers, there were stoles, floor-length or three-pointed, a white velvet floor-length cape based on a fisherman’s net. Ruffles, which he liked, burst with power and never simpered; the flare on a long skirt could have been chamfered rather than cut by scissors, but was supple, not stiff. No detail, even the tiniest flower, was merely decorative: the dresses were showpieces of authenticity. No other designer could be so heartbreakingly simple, or so irrevocably complex.
The short front and trailing back, a Balenciaga favorite
A typical Balenciaga train
The fashion writer’s killer words, “wearable” and “pretty,” were never applied to Balenciaga’s clothes. Not only did the evening clothes demand assurance and a sense of style but they could also be damnably hard to put on. “Balenciaga is such a trying m
an,” the Duchess of Windsor complained, “he makes one pull everything over the head. It is ruinous to the hair.” Florette, when we looked together at the color plates in Marie-Andrée Jouve’s book on Balenciaga, wondered how her clients actually managed to wear what she had sold them. He often used a short front hemline that flowed to floor length at the rear—lovely, but how to get into a taxi? How did the woman in the balloon dress, which was shaped like one, sit down? How did the wearer of a trumpet-shaped long sleeve avoid dipping it into her dinner?
Such questions were not posed by the women who could carry such clothes, and pay for them. Mona Bismarck took eighty-eight numbers in 1963, fairly typical except for the year when many of her clothes were in a train wreck and she ordered one hundred fifty Balenciagas all at once. His biggest client of all was Mrs. Paul Mellon, who, like Mona, had him make her gardening clothes, though she didn’t have the legs for Mona’s shorts: “Being a working gardener,” she wrote, “I had big cotton or linen blouses with plain blue denim skirts, each slit to the knees.”
One client who may have supplied comic relief was Claudia Heard de Osborne, a good-looking Texas oil heiress who had married into the Spanish sherry-producing Osborne family and traveled between the Ritz in Paris and the Ritz in Madrid, where she kept several rooms just for her clothes. Her enthusiasm was as exuberant as her orders, but her taste was curious. For a ball, Balenciaga designed especially for her a black velvet long gown with a bustle to which were affixed many tiny ermine tails. It is arguably the ugliest dress he ever made. She regarded herself as an intimate: she condoled with Balenciaga on the death of both his sister, Agustina, and his Yorkshire terrier, Plume; she thrillingly submitted to having her Balenciaga jacket ripped apart because of the sleeve after they had had lunch together; she wept with him after he closed. Unhappy with Spain’s post-Franco democratic government, in 1975 she consigned three hundred of her Balenciagas to the University of North Texas, noting that in parting with them she had stained them with her tears.
Balenciaga’s favorite, and one of his closest friends, was Sonsoles, Marquesa de Llanzol, a client since the 1940s and a confidante whom he addressed in the familiar tú. Florette, like his other French employees, thought that the marquesa, being Spanish, was distinguished but lacked style until she dressed at the Paris, as well as the Madrid, house, but her daughter, Sonsoles Díez de Rivera, says the tall, fair marquesa was considered the most elegant woman in Madrid. Sonsolita, as she was called, knew Balenciaga from the age of seven. “He was like an uncle,” she said. “I never realized he was secretive or timid or whatever, he was always enormously nice to me. He and my mother were very close. She was a very witty woman, very intelligent and cultivated, and he always had a lovely time with her. So I always saw him relaxed, not stiff. It was a great privilege, which I didn’t realize until much later.”
Sonsolita first went to Paris at the age of fifteen, driving through the Loire Valley with her mother, followed by Balenciaga in a car with Esparza and his chauffeur. “Finally we got to Paris and we stayed in his apartment. My mother then was very young, she must have been thirty-six or something like that, and my father didn’t come along, so she found herself very free and wanted to go out every night, which Balenciaga found very funny. So we always went out, the four of us, to all sorts of nightclubs and the Lido, that sort of thing. After that I’d be tired because I was only fifteen and my mother didn’t want to go to bed, she wanted to go to the Quartier Latin and Les Halles for onion soup. So they went for their onion soup while I slept on Esparza’s shoulder, and there they were chatting along and having great fun, both of them.”
The balloon dress
Balenciaga and his favorite client and friend, the Marquesa de Llanzol
Balenciaga made young Sonsoles’s first communion dress and, in 1957, her wedding gown. He did not ask her what she wanted. “I was only eighteen and no one those days asked the opinion of an eighteen-year-old girl. He said, You are very dark, like the Madonna in the processions in Seville, so we’ll make a gown like the Madonna’s, all embroidered in silver.” He didn’t have time to fit her but made a dummy and cut the toiles himself. Esparza came to the wedding; Balenciaga was away at winter sports.
Wedding gown with “coal-scuttle” headdress, 1967
The gown was superb, as Balenciaga’s wedding gowns always were. They suited his sense of occasion, his stupendous technique, and his emphasis on the back of a garment (after all, a wedding dress is seen mostly from the rear). His dress for Queen Fabiola, Givenchy told me, was a miracle of construction in his placing of a heavy white mink border on the fragile neckline and train. And one of his last masterpieces was the 1967 gazar bridal gown with a headdress shaped like a coal scuttle over the nape of the neck, its oval shape echoing the curve of the train. Danielle Slavik, blond and somewhat shy, modeled the dress and says it was easy to wear, despite the headdress, and often ordered.
Danielle, who had planned to be a beautician, came to Balenciaga in 1964 just to keep a friend company during a model call. “I had colored my hair myself and I had a spot on my dress so I put it on backwards. I was sitting with a bunch of girls in the grand salon when I heard myself called by Mademoiselle Renée, and suddenly in the salon there was Monsieur Balenciaga and Monsieur Esparza and they asked me to walk. I couldn’t raise my head, I was so mal à l’aise. Then Mademoiselle Renée put me in a suit, Monsieur Balenciaga went back into his studio, and I was asked when I could start.”
First, Balenciaga had to show her the Balenciaga walk. “One day he took me by the arm and walked next to me to show me the rhythm. He would say, Boom, boom, boom, slow but not too slow and look straight ahead.” Although he could explode during fittings that might last into the night (when they did, he would send Danielle home in a taxi or his car), he was unfailingly paternal to his models.
Queen Fabiola’s mink-trimmed wedding gown: “a miracle of construction,” according to Givenchy
“I always thought my thighs were a bit heavy. One day I was dizzy during a fitting and Monsieur Balenciaga asked me what was wrong. I explained that I was on a diet and he said, Danielle, it’s not your job to slim, it’s my job to dress you so it can’t be seen. Imagine! And he had the restaurant at the corner, the Relais de l’Alma, send up a steak and French fries. He and Monsieur Esparza stood over me until I ate it all.”
His benevolence did not temper his terrifying vigilance. When a young assistant named Claudia passed by laden with ten hats, Balenciaga stopped her with the words “You look like you’re carrying a load of melons,” although she was Mlle Renée’s niece. Fittings were torture for the premiers d’atelier, Danielle says. “He would start off smiling and lose his temper within five minutes. It would go on until the eve of the collection. The premiers would think a dress was finished and then Monsieur Balenciaga would ask to see it again and it was la catastrophe. The premiers always hoped he wouldn’t notice them.”
He even surveyed photographers. Danielle, while pretty, was not photogenic, but for a while Balenciaga had a rule that photographers had to use his house models, with the result that the heads were cut off in many printed pictures. He threw Twiggy out when she came with a photographer, insisting that one of his girls be used instead.
A fitting on Danielle Slavik
In their cabines the eight models crocheted or told each other’s fortunes. When summoned to Balenciaga’s studio for a fitting, they put on a lightweight black satin underdress, or fond de robe, embroidered with their names, worn so that pins would not catch in their undergarments. “I think Monsieur Balenciaga also had us wear them for reasons of modesty,” Danielle said. The girls didn’t necessarily get along, but Danielle’s biggest problems came from, of all people, Florette.
“She was jealous because she wanted Anita Delion, her niece, to get my job. She would say things like I don’t know why he hired you, and when a private client came she would ask for another model to show my clothes.”
They became friends later but the begi
nning was rough. “I was so frightened at my first collection,” Danielle said, “that my fingers couldn’t button the coat I was showing. Some of the vendeuses helped me, but not Florette.”
* * *
Florette’s success didn’t make her popular in the house, and she could be short-tempered given how sore her feet were despite the four pairs of Mancini pumps that she wore out each year. Her voice had become more worldly in her fifties, her manner more assured. She was the only vendeuse who needed two assistants (and sometimes three), whom she paid from her own pocket—another niece, also named Anita, and Betsy, a broken-down marquise qui avait eu des malheurs. Betsy was sweet but fairly useless, though Florette said she was good at handling the ateliers. Florette was perhaps rather pleased to have a marquise in her employ.
Payot, semi-retired, loyally prepared dinner and soothed her nerves at the end of the day, although he didn’t much like it when people called him M. Florette. “What was exceptional about them was their mutual admiration. Payot was always praising her, saying she was the highest paid vendeuse in Paris, and Florette admired his culture,” says Benoît Gaubert, son of the Chelots’ oldest friends. The Gauberts were prosperous shopkeepers with two stationery stores in central Paris. Georges Clemenceau was a client and Colette ordered her famous blue writing paper from the Papeterie Gaubert.
In the summers the Gauberts would rent a house near the Chelots’ maison de bonheur in Normandy. When in town they dined together (Benoît tasted his first foie gras at the Chelots’), and on Saturday afternoons they boated, paddling up the Seine from Paris and taking the train back. Benoît was uneasy with Florette because, like many childless women, she fussed over him too much. His mother felt intimidated, too, and never went to a Balenciaga show (that wasn’t her world, Benoît says). Although embarrassed when, in her new fancy voice, Florette complimented him on his shapely legs, M. Gaubert had the greatest respect for her. “My father considered her an exceptional woman. He would say, She is always at ease, always at home everywhere. That was what he most admired.”