The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, His World PDF
Preview The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, His World
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. 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
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