Creators (31 page)

Balenciaga soon had to contend with a new war, in September 1939, and shut down his Paris house for a time. When France surrendered to the Nazis and Paris was occupied, the fashion industry was in a dilemma: to carry on or not? To risk being accused of collaborating, or to fire all their employees? In France the fashion industry was regarded as a vital exporter. In 1938–1939, one exported couture dress would pay for ten tons of imported coal, and a liter of exported perfume would pay for two tons of imported gasoline. The Germans were jealous of the
French fashion industry, and both Hitler and Goebbels believed that under the Nazis’ “new order” for Europe, Berlin would usurp the role of Paris as the world center of fashion (and of art generally). When the Nazis seized Paris, German agents ransacked the offices of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture and carried off all its archives to Berlin. The idea was to recruit all the top cutters, sewers, and designers as forced labor and set up dress houses in Berlin. Some people in the industry resisted: Michel de Brunhoff, head of the Paris
Vogue
, shut it down rather than work under Nazi supervision. Some collaborated. Chanel sucked up to the Nazis, lived openly with a young Nazi lover at the Ritz in Paris, and flourished mightily, accumulating vast sums in hard currency so that she was later able to flee to Switzerland when the Allies retook Paris, and gradually buy her way back to respectability by bribery.
⁵
Lucien Lelong, head of the Chambre Syndicale, steered a middle course. He negotiated with the Nazis; defeated the attempt to transfer Parisian fashion to Berlin; operated a two-city base, with Lyon, in unoccupied France, sharing the leadership with Paris; and by these means saved 97 percent of the industry and 112,000 jobs. The price was to hand over the industry’s Jews to the S.S., who deported them to death camps. That done, the industry flourished during the war. Balenciaga did well, thanks to his connections with Hitler’s ally Franco. Reopening his house in September 1940, he was one of sixty firms that the Germans allowed to function. He produced ingenious outfits suited to wartime conditions—smart cycling outfits, for instance, consisting of short skirts, worn over tight purple jersey bloomers, with blazers and thick red stockings. His three Spanish shops, all successful and with access to materials unobtainable in France, reinforced the Parisian business, so he was in a strong position when the war ended.

At that point, France was devastated, bitterly divided, and impoverished. All we have left, said André Malraux, “are our brains and our artistic skills”—that is, intellectuals and designers. On 29 October 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre, on behalf of the first group, gave a public lecture in the Salles des Centraux, 8 Rue Jean Goujon, which launched his new philosophy, existentialism. Almost instantly it became world famous. For a time, at least,
Paris became the center of the intellectual avant-garde. The fashion industry took advantage of this recovery in prestige to launch its own program on 10 December 1946 at the “Théâtre de la Mode.” It showed 237 figures designed by Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard, two clever, artistic jacks-of-all-trades closely connected to the dress industry. There was a spectacular display of evening gowns called “Les Robes Blanches,” in which established houses like Patou, Ricci, Desses, and Balenciaga joined with ambitious newcomers like Balmain.

All this was a preparation for the first proper postwar collection, in January 1947, when a sensation was caused by an unknown designer, Christian Dior. He produced long, full-skirted dresses, with emphatic hips, narrow waists, and rounded bosoms, using prodigious quantities of precious materials and thumbing his nose at wartime austerity. He himself called this style the “Corolla line,” but American fashion editors, coming to Paris in force for the first time since the 1930s, called it the “new look.” It electrified rich, fashion-conscious ladies of all nations, and infuriated the radicals as a symbol that the ruling class was back in the saddle. Nancy Mitford, who had recently published her bestseller
The Pursuit of Love
, wrote home from Paris: “Have you heard about the New Look? You pad your hips and squeeze your waist and skirts are to the ankle. It is bliss! People shout
ordures
at you from vans because for some reason it creates class feeling in a way no sables could.”
⁶

Who was Christian Dior? And what was his relationship with Balenciaga? He was a Norman from Granville, born on 21 January 1905 and thus ten years younger than the Basque. His mother, Marie-Madeleine Juliette, had upper-class pretensions and wanted to move in “good society.” Young Dior, plump, pink-cheeked, with a receding chin and popping eyes, had his mother’s physique and her longing to move up the social ladder, though his inclinations were toward smart bohemia rather than
le gratin
. His father was a successful businessman who ran a fertilizer factory specializing in liquid manure. This, oddly enough, was also the trade of the father of Kenneth Widmerpool, the fictional antihero of Anthony Powell’s roman-fleuve,
A Dance to the Music of Time
, which began to appear in 1951. I asked Powell, who
was almost exactly the same age as Dior, by then world famous, if that is where he got the idea, but he denied it vehemently. The profits of liquid manure allowed Dior
père
to maintain a house in Paris, as well as in Normandy, and young Dior took full advantage of it. He could draw; he loved dressing up, with the help of his adoring mother; and he enjoyed designing fancy frocks for his sisters. He flatly refused to go into his father’s business. But his father vetoed the École des Beaux Arts, forcing young Dior to study for a career in diplomacy. In Paris he quickly became a member of the elite artistic set, which included Picasso, Poulenc, Breton, Cocteau, Dérain, Radiguet, Bérard, Aragon, Milhaud, Léger, and the painter Marie Laurencin. The group buzzed around a nightspot called Le Boeuf sur le Toit. Dior never became a diplomat, though he dressed
à l’Anglais
with a bowler hat, tightly furled umbrella, and spats. He designed clothes for his female friends; attended masked balls; was at the opening of the Exposition des Arts-Décoratifs of September 1925, which finally buried art nouveau and launched art deco; and attended Shrovetide parties for homosexuals at the Magic City Music Hall. In 1927 he was conscripted into the Fifth Engineer Corps, where he had to carry railway girders. He met the designer Paul Poiret, who declined to take him on. Instead he became a partner in an art business, the Galérie Jacques Bonjeau, his father putting up the money. The name was his partner’s, for Dior’s mother would not allow his own to be used: that was “trade.” The years 1928–1929, culmination of the boom of the 1920s, were good years for selling contemporary art, and as an art dealer Dior traded in the works of his friends “Bébé” Bérard, Raoul Dufy, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, and Alberto Giacometti. Then troubles came, and Dior later told me: “I never really got over them.” His brother was locked up in an insane asylum. His mother died. In 1931, in the Depression, his father went bankrupt. Virtually all the galleries, including Dior’s, failed.
⁷

Without this financial disaster, Dior would probably have spent his life as a middle-ranking art dealer, and died unknown. As it was, penniless, he kept up a brave front with an apartment at 10 Rue Royale, and hawked his designs as a freelancer to big-name houses like Nina Ricci, Schiaparelli, Molyneux, and Patou.
Dior was lanky for a Frenchman in the 1930s (5 feet 10 inches). He wore shiny, well-pressed suits and frayed spats. He had success with a design called Café Anglais, a houndstooth dress with petticoat edging, and he was offered a full-time though humble job with Robert Pignet in 1938; but he preferred to design the costumes for a production of
The School for Scandal
in 1939. He effected introductions to important figures at the Parisian end of the American fashion trade, like Marie-Louise Bousquet and Carmel Snow. In September 1939 he was conscripted for “farming duty”; a dim photo shows him wearing clogs and performing some rural job. Demobilized, and in the unoccupied zone, he worked in Cannes, where a rudimentary fashion trade had sprung up, again selling designs. Peace found him back in Paris, hovering on the fringes of the fashion industry.

Then came a unique stroke of fortune that transformed his life. In this book I do not, perhaps, pay enough attention to the role of luck in the creative process, especially to the way it sometimes allows a frustrated would-be creator to fulfill his destiny. Dior certainly believed in luck. He kept lucky charms in his pockets and fingered them constantly. He often visited fortune-tellers. To the end of his life, he regularly consulted an astrologer, Madame Delahaye, who cast his horoscope. A “wise woman” (as he said) had told him during the war, “Women will be very lucky for you. You will earn much money from them and travel widely.” As of July 1946, however, Dior was a nobody in his forties, with nothing in his design career to suggest genius. Then, that month, he met Marcel Boussac, a textile magnate who was called “King Cotton.” Boussac wanted to own a big Paris fashion house to give prestige to his booming but humdrum business; and he had a crumbling house called Philippe et Gaston. Someone told him that Dior might be able to produce ideas—hence their meeting. Dior told him: “I am not interested in managing a clothing factory. What you need, and I would like to run, is a craftsman’s workshop, in which we would recruit the very best people in the trade, to reestablish in Paris a salon for the greatest luxury and the highest standards of workmanship. It will cost a great deal of money and entail much risk.” This was, looking back on it, an amazing speech to make to a hard-nosed businessman, for Dior
was extraordinarily shy, and his plump pink cheeks gave him a babyish look that put many people off, as did his protruding Bing Crosby ears. But Boussac liked the idea and offered to set Dior up immediately with an investment of 10 million francs (this was later increased to 100 million). At the last minute Dior, frightened, almost turned down the offer, but he was persuaded into it by his fortune-teller.

Dior doubled the risk of opening a new house with his revolutionary “new look” (12 February 1947), a deliberate and defiant return to the most extravagant use of material since the grand old days of Worth before World War I. He spat in the face of postwar egalitarian democracy and said, in so many words, “I want to make the rich feel rich again.” His first collection, which purposefully sought to put the clock back and defy the conventional wisdom of the time—that luxury and privilege had gone for good—turned out to be, to the delight of Boussac, the most successful in fashion history. People who looked carefully at Dior garments were amazed that such brilliant craftsmanship and superlative materials were still to be had: Dior’s new shapes and gambits were merely, as it were, the artistic icing on a cake made with solid skill, with no expense spared and endless trouble taken. Dior recruited and continued to employ in his atelier the best people to be found in France, men and women who would die rather than turn out an article which was, in the tiniest degree, below the best in the world. The sewing was perfect, the cutting impeccable, the fitting infinitely patient and exact. The success of the house was immediate and prolonged, and the volume of business continued to grow steadily in the ten years up to Dior’s death in 1957, by which time the house employed 1,000 of the finest experts ever gathered together under one roof. During this decade Dior sold over 100,000 dresses made from 16,000 design sketches and using 1,000 miles of fabric.
⁸

How did Dior’s sudden, enormous, continuing success strike Balenciaga? We do not know. As Dior realized, and often remarked, there is a great deal of unpredictable chance in fashion. He thought himself spectacularly fortunate with his success in 1947. It has to be understood that couturiers never present just one line. They produce a variety of styles in each collection, and though for publicity purposes they stress a particular favorite, they know that in
the end the magazine writers, the big buyers, and, above all, the individual customers will decide which is dominant. That certainly happened in February 1947. Just as, the year before, the media and elite intellectual society had saddled Sartre with “existentialism,” a word he himself had never hitherto used—and always disliked, or so he told me. So it was with Dior’s first collection—the “Corolla line” was singled out from a number of lines he presented and rebaptized by journalists (chiefly Carmel Snow) the “new look.” As it happened, long, full skirts with padded hips—the essence of the new look—had been made by Molyneux just before the war, and by Balenciaga himself just after it. As Dior acknowledged, what told was the fact that his house was new and was funded by Boussac (who was seen as a significant and rather alarming figure at the time). But another factor, undoubtedly to his credit, was the unabashed joy with which he presented this return to luxury, the panache of his
épater les travailleurs
, and the fun of his well-rehearsed presentation. Once he could get away from his own shyness, Dior could be a mesmerizing symbol of good times ahead. That is what everyone, not least rich women, needed after seven years of austerity and horror.

Balenciaga, so far as I know, never said a word about the “new look,” or Dior’s triumph. He never commented on other designers. He certainly approved of the high standards of workmanship which Dior insisted on, and which matched his own. That, in Balenciaga’s view, was what haute couture was all about. He did say, once, that he envied Dior’s skill as an artist. Dior was stunningly quick with pen and brush—“I often do several hundred drawings in two or three days,” he said—and some of the results were striking. By contrast, Balenciaga had to rely on the draftsmanship of his assistant Fernando Martinez. But draftsmanship must have been the only skill of Dior’s that he wished he possessed. In every other way he was immeasurably superior. On the question of quality, indeed, Balenciaga sometimes felt that Dior was unrealistic, going too far, precisely because he could not (like Balenciaga) sew, cut, and make a dress himself and was not fully aware of the sheer effort involved in superlative sewing. A curious episode, related to me at the time, illustrates this. Balenciaga hardly ever dined out, except with one or two old friends. One
evening he was the guest of Madame Hérnon and her husband. She was one of his customers, though she also patronized Dior, and on this occasion she wore a Dior dress that buttoned down the back—or should have. Her maid was on vacation; she herself could not button the dress alone; and her husband, summoned to help, flatly refused: “I won’t get involved in that absurd garment—get your friend Monsieur Cristóbal to do it when he comes.” So that is what happened. The dress had no fewer than thirty-six tiny buttons at the back, each covered with brilliant Lyon silk. Balenciaga, with his wonderful fingers, succeeded in doing it up, but with some difficulty. Somewhat exasperated, he said, “Twenty-four buttons would have been quite enough to preserve the fit of the dress perfectly. But thirty-six! He is a madman!
C’est de la folie furieuse
!” There followed other remarks in demotic Basque, the purport of which Madame Hérnon could only surmise.