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01B Eiber
01B Eiber
Julie Eilber
Independent Researcher/Journalist. Her practice-based research
includes pattern-making and reconstruction of twentieth century
designer garments. Ms. Eilber is currently writing a biography
of American designer Claire McCardell. In 2017 she presented a
workshop on the history and practice of mending at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. → julieeilber@aol.com
abstract
keywords
Bettina Ballard
Carmel Snow
Diana Vreeland
Cristóbal Balenciaga
Haute Couture
Biographical Aspects—Balenciaga and the American Fashion Editors… 53
INTRODUCTION
One February night fourteen years after we had first met, I found
myself in a wagon-lit that lay like a sleeping dog in the foggy Gare
de Lyon…As the whistle blew, a figure stepped into the train calling
a last stream of instructions in Spanish to someone on the platform.
The figure was Cristóbal Balenciaga […] (Ballard 1960: 104).
BETTINA BALLARD
Her 1951 trip with him, to his house in San Sebastian, Spain, was
a spur of the moment idea on his part, in response to the “deep
letdown” he experienced after showing a collection. At one point,
she had found him alone in his studio after a show, ripping apart a
garment, even though the collection had been a great success. As she
recalled, “the press had stomped on the floor and yelled ‘bravo.’” But
his retort was to tell her: “It’s not right—it’s never right the first time”
(Ballard 1960: 105).
When she and Balenciaga arrived at the Spanish border from Paris
that February afternoon, he took the wheel of an old Citroën, which
he drove “like an expert racing driver.” Arriving at his house, she
described an enveloping environment, with:
[…] warm fires casting their flames on the highly polished floors and
furniture … we set the massive, highly-waxed table with beautiful
Spanish silver, we ate strong Spanish food, drank strong Spanish red
wine, and talked until we unwound our Paris tenseness and went off
to our rooms to sleep (Ballard 1960: 106).
During that same visit, Balenciaga whisked her away in the Citroën to
visit his home in Madrid—a flat over his couture house named “Eisa.”
She describes it as “austere” yet notes, with humor, that because her
friend was an avid antique collector,
[…] the long hall from the salon to the bedrooms was piled high with
Spanish tables and commodes, like a well-polished antique shop. My
small room had three commodes piled one on top of the other. “I keep
buying things and forget to send them to the house in San Sebastian,”
Cristóbal apologized (Ballard 1960: 109).
She describes the fittings that took place in the apartment, for clothes
that she had ordered for herself in the atelier downstairs, as a tug of
war between Balenciaga and his tailor:
[…] the tailor, Juan, who was just recovering from a heart attack,
would come up, bringing my suits. No sooner would he get to work
meticulously with pins than Balenciaga would come in, half-shaved,
razor in hand, and start tearing the suits apart. Poor Juan would
clutch his heart and watch all the stitches of the day before being
ripped out (Ballard 1960: 109).
In the end, the tailor gave Ballard her finished suit a half hour before
she was leaving, and she threw her coat over it so Balenciaga couldn’t
take it apart again.
Over the course of their friendship she witnessed the growth and
trajectory of his career, and by 1960, she observed that he was a man
with too much time on his hands. His couture houses at that point
were well-oiled machines that needed little more than four months a
year of his attention. Yet his restlessness and hypersensitivity caused
him bounce from one residence to another, spending time in “his
Biographical Aspects—Balenciaga and the American Fashion Editors… 56
CARMEL SNOW
By the early 50s, her mania for him began to cross the line, and, for
an editor with so much power in fashion, it bordered on unethical.
She pushed him into a visit to the U.S. to promote his fashions, but he
was so uncomfortable in the spotlight that Ballard described it as “a
sad failure” (Ballard 1960: 112). Undeterred, Snow convinced him to
hire an unsuitable executive to promote his perfumes in the western
hemisphere. Givenchy later described the move as “almost destroying
his line” (Rowlands 2005: 441).
Yet acting in her role of editor, she performed a true favor for
him, when a radical new silhouette he had conceived landed like an
unexploded bomb in the early 50s (Figure 4). As she recalled,
quality of the exhibit, and she wrote to Mona Bismarck, “the show is a
total success” (Dwight 2002: 207).
Even though she’d stepped on a few toes in the staid museum
world—and would continue to do so—she knew she’d found her
footing in a new career, and she remained at the Met until her
retirement. As for Balenciaga, it was Vreeland’s editorial eye and
curatorial power that ensured his legacy in the U.S. No longer would
he be considered a couturier whose time had passed, and, thanks to
her, his once-radical designs were transformed into enduring sartorial
art. As Vreeland noted on opening night, “people would tell me
fashion started in the streets, and I would say I always saw it first at
Balenciaga” (Morris 1973).
CONCLUSION
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Cristóbal Balenciaga in his maison in the Avenue George v in Paris
© Biblioteca Nacional de España / Juan Gyenes