The Great Fashion Designers (16 page)

Balenciaga was a devout man, and the church and its grandly modelled spaces, its monumental images, its sculpted draperies, and its lavishly painted, richly caparisoned saints would have lodged themselves securely in his receptive visual imagination—a semiotic language to be used in his search for an imposing beauty infused with dignity and meaning.

His colour sense, however, was simultaneously subtle (his range of greys, browns and blacks was a focus of press wonder) and bold, in their depth and richness often reminiscent of late Renaissance or baroque religious paintings. He would hazard unusual colour combinations that worked in a most spectacular way: ginger and bottle green, greige and granite, black and brown, honey beige on black.

Balenciaga moved to Paris in 1937 establishing a couture business on avenue George-V with two partners, one with Basque connections. Some commentators have suggested that he was escaping the dangers and uncertainties of the Spanish Civil War (both Madrid and Barcelona were under siege from 1935, and San Sebastian fell to Franco's forces in 1936), but it is likely that Balenciaga intuited the economic stagnation and isolation—and consequent poverty—that would follow a Franco victory. He tried London first but could not get a work permit and took the advice of Madge Garland, the fashion journalist and later educator, that he would be better received in Paris.

He was by no means in exile—he was able to run his business in Spain from 1940 on—but, as he told Prudence Glynn of the
Times
in an interview conducted in 1971 after his retirement, ‘Paris used to have a special ambience for fashion because it contained hundreds of dedicated craftsmen making buttons and flowers and feathers and all the trimmings of luxe which could be found nowhere else.'

He stayed open through the war, supporting Lucien Lelong, head of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, when the Nazis attempted to move the French couture industry to Berlin or Vienna, standing up to ‘six enormous Germans' with the suggestion that ‘[Hitler] might just as well take all the bulls to Berlin and try to train bullfighters there.'

Although his circle of friends included the artists Braque, Chagall, Picasso, Miro and Palazuelo, he did not collect their work. Bettina Ballard, editor of
Vogue
, described his preferred decor as ‘simple, almost austere', the atmosphere of the couture house as ‘convent-like'. Photographs of his Spanish country home in Igueldo, however, show the dark carvings of traditional Spanish furnishings and religious antiquities.

After the war the French government concentrated on reviving the couture, levying a tax on all exports so that the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne and its members could afford to mount the shows that would bring back the customers from around the world. Its reasons were only partially economic; Paris was couture and couture was Paris. The restoration of couture was essential for the restoration of a humiliated nation's self-respect. In the absence of Chanel, whose wartime collaboration with the enemy meant a necessary self-banishment to Switzerland, it soon became clear that two giants were to bestride fashion's next decade, Christian Dior and Cristobal Balenciaga. They were very different giants.

As Claire Wilcox wrote in 2007, ‘Dior, an intuitive man, developed an extraordinary sensitivity to the climate of the day. Although shy and nervous of his own innovations, he moved quickly … The fanfare with which his first collection was met on February 12, 1947, set the designer on an upward spiralling path upon which innovation was vital in order to maintain media interest.' Part of that innovation was commercial—the necessity of ready-to-wear collections and licences. ‘Balenciaga, in contrast,' wrote Wilcox, ‘was resistant to the idea
of producing luxury ready-to-wear on the grounds that only haute couture, to which he was totally dedicated, could meet his own exacting standards. He was a traditional man who built his work gradually, developing his ideas over two or three years.'

Gustav Zumsteg, the Swiss textile manufacturer, relates in the catalogue to the 1985
Hommage à Balenciaga
exhibition in Lyon, that Balenciaga often repeated to him that a good couturier had to be an architect, a sculptor, a painter, a musician and a philosopher, all in one person. Otherwise he would be unable to deal with the different problems of planning, form, colour, harmony and proportion. In fact, Balenciaga, in his white coat and in the hushed, monastic atmosphere he preferred, must have been the ultimate nightmarish controlling boss. He involved himself in every stage of the process from first sketch and choosing, cutting and pinning the fabric through fitting, sewing, re-fitting, unpicking, remaking to meet his exacting standards of perfection, choosing accessories and supervising every last detail down to choosing and drilling the mannequins for the fashion show. Prue Glynn's interview reveals that his staff referred to him as ‘the Master'.

His method, a subtle progression over his three decades of dominating couture, was a gradual refinement, paring away extraneous detail to achieve the impact of a pure line and a breathtakingly simple sculptural shape that cocooned the body as lightly as a whisper—however structured they might look. ‘Balenciaga's clothes are the most extraordinary things,' reflected Hubert de Givenchy in 2006. ‘He designed clothes that moved around a woman's body, caressing it … A dress of Balenciaga moves like the wind.'

Although his daywear always aimed for ease, his evening wear was the most glamorous, the most lavish and the most imposingly Spanish in Paris, often relying on some serious under-structure for its grand-entrance effect. But the battle for the headlines was then, as it is now, won in the trenches of chic daywear. Balenciaga did not name his collections for a new look as Dior did, but the fashion press identified new shapes and proportions as they evolved. In 1947, when the New Look was claiming column inches, Balenciaga's sac or barrel-line jacket, slightly bloused to the hip, was preferred by many fashion editors to Dior's fitted jacket with its corseted nipped-in waist. Balenciaga gradually developed the cocoon jacket (1947), the box jacket (1949), the middy line (1951), the tunic line (1955), the sack or chemise (1957) and the empire line (1958).

However 1947 was difficult for him. His nephew, Agustin Medina Balenciaga, described Balenciaga's reaction when many of his clients deserted him for Dior.

At the beginning of his career and during the war, he was not only designing but interacting with everyone socially as much as possible. He had a strict sense of what was right or wrong and felt betrayed if someone left him for another designer. He was dismayed when many longtime clients rushed to the house of Dior after the success of the New Look in 1947. From then on he became more selective as to whom he would trust. Ultimately he would concentrate on his work and not care about the opinions of a larger social group. However if one was fortunate enough to be included in the circle around him, one enjoyed a real intimacy with him, and his friends took pleasure in his sly sense of humour and irony.

And there are elements of his work that are undeniably playful. His architect's fondness for geometric forms, for apparently hard-edged curves and spheres, was reminiscent of an Eastern approach to dress where clothing does not cling to the body but rather cocoons it, frames it, floats around it. This was to inspire Cardin and Courrèges. In 1958, Balenciaga received the Légion d'Honneur, France's highest award, for his services to the fashion industry. In 1968, ready for a relaxed retirement, he closed his couture house, allegedly reflecting, ‘It's a dog's life.' He died in Spain in 1972.

In a memoir for the Balenciaga retrospective exhibition in Texas in 2006, Hubert de Givenchy wrote: ‘He would say, “Hubert, you must be honest with your customer. Do not try to do something that is only amusing. Be serious in your work. Be conscientious. If you use flowers, then place the flowers in an intellectual manner. Do not place flowers just to
add to the drape or cut, if it does not make sense.” A funny saying he had was, “Don't try to make
mouton
[sheep] with five legs! That is what another designer would do, just to surprise the press or the customer; not you. It is more important to be conscientious and always aware.” ‘

Further reading:
Lesley Ellis Miller's
Balenciaga
(2007) and
Balenciaga Paris
, edited by Pamela Golbin (2006), are the two most comprehensive and analytical books on the designer. Cecil Beaton, in
The Glass of Fashion
(1989), is an amusing read.

Christian Dior's Bar suit, the one with the white jacket nipped at the waist with a stiff peplum standing proud of the full, long black skirt with the archaically padded hips and worn with a white straw hat, is without doubt the most memorable image from all of twentieth-century fashion. Long after Dior's death, his was the name universally used as a short form for hugely desirable, hugely elitist couture fashion. Cecil Beaton named him ‘King Pins and Needles' and ‘the last of the great couturiers' and quoted him thus, ‘Nothing is ever invented. You always start from something. It is certainly Molyneux's style that has most influenced me.'

Edward Molyneux (1894–1974) was a superb tailor whose refined style made him very successful between the wars. A cultivated man, he also designed for film, and it is generally acknowledged that his wonderfully romantic designs for 1933's
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
(the love story of the Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning), inspired by Winterhalter's sensuous contemporary portraits, remained in Dior's wistful imagination, a nostalgic dream awaiting its moment of realisation.

That moment came in 1947 in the dreary aftermath of the Second World War as Europe struggled to rebuild a civilisation that had been devastated economically, socially and morally. The New Look's extraordinary power was not derived from anything as simple as the fact that women were sick of short skirts made from rationed fabric and the square shoulders that went with wearing uniforms and endlessly recycling threadbare pre-war clothes. That was part of it. Nor was it just because the financial backer of Dior's house was Marcel Boussac, a fabric manufacturer who needed his factories back on fulltime production. Nor even that France needed those factories producing, the workers working, the fashion industry back on its feet and exports beginning to grow again. All that mattered. Indeed, the French government was taxing all exports to subsidise the couture industry in its efforts to re-establish itself. But what was much more important was that everyone was so tired. Traumatised by six years of a terrible war, men and women alike succumbed to a general atavistic yearning to return to a safer time of economic security, social order and moral certainties.

Men were returning from the battlefields and reentering civilian life only to find women doing their jobs and reluctant to relinquish them. Women had tasted independence, economic power, a degree of sexual freedom and the liberating camaraderie of the workplace, and they liked these things. Restoring the natural order required women out of the workplace and back in the kitchen, the bedroom and, as soon as ever possible, the nursery. Populations were drastically depleted, and the morale of nations depended on an investment in the future—in short, babies.

The exaggerated, Victorian-inspired New Look of 1947, with its crinoline skirts, corseted waists and softly sloped shoulders, was essentially the hourglass configuration of the fertility goddess who recurs throughout history. It was almost a caricature of femininity, but it was exactly what the moment required and Dior was the man who instinctively realised this. So can we blame the birth-rate bulge that produced the baby-boomer generation on Christian Dior? He certainly dressed the women who had the babies and, for a decade after, until his early death in 1957, continued to do so.

He wrote in his 1956 memoir,
Christian Dior et Moi
,

In December 1946 … women still looked and dressed like Amazons. But I designed clothes for flower-like women, clothes with rounded shoulders, full feminine busts and willowy waists above enormous spreading skirts. Such a fragile air can be achieved only by solid construction. In order to satisfy my love of architecture and clear-cut design, I had to employ a technique quite different from the methods then in use. I wanted my dresses to be constructed like buildings, moulded to the curves of the female form, stylising its shape. I emphasised the width of the hips, and gave the bust its true prominence; and in order to give my models more ‘presence', I revived the old tradition of cambric or taffeta linings.

He also used horsehair padding in his interlinings and directed his less curvaceous models to invest in a pair of ‘falsies'.

Christian Dior was born in Granville, a fishing port and shipbuilding town on the Normandy coast that had turned itself into a smart resort. His father was wealthy, the owner of a flourishing business manufacturing agricultural fertilisers, which he and his partner expanded into other products, such as detergents. His mother was a talented gardener and that passion was to form an exceptional bond between her and her second son. When Christian was six his family moved to Paris, keeping the villa in Granville as a holiday home. It was here at carnival time that Christian learned to sew, helping the maids make up the costumes he designed for himself and his friends. His maternal grandmother, erudite, opinionated and fond of soothsayers and fortune-tellers, was also a strong influence on the boy.