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Bettina Ballard, Carmel Snow, and Diana Vreeland

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Bettina Ballard, Carmel Snow, and Diana Vreeland 51 Balenciaga and the American Fashion Editors Who Shared His PrivateWorld: Bettina Ballard, Carmel Snow, and Diana Vreeland 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. → [email protected] To ciTe This arTicle Eilber, Julie. 2021. “Balenciaga and the American fashion editors ↓ who shared his private world: Bettina Ballard, Carmel Snow, and download Diana Vreeland.” Balda, Ana (ed.) I International Cristóbal Balenciaga This arTicle Conference Proceedings. Getaria: Cristóbal Balenciaga Foundation, 51-63. Biographical Aspects—Balenciaga and the American Fashion Editors… 52 absTracT Cristóbal Balenciaga, the notoriously private designer who shunned press coverage, nevertheless developed deep, intimate friendships with two highly influential American fashion editors: Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar and Bettina Ballard of American Vogue. Their attachment to him, in tandem with his genius as a designer, ensured that his designs were promoted in the crucial post-WWII American fashion market. Though a third editor, Diana Vreeland, did not have as close a personal connection with the designer, the posthumous Balenciaga exhibit she mounted (at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) rescued her career, put her on the map as a curator, and ensured Balenciaga’s legacy in the U.S., both as a designer and an artist. This article shares glimpses of the private world of Balenciaga through the eyes of these three editors, and illuminates how his personal charm ensured his lasting legacy in the U.S. It seeks to answer the question: beyond being a master of haute couture, was Balenciaga also a master of stealth public relations, by entrancing these three women? 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). With these words, Bettina Ballard, Paris editor of American Vogue, cracked opened the door to the private, cloistered world of designer Cristóbal Balenciaga. By then, in 1951, he was considered one of the greats—if not the greatest—practitioner of modernist draping, tailoring and haute couture (Miller 2007: 51; Golbin 2006: 72). Christian Dior famously gave him the moniker “the master of us all” (Horyn 2006), and his friend Coco Chanel paid him the compliment of being the lone couturier skilled at both design and craft. “Only he is capable of cutting material, assembling a creation and sewing it by hand,” she said. (Miller 2007: 16). Perhaps the most renowned fashion editor of the era, Diana Vreeland, called him, “…the greatest dressmaker who ever lived. If a woman came in in a Balenciaga dress,” she said, “no other woman in the room existed” (Vreeland 2011: chap. 16). Though his international clientele included a very broad interpretation of “the elite”—everyone from aristocrats and royalty to American dime store heiresses—Balenciaga was notoriously shy of the press (Miller 2007: 14-19; Blume 2012: 117). During his lifetime he gave only two known published interviews, both granted after he had closed his houses and retired. (Balda 2020: 4). Explanations given for his reticence have ranged from his “crushing shyness,” his perceived difficulty in explaining his work to the masses, or his unwillingness to trash fellow designers (Golbin 2006: 44; Miller 2007: 14). The more pragmatic answer may be simply that he didn’t want his designs to be stolen by copyists, who were eager to knock-off the latest Paris style for the mass market. Indeed, in 1956, he and fellow designer (and former protégé) Hubert de Givenchy embargoed the press from viewing their collections until one month after they had been presented to the buyers (Ballard 1960: 118-119). All of this secrecy during his lifetime has given Balenciaga a posthumous mystique that, on the positive side, has allowed the quality of his work to have the last word. However, though he may not have spoken to the press on the record, he did expend a great deal of effort charming two of the most powerful and influential editors in the American fashion world: Bettina Ballard of Vogue, and Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar. Their memoirs give us a glimpse of a man so reticent that Snow referred to him as “the monk of the couture” (Blume 2012: 82). And Ballard noted: “the more journalists plead for stories, for clothes to photograph, the more the entire house of Balenciaga draws itself into its shell” (Ballard 1960: 118). This begs the question, was his attention to these editors based on true friendship, or was it a shrewd public relations move to guarantee stealth press coverage in the important American market? Biographical Aspects—Balenciaga and the American Fashion Editors… 54 Diana Vreeland, editor at Harper’s Bazaar and later Vogue, didn’t have as close a personal relationship with Balenciaga as the other two, but in the end, her reverence for his designs led her to create the museum exhibit at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that would canonize Balenciaga’s legacy in the American collective memory. All three editors put Balenciaga on the map—and kept him there—in the U.S. beTTina BALLARD In 1934, the formidable editor in chief of Vogue magazine, Edna Woolman Chase, tapped a young, enthusiastic writer from California to join her editorial team. In that era, Vogue, under publisher Condé Nast, breathlessly covered society and fashion, with editorial geared, as he said, “not merely to women of great wealth, but more fundamentally, to women of taste” (Ross 1992: 7). After a year of tirelessly writing copy for the “Shop Hound” column and assisting photographers such as Edward Steichen and TonI Frissell, the young woman, Bettina Ballard, had the good fortune to be dispatched to Vogue’s Paris office. She possessed, in Chase’s words, “an easy pen,” she was the only one in the office that spoke French, and she was industrious in a very American way. Like many Vogue readers, Ballard was one of those aspirational strivers with more taste than money. So, when Vogue gave her a ticket to Paris, she Fig. 1 hopped on the boat and didn’t looked back (Ballard 1960: 4-13). Cover art of Bettina Ballard’s Ballard’s 1960 memoir, In My Fashion, remains a warm, gossipy 1960 Memoir In My Fashion © Image out of copyright / author’s tribute to the international fashion industry and the many players collection that she knew well, including Dior, Chanel, and her good friend Cristóbal Balenciaga (Figure 1). She met him in 1937, the year he became established in Paris, and she was immediately taken by his “instinctive, spontaneous charm” (Ballard 1960: 104). She described him as, […] a gentle-voiced Spaniard with fine pale skin the texture and color of eggshells and dark hair that lay thick and glistening in wavy layers on his well-shaped head. His voice was like feathers, and his intimate, quick smile had never been used to express anything but true pleasure… (Ballard 1960: 104). During their friendship of more than 20 years, Ballard got to know a restless yet focused genius who both lived for, and was tormented by, his work. She described a man who was “capable only of intimate friendships, the kind that had no complicated social machinery to keep oiled.” To her, “the simplicity of my friendship with Cristóbal was very comforting” (Ballard 1960: 104). Biographical Aspects—Balenciaga and the American Fashion Editors… 55 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).
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