Couture Culture: The Master of Us All, A New Biography of Balenciaga

“Mystique” is something of a fashion cliché, but if any designer can claim honest ownership of the term, it’s Cristóbal Balenciaga. Bunny Mellon said his clothes gave her courage. The Baroness Alain de Rothschild wore a black Balenciaga coat to have her portrait painted by Balthus. We have Balenciaga to thank for many things: the sack dress, the bracelet sleeve, the pillbox hat—but most of all, it’s his enigmatic sensibility, one that a half-century of fashion writers struggled to put into words, that he’s remembered for. As Vogue wrote in April 1962, “Whatever it takes to hold vast numbers of women in the palm of your hand year after year, Balenciaga has it. . . .Not that his clothes are easy to wear; on the contrary, they could hardly be more demanding—of elegance, wit, of real clothes authority.”

Now, 40 years after Balenciaga’s death, many associate his name first with the critically acclaimed, commercially successful line of ready-to-wear designed by Nicholas Ghesquière, and now, since his departure, by Alexander Wang. In a faster, breezier, more body-conscious age, what are we to make of the high priest of twentieth-century haute couture? Part of the problem, argues the Paris-based journalist Mary Blume in her captivating new biography, The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, His World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is that the man himself has remained so inscrutable. Blume’s colorful and personable account, which draws largely from the memories of Balenciaga’s first and most loyal vendeuse, Florette Chelot, begins with the disclaimer that the only thing certain about the famously reclusive designer is that loved to ski and had sinus trouble.

Thanks in part to Florette, we know a bit more. Born in a Basque fishing village, Balenciaga assisted his mother, a widowed seamstress. By 21, he had made a dress for the queen of Spain. Twenty years later, in 1936, he left for Paris, opening La Maison Balenciaga on the Avenue George V with a business partner and his longtime companion, the French-Polish aristocrat Wladzio Jaworowski d’Attainville. Monsieur Balenciaga was humble but driven, a technically brilliant perfectionist obsessed with sleeves—cries of “la manga!” and ripping seams could be heard before the collections. He had odd taste in models, who tended toward the lantern-jawed and moonfaced. He was painfully shy, often watching Florette at work with the clients, most of whom never met the master, through a peephole. (The presentation, he believed, should appear as discreet and seamless as the clothes themselves.) Although he wasn’t above using his Spanish origins for a promotional showpiece or two—the Velásquez-inspired Infanta dress, the toreador jackets—he dissuaded customers from ordering them.

Blume first visited the flagship in the early sixties, and she recalls its “voluptuous austerity” and its platoon of chignoned saleswomen in black smocks. The wide-eyed author regretted her cotton shirtdress, and the sympathetic Florette came to her rescue, selling her a blue light wool tailleur from a previous season. The suit, Blume recalls, was the first of many Balenciagas Florette sent her way for a song, all of them lending her something far more valuable than the clothes themselves: a quality of “poise—a savant equilibrium.” Soon after, Blume landed a job at Paris office of the Herald Tribune, and was emboldened enough by her outfit to “take out a notepad and quiz Eleanor Roosevelt at the Hôtel de Crillon as if I were (almost) entitled to.”