The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, His World

175 Pages·2013·4.59 MB·English

by  Mary Blume

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For Thea and Al
Style? A certain lightness. A sense of shame excluding certain actions or
reactions. A certain proposition of elegance. The supposition that, despite
everything, a melody can be looked for and sometimes found. Style is tenuous,
however. It comes from within. You can’t go out and acquire it. Style and
fashion may share a dream, but they are created differently. Style is about an
invisible promise …
—John Berger,
Here Is Where We Meet I wonder what happens to all the people who make the
buttons.
—Andy Warhol
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Photographs
Notes
Acknowledgments
Permissions Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Also by Mary Blume
A Note About the Author
Copyright

PROLOGUE
Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895–1972) was considered the greatest couturier of his
time: in the words of Christian Dior, “the master of us all.” But the man himself
remains mysterious, though private is perhaps the word he would have preferred.
“Do not waste yourself in society,” he told his friend the fabric designer Gustav
Zumsteg, and followed his own advice. Two of the things about him that one can
state with absolute certainty are that he had sinus trouble and that he loved to ski.
Some said he was tall, others short; he was either portly or gaunt, charming
or aloof. Although he sat for Cartier-Bresson and Man Ray he fled
photographers, and some journalists claimed that he paid the newspaper vendor
across from his apartment to wave a feather duster if any were lurking in the
street below. He never took a bow at the end of a collection, and so few people
had even seen him. He was, says Women’s Wear Daily’s retired publisher John B.
Fairchild, a strange duck.
It got to the point where some fashion writers wondered if he was a real
person, while others thought that, like Shakespeare, he was several. In fifty years
as a designer he never gave an interview. There must have been some
explanation for the incalculable beauty of his clothes, but of course none could
be found. And none would have been sought had he remained in his native
Spain, esteemed but forgotten by now. Instead, he came to Paris, and Paris had,
for nearly three hundred years, been the fashion capital of the world.
I daresay Italy was as qualified in terms of invention and taste, but it was not
unified under a single leader. France’s ascendancy began when Louis XIV’s
finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, informed the king that the silk weavers
of Lyons were as valuable to the French economy as the gold mines of Peru were
to Spain. Inventing endless and costly rules for court dress, the king easily made
fashion a national preoccupation. By the mid-nineteenth century, because the silk
makers had threatened to strike, Napoléon III insisted that the Empress Eugénie
wear Charles Frederick Worth’s enormously wide silk skirts. The empress
referred to them as her toilettes politiques.
Having shown that it had a use, fashion came to have a meaning. It spoke
volumes to Balzac and Baudelaire and Proust. The symbolist poet Stéphane
Mallarmé founded a fashion magazine and provided all its contents under such