by Mary Blume
He knew that fashion is doomed to be ephemeral, that even the greatest is not, after a while, the most desirable, but he must have had a wish for at least a proper record of his existence because in 1962 he had the photographer Tom Kublin start making films for his own archive of his collections—just a model or two parading through the empty salon. Words never measured up to Balenciaga’s work, great magazine photographs were better, but only these modest, badly lighted films (scraps of which are available on YouTube) show how the body moved in a Balenciaga, how it was skimmed, but never straitened, by the clothes.
It is usually claimed that Balenciaga was done in by ready-to-wear, which is and isn’t true. Already in the 1950s he had agreed to look at a New York manufacturer’s setup, rejecting it not because of the principle but because the quality was poor, and it is said that in Paris in the sixties he occasionally bought other designers’ ready-mades to study the technique. He did, after all, know ready-to-wear quite well, having made it in Spain before he even came to France, but he didn’t want to water down his skills for something his clientele did not seek. He told Givenchy that although he would have given ready-to-wear a try had he been younger, it was not something to take up toward the end of one’s career. He did, in fact, do it once, and with great success: in 1968, aged seventy-three, he designed uniforms for Air France stewardesses, which stayed in production for ten years, until 1978. They had such typical Balenciaga features as knee-high boots and a half-belt on the coat, and although made for the most part from an artificial fabric, Terylene, they were smart and, but for one detail, perfect: despite tryouts on his models, the armholes were, for the first time in Balenciaga’s long struggles with la manga, not right, too tight for stowing baggage overhead.
Air France uniform
Balenciaga belonged to the ocean liner era, although since 1957 more people had been crossing the Atlantic by airplane and steamer trunks were gone from the corridors of the Ritz. Retirement had been in the air for a while, Givenchy says. “For three years before he closed, the Marquesa de Llanzol and Esparza and I were trying to persuade him not to.” He was tired, he told Givenchy, but he couldn’t stop because he was supporting so many people—presumably mostly his family—that he was afraid he wouldn’t have enough to live on if he retired. Couture houses were closing and his own house was taking in less money. In 1967—was it a sign of panic?—he let the press back in to view his collection. Even Florette’s order book shows a decline, although she had as new clients girls from the house of the famous procuress Mme Claude. “Just a few. They were very pretty and very polite,” she said. They paid with checks signed by their customers, except for one who gave cash. She must have been turning tricks on the side to earn enough for the clothes, Florette guessed.
* * *
Designers, caught in the world of commerce, cannot afford themselves a late style in the manner of painters and writers and composers, but in his 1967 collections Balenciaga produced three almost ecstatic examples of what must be called his late style: the four-sided “envelope” dress, the “chou,” with its deep black ruffle around the face that could be lowered to the shoulders, and the coal scuttle bridal gown. It was impossible, even for him, to go further, and he closed his house the following year.
Diana Vreeland, staying with Mona Bismarck in Capri, got the news from Consuelo Crespi, who had just heard it over the radio in Rome: “Mona didn’t come out of her room for three days. I mean, she went into a complete … I mean it was the end of a certain part of her life.”
The extraordinary “chou” dress of 1967
It was like the moment when Prospero abandons his magic, but it wasn’t a moment. It was a sloppy, drawn-out, painful mess. Already on April 26, 1968, the London Daily Express’s Sam White announced BALENCIAGA DECIDES TO QUIT—AND FASHION WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN. Official denials followed, then on May 23, The New York Times stated, correctly, NOTHING LEFT TO ACHIEVE, BALENCIAGA CALLS IT A DAY. No one in the house, not even Mlle Renée, it is said, had been warned.
“He left like the grand seigneur that he was. He closed the door,” Givenchy says. It was more brutal than grand. Perhaps to Balenciaga in Madrid the dramatic photos of the May events in Paris—the burning cars, the street fighting—seemed a replay of Spain’s chaotic civil war: a sign, or a pretext, to close. He was tired, and he did.
On May 31, typewritten registered letters signed by Mlle Renée informed all four hundred employees that they had been fired. It might have been less painful had Balenciaga come back from Spain; as it was, Florette learned about the closing from a client who telephoned from New York to ask her to reserve a particular number from the collection since there wouldn’t be another. “For years I felt a mixture of rage and sorrow,” she said. Odette, cooler, said that some employees wanted to sue: “But the last collection was weak, we could see he was tired. His nephews pushed him to go on.”
The little employees, Warhol’s “makers of buttons,” some of them already past retirement age, accepted their fate silently. Odette wrote a letter to Balenciaga thanking him for what she had learned from him, and a retired model was so upset she wrote him a poem. Florette got a pile of condolence letters from clients, most of them asking her where she would go next. Several addressed her as “Fleurette” and one interrupted her grief to ask Florette to cancel her hair appointment at Carita as she wouldn’t be coming to Paris. “I shall very much miss my Balenciaga wardrobe,” wrote Mrs. Angelika W. Frink of 610 Park Avenue, while Mary Lee Fairbanks, in bright green ink, reflected, “It is terribly sad that the one and only genius is retiring but he deserves peace and serenity. It leaves a great void in the world but he must be a man richly rewarded for his devotion to his knowledge, talent and compassion.”
The last page of Florette’s order book
Condolence telegram from Bunny Mellon to Mlle Renée
No one can give with accuracy the closing date of the house since orders had to be filled and the sad process dragged on for months. (The Spanish houses closed after Paris.) Danielle stayed until the last days, by which time Balenciaga was back. “Monsieur Balenciaga came into the cabine with Mademoiselle Renée and said, Take what you like, Danielle, this suit maybe or this dress. And each time Renée said, No, Monsieur, that’s been sold. She was so hard and he was so generous.” In what sounds like a total breakdown, Florette says that Renée left disordered piles of unsold garments around, hanging on to them or throwing them away: “Really, into the garbage bin. It was horrible. Monsieur Balenciaga didn’t care by then.” Renée’s niece Claudia, an assistant vendeuse, says that despite their closeness she never spoke of the closing to her aunt and her aunt never brought it up. Renée, who had lived at 10 Avenue George V in a transformed attic, moved to Enghien, a nondescript former spa outside Paris, and died there in 1994. Odette, who decided at the age of fifty-five to marry a widower, chose a free wedding dress dating from the late 1940s, and hats for her five new stepchildren.
Florette took nothing, and after thirty-one years got as severance pay a sum just sufficient to repaint her one-bedroom apartment.
7
Balenciaga’s staff was accustomed to the peremptory ways of genius so, once the shock had passed, none of them seemed to hold the way that he closed against him. They remained protective and over the years some of them came to resent the probing of strangers into what they regarded as the best years of their lives. “Monsieur Balenciaga was someone extraordinary about whom I do not wish to speak,” a fitter named Jacqueline told me over the telephone. “My memories are in my heart and I don’t want to share them with anyone.” Understood, but had she known Florette? “I knew her very well, she was a vendeuse et c’est tout.” Click of the telephone being hung up. That wasn’t really all, for Florette had shown me a note from Jacqueline written in 1968: “Dear Mme Florette, What I want to do in this letter is thank you, first of all for the courage you had when I began. You weren’t afraid to work with me and from that I gained confidence. Thank you for continuing
to believe in me, a thousand thanks…”
None of Balenciaga’s employees had trouble finding work in other houses. Florette, with her winning ways and an order book worth its weight in gold, had her choice, and she made the wrong one.
“There was Chanel, Grès, Saint Laurent, whom I would have liked to go to but I didn’t care for Monsieur Bergé,” Florette said. “I told Monsieur Balenciaga I didn’t know where to go and he said, You know, I am very fond of Monsieur de Givenchy, I advise you to go to him.” Florette had had her doubts about Givenchy since the expulsion of M. Bizcarrondo, but Givenchy, she says, offered her the job of directrice and so she accepted. M. Bizcarrondo’s widow asked her how she could do such a thing.
Odette and Danielle and several Balenciaga fitters also crossed the Avenue George V to work at Givenchy. “The vendeuses hated us. It was not a good ambience,” Odette says.
“There was a lot of jealousy and ill-humor among the staff,” said Florette. “The directrice refused to go and was odious.” Eugenia Sheppard, describing Florette as the smiling vendeuse, wrote that her customers “have followed her, to the last woman.” Maybe so, but she didn’t see them: “I was stuck off in a little office and when my clients came in they were told I wasn’t there.” The position of directrice was never mentioned again.
Florette suspected, reasonably enough, that the point in hiring her had been simply to freeze her order book: to make her a nonperson. Mona Bismarck, whose Balenciaga vendeuse had retired and who should logically have been given to Florette when she moved to Givenchy, was handed on instead to the lesser talent of Odette—why, Odette never knew. It may be because she went to the private office of Givenchy after the directrice claimed, as she had with Florette, that her Balenciaga clients had been longtime Givenchy clients. “There’s no point in my staying on here since all my clients already have vendeuses,” Odette told him. She was given Mona and ended up staying at Givenchy for seventeen years, while Florette suffered through three years of humiliation and went home every night and cried.
The Givenchy years were her low point, but Florette, being Florette, picked herself up and soon, with André Courrèges, had a job where she had the best time in her life. She had known Courrèges at Balenciaga, where she admired his tailoring skill (she says he created several of Balenciaga’s successful models, including the famous windowpane-check coat), and Courrèges had wanted her from the start. “I said, Your style isn’t right for my clients. He said, I’ll make clothes for your clients.”
He started a couture line especially for her, modifying his space-age look for older, richer women. Florette was put in charge, having reassured the always prickly Coqueline Courrèges, whom she had known as a Balenciaga seamstress, that she would always address her as Madame when clients were around.
“It was nothing like Balenciaga,” Florette said; “at Courrèges one could amuse oneself.” But you amused yourself at Balenciaga, I remarked. “Yes, because it’s my nature, but it wasn’t very droll.”
Florette cut off her brown chignon, becoming a windswept blonde, and wore Courrèges’s gleaming dental-hygienist white instead of Balenciaga’s black. For her clients, Courrèges began making a luxury line, including what she described as very good evening dresses with long sleeves. “I would tell Monsieur Courrèges what was needed and he always understood because we had worked together at Balenciaga.” It was like a passport to youth: “Clients couldn’t dress there completely, but still there was plenty for them.” Among the new clients was the Baroness Guy de Rothschild; the Baroness Alain, on the other hand, never came, preferring Saint Laurent.
Being the directrice involved a good deal of PR work: prospecting for new clients at the court of the Shah of Iran and going to New York in, for example, a little black (“I didn’t want to shock them in white”) Courrèges dress and jacket that she would wear at lunch with clients at La Grenouille and wear again without the jacket when invited to their homes for dinner: “They were amazed that one could wear the same outfit night and day.”
It may not have had the splendor of Balenciaga, but it was livelier, and it lasted until 1982. By then Florette was seventy-one years old, ready to be just Mme Chelot and to relieve Payot of the title M. Florette. In those days, the job of vendeuse was the only one in which women with no skills or diplomas could win excellent wages—by the time Balenciaga closed, Florette was earning more than a full professor at Harvard—but few vendeuses had a family life. That Florette had both was, she knew, thanks in part to Payot’s familiarity with her working world and to his patience.
“At collection time she would come home in a state of nerves, trembling, lashing out, and she could be nasty,” says Anita Delion, Florette’s niece. “No one ever saw it. Payot calmed her down. He could be a little vieille France—he would argue about whether they really needed a washing machine, for example—but he was marvelous.”
I saw Payot a few times and liked him a lot—a tall, slim, friendly man who spoke very precise English and had a very un-French taste for peanut butter. Since leaving work he had been writing mildly erotic novels. I counted fifteen leather-bound volumes, self-published, in the living room. Payot decided that as retirees they should sell the Normandy dream house, keep the Île St. Louis apartment, and rather conventionally buy a flat in Cannes, where Florette used Cécile de Rothschild’s fine English gardening tools on her small new terrace. During the time that remained, Florette didn’t see her Balenciaga friends or clients. “My husband said that’s all over now. And he was right. No, he wasn’t right, but he had put up with enough, no?” Payot died in Cannes from a heart attack in 1985 and Florette briefly lost her mind.
“I remember none of this but it seems I got through the funeral receiving everyone very charmingly, Monsieur Courrèges said, as if I were giving a cocktail party. Then at the church I lost it and kept saying, Where is Payot, tell him to hurry back, why is he so late? When I got home I sat there in my Balenciaga black dress and hat, took off my hat, and waited for him. I kept saying, Where is Payot, and not being able to find him.” After a while, her nieces and nephews thought she should be sent away for psychiatric care, but her doctor said not to worry, she would pull out of it. And after two years, she did.
Florette was always a glass-is-half-full person, while Balenciaga was definitely a half-empty (or, more likely, was most concerned with the shape of the glass). She had almost twenty years left after Payot’s death, and except for the last four months, she lived them very well. She took up with old Balenciaga friends again, including the mannequin Nicole Parent, who drove her home after lunch in her Morgan 4/4, and Jean-Claude Janet, widower of Balenciaga’s window dresser; she made new ones such as the designer Azzedine Alaïa. And she installed a walk-in bathtub “for when I get old” (she was nearly ninety at the time). A month before falling ill, she called me from Cannes to say she had been swimming and was watching a horse show from her terrace. “The older I get, the more I want to live. It’s odd, isn’t it? It isn’t that I’m afraid to die—I am not—it’s just that I find life so wonderful that it’s hard to leave.”
Florette at 90
All her life she retained that most attractive quality, a sense of wonder. Not because she was naïve—she certainly was not—but because the wonderful had happened to her. And so she never lost her curiosity. “I talk to everyone,” she said. “I think people are surprised that at my age I am so interested.” I watched strangers’ reactions to this lively small woman (she said she had lost four inches in height over the years) as she chatted to them in restaurants or taxis, and they were always charmed. This in sullen Paris! Even in her apartment building on the Île St. Louis, where the concierge was banned from doing tenants’ housework, one of them, Mme Georges Pompidou, insisted that an exception be made: “If it’s for Florette, it’s all right.”
She wore glasses only for reading, her hearing and brain were in perfect order, her movements deft as she cut frozen pizza with pinking shears during our taping sessions in her Pari
s flat. She was very popular in Cannes, where she spent the summers and went winter swimming in the bleakest months, and she was bored stiff among the other old folk. “I bring them something from the outside world. When I arrive they look so sad that I start waking them up and they say, Why don’t you come more often? That would amuse me not at all, they’re all half asleep.” She played gin rummy twice a week and, although often asked, refused to take any of the ladies shopping.
In Paris, her hair now short and white, she was chic in a Balenciaga-like blouson cut from her long mink coat, and a Courrèges pullover. She paid for a long ninetieth-birthday cruise by selling her Balenciaga vendeuse outfits to Alaïa, who also collected Vionnets; the few Balanciagas that she had for her own use she would never sell. She admired Alaïa (“I have watched him work, it was perfect, I think I would have liked to work with him”), as she had Saint Laurent (“a real creator”). She also liked Gaultier and surprised me by calling Lagerfeld “insignificant,” which I finally realized meant he hasn’t left a personal stamp on the couture: “He knows how to do everything. He knows how to take ideas and adapt them, which is already a great talent, don’t you think?” she said. When I interrupted one of her Givenchy rants to say he had talent, she replied, “Talent, no. Taste, yes.”