Couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga

UPDATED POST: Your blogger first learned of Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895-1972) from a pamphlet at the San Sebastian (Spain) tourist office. In a list of famous people who had made San Sebastian their home, he was in the second position, right behind the Queen of Spain. My female traveling companion, speaking in reverent tones, informed me that he is regarded as one of the greatest couturiers of the twentieth century.

Counted among his clients were the de Rothschilds, Bunny Mellon, Helena Rubinstein, the Duchess of Windsor, Countess Mona Bismark, Doris Duke, Marella Agnelli and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Jackie upset John F. Kennedy for buying Balenciaga's ultra expensive creations while he was President, because he feared that the American public might think the purchases too lavish; her haute couture bills were discreetly paid by her father-in-law, Joseph Kennedy. While Dior dressed the rich, Balenciaga dressed the very rich. During the 1950s, it was said that a woman “graduated” from Dior to Balenciaga.

Balenciaga, who had quit school to go to work for a local tailor at age 13, opened his first shop in San Sebastián, Spain, at age 19, and by the age of 24 he had his own couture house, which later expanded to branches in Madrid and Barcelona. All three were called Eisa, after his seamstress mother. He learned every aspect of the couture business. While apprenticed to the San Sebastián tailor, he learned the skill of cutting, an art few dress designers possess.

At seventeen he went to Biarritz, across the border, to learn the French language and their clothes-making techniques. By the age of eighteen, he was learning the women’s wear trade back in San Sebastián, in a luxury shop, Louvre, where he became adept at fitting ladies and finding gowns for their personal requirements. His clients loved him and followed him when he opened his own fashion house in the Basque capital at age 24. Among his clients was the Spanish Queen Mother, Maria Cristina, for whom San Sebastián’s great luxury hotel is named. His business was run with the help of his sister, brother and other relatives, and was very much a family firm, though on a substantial scale; 250 people worked in the Madrid house alone, plus an additional 100 or so in Barcelona.

The Spanish royal family and the aristocracy wore his designs, but when the Spanish Civil War forced him to close his stores in 1931, he fled first to London, then to Paris in 1936, eventually opening a couture house on Avenue George V in 1937. His success was immediate. Customers risked their safety to travel to Europe during World War II to see Balenciaga's designs.

Below: A Balenciaga design from 1951.

It was in Paris that he met the love of his life, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, who was also his business associate. At the time he partnered with Cristóbal, Vladzio was a Franco-Russian milliner. Balenciaga was devastated when he died in 1948, to the point that he considered closing down his business. While Balenciaga had affairs with other men after Vladzio's death, he remained an intensely private man, rarely socializing.

Several designers who worked for Balenciaga would go on to open their own successful couture houses, notably Oscar de la Renta, Emanuel Ungaro and Hubert de Givenchy. Balenciaga’s influence on these men cannot be overstated.

His greatest period of innovation and influence was from just after WW II until he closed his couture house in 1968, four years before his death. His “sack dress” created a sensation in 1957 and was even parodied on an episode of “I Love Lucy”. Unlike other couture houses, Balenciaga never produced a ready-to-wear line: "I will not prostitute my talent." Tapping the deep roots of his Spanish heritage, Balenciaga found inspiration in flamenco and Velázquez paintings, clerical vestments and bullfighters’ boleros. Later, in designs that re-envisioned the female silhouette with gestures that flouted the traditional waistline, he created his unfitted middy blouse and tunic dress, the barrel-line jacket and balloon dress. In 1960 Balenciaga received the Légion d’honneur for services to the French fashion industry.

When Balenciaga died in his native Spain in 1972, Women’s Wear Daily declared, “The King is Dead”. He died a very rich man, with houses and apartments in Paris, at La Reynerie near Orléans, in Madrid, in Barcelona, and in Iguelda in his native Basque country. Although his couture house remained dormant from 1968 until 1986, in 1992, for the summer Olympic Games, the rejuvenated House of Balenciaga designed the French team's clothes to give them a more sophisticated look.

The Balenciaga name is best known to young people today as the label for men's and women's shoes and sought-after handbags and accessories. Balenciaga, headquartered in Paris, is now owned by the French-based Kering Company, which includes Gucci, YSL, Bottega Veneta and other luxury brands. In recent times Kim Kardashian has been the Balenciaga brand's official ambassador. Even more controversial was a 2022 holiday ad campaign featuring children holding plush teddy bears embellished with BDSM accessories. Public backlash was swift, and the outcome was an unnecessary blemish on the reputation of a fashion house once at the very pinnacle of respectability.

Erté

The name Erté was the French pronunciation of the initials R.T., which stood for Romain de Tirtoff (1892-1990), a Russian-born Art Deco graphic artist and designer of jewelry, costumes, interiors, and sets for opera, film and the stage. Not to mention textiles, handbags, watches and perfume bottles. As his career played out, Erté and Art Deco became virtually synonymous. His 240+ covers for Harper's Bazar* magazine (1915-1937), which often depicted women draped in furs and jewelry, are today collectors’ items.

*Spelling later changed to Bazaar.

The son of a wealthy Russian Admiral in the Imperial Fleet, Tirtoff took the pseudonym Erté while working as a fashion designer/illustrator in Paris, so as not to disgrace his aristocratic Russian family, which expected Romain to follow in his father’s footsteps as a military officer. His artistic talent was discovered early, and his mother had a dress made after one of Erté's designs he had sketched at the age of five. At age 22 he appeared at a Parisian ball in 1914 clad in a self-designed silver lamé costume, complete with pearl wings and ebony-plumed cape. True.

In 1925, MGM studios (Culver City, CA) brought Erté and his partner, Russian Prince Nicolas Ouroussoff, from Paris to Hollywood, picking up the considerable expenses for both. When their ocean liner arrived in New York, they disembarked with fifteen steamer trunks and three assistants. Erté’s black, white and gray Monte Carlo atelier was reproduced in Culver City. He was treated like a star, installed in a hilltop house in Hollywood, given a chauffeured limousine, two bi-lingual secretaries and was interviewed by the press 200 times.

MGM head Louis B. Mayer, who was known to be intolerant of homosexuals, even invited the couple to his house for dinner. Erté reported that his relationship with Mayer was always pleasant, and Mayer expressed regret when Erté asked to be let out of his contract after designing costumes for just six films. Erté lived with Ouroussoff for nearly twenty years, until the Prince's premature death in 1933. By the 1920s homosexuals in film studio wardrobe, makeup and set departments enjoyed an extraordinary freedom and tolerance, an environment found virtually nowhere else in American industry. It wasn’t just tolerated, but being gay actually carried with it some cachet.

Graphic Art: Symphony in Black

In his 1975 autobiography, Things I Remember, Erté catalogued his homosexual encounters, starting at the age of 13. Readers learned that after the death of Prince Ouroussoff, he had a serious relationship with a champion Danish swimmer and decorator named Axel. Erté’s openness regarding his sexuality was in marked contrast to others in his field at that time.

Erté designing sets and costumes for the Folies-Bergère, the Ziegfeld Follies and the Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Performers who wore his costumes included Josephine Baker, Anna Pavlova, Mata-Hari and Sarah Bernhardt. 

Erté worked up until just a few weeks before his death from kidney problems in 1990, at age 97. Very wealthy by the end of his life, he was building a house in Majorca at the time of his death.  During his long career he produced Art Deco designs for furniture, lamps, sculptures, seriographs, lithographs and even playing cards.

 

Rooms at Chateau de la Sorcere (France), decorated by Erté:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sources:

Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood – William J. Mann

Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History

Wikipedia

Photos of interiors at Chateau de la Sorciere: "Fantasy Furniture" by Bruce M. Newman and Alastair Duncan (1989)

Bill Blass

William R. Blass (1922-2002) was first and foremost a handsome, gay fashion designer and society maven. As a couturier he made millions and was thus able to travel in the social circles of the rich and famous clients he dressed – Blass was on a first name basis with several presidents’ wives.

He was also a philanthropist, a collector of art, furniture and antiquities, and an activist. He lived a life of glitz and glamor, squiring around the wives of some of the world’s most powerful men. Scores of married women up and down Park Avenue called on Blass when their husbands were too bored or tired to go out for a black-tie party.

From the time he formed Bill Blass Limited in 1970, his career was on a rocket trajectory; by 1998 his firm had grown to a $700-million-a-year business. A native of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, he had been a protégé of socialite/fashion editor Baron de Gunzburg, as were Oscar de la Renta and Calvin Klein; these three men went on to dominate the fashion industry, each becoming far more famous than Gunzburg, their mentor.

Over the next 30 years he expanded his line of clothing for men and women to include swimwear, furs, luggage, perfume, and even chocolates. As well, he designed signature collection editions of Lincoln Continental automobiles from 1976 through 1992. The Blass name came to be associated with a uniquely American style of his own invention: tailored, sporty classicism, with an accent on tweeds, cashmere sweaters, impeccable evening gowns, and his signature blazers.

Many of the world’s richest and most famous women wore his creations: Jacqueline Kennedy, Gloria Vanderbilt (photo at right; a.k.a. Anderson Cooper’s mother), Nancy Reagan, opera diva Jessye Norman,  Barbara Bush, Candice Bergen, Barbra Streisand, Brooke Astor, Nancy Kissinger, Happy Rockefeller and Barbara Walters – for starters.

Blass served in the U.S. Army during WW II and began a career in fashion in NYC immediately after, in 1946. At the peak of his influence as a designer in the late 1980s he became a generous supporter of AIDS treatment services; Blass was also a major donor to Gay Men's Health Crisis at a time when most prominent people were silent about AIDS. One of the founder members of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), he was the first to receive the CFDA Perignon Award for Humanitarian leadership beyond fashion; Blass donated the $25,000 prize to the AIDS care center of New York Hospital.

In 1999 Blass sold Bill Blass Limited for $50 million and retired to his home in New Preston, Connecticut. Blass was diagnosed with oral/tongue cancer in 2000, not long after he began writing his memoirs. His cancer took his life in 2002, and he died at age 79, six days after completing his memoir, Bare Blass. His will bequeathed half his $52 million estate, as well as several important ancient sculptures, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sotheby’s oversaw the auction of the designer’s possessions in 2003, bringing in $13.6 million, more than double the high estimates.  The contents of his NYC Sutton Place apartment and 1779 stone house in New Preston, CT (photos of both below), comprised the 475-page auction catalog (sold out at $45), instantly becoming a treasured collectible coffee-table item. Used copies sell today for $100-$200.

His homes were designed as virtual galleries for his vast collections. The interiors were considered influential and trend-setting, in that they mixed antiquities with nineteenth century objects.

Bunny Roger

There have always been flamboyant gay men, but few could hold a candle to Bunny Roger (1911-1997). In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of someone who was even in his league. Roger was glib, quick-witted, fearless – and the dandy to end all dandies. Christened Neil Munroe Roger, “Bunny” was the most eccentric of three life-long bachelor brothers, and by far the most interesting.

It’s difficult to imagine how he could take the time from being a full-time fop to establish himself as an important couturier, not to mention becoming a WW II hero. He died fifteen years ago this month, just shy of his 86th birthday, and he partied up until a month before entering the hospital for treatment for a fatal cancer. He bragged at the time that he had a waist size the same as that of Princess Diana.

The son of a self-made Scottish telecommunications tycoon, he taunted his no-nonsense father by peroxiding his hair. Roger read history at Oxford and studied drawing at the Ruskin. Oxford dealt with his indiscrete homosexuality by kicking him out. Maybe it was the rouge and dyed hair that gave him away. Undaunted, at the age of 26 he established his fashion house, Neil Roger, in London, and among his early clients was Vivien Leigh. Five years later he found himself serving in Italy and North Africa in the Rifle Brigade. Roger became a WW II hero known for his bravery and courage under fire, even though he exhibited a quirk or two, such as wearing rouge and chiffon scarves into battle. It is reported that he dragged a wounded fellow officer from a burning building that had been bombed. Roger once claimed to have advanced onto a battlefield brandishing a rolled-up copy of Vogue magazine while issuing the command “When in doubt, powder heavily”.

Perhaps he meant gun powder.

Following the war he was invited to run the couture department at venerable Fortnum & Mason, and he was quite successful at it. Bunny is credited with inventing Capri pants in 1949, while on vacation there off the Bay of Naples. He spent over £35,000 a year on his own wardrobe, which tended toward an extreme Edwardian look.

Roger was also well-known for the lavish and outrageous parties he hosted. These events were often themed, as in the Diamond, Amethyst and Flame Balls held to celebrate his own 60th, 70th, and 80th birthdays. Bunny wore an exotic mauve catsuit with egret feather headdress at his "Amethyst" 70th birthday ball in 1981 (see photo), and he followed that with a sequined "Ball of Fire" costume a decade later, which he wore as he emerged through fire and smoke to the applause of his 400 guests. For day-to-day wear, he favored jackets in lilac and shell-pink. Yellow was also a favorite hue. The man knew how to stand out in a crowd.

His father, Sir Alex, whom Bunny despised, did not live long enough to witness the mauve catsuit at the 70th birthday ball, but he exploded with anger in 1956 when a newspaper carried photos of Bunny's New Year fetish party at which men wearing leather bondage gear and high heels led women around tethered with chains. It seems his father had no sense of fun, although when Bunny, as a teenager, had asked for a doll's house as a reward for being selected for Loretto's junior sports team, he gave it to him. At the age of six, his mother and father gave him a fairy costume with diaphanous skirts and butterfly wings. Who knew what the future would hold? When he got a little older, Bunny plucked his eyebrows to resemble Marlene Dietrich, whom he adored. In later years his face was described as “much-lifted.”

Moving right along.

After his success as a couturier, Roger used his wealth to furnish his mansion with elaborate Gothic furniture, carved with bull and goat motifs, symbols of rampant male sexuality. He bought a set of 12 ebonized chairs and covered them in cowhide. He could have his butch moments, it appears.

But back to his clothes, which is what really mattered. Bunny Roger’s signature look was a high-crowned bowler hat paired with extraordinary spectator shoes he polished himself using homemade stains concocted from beeswax and natural dyes. Bunny enjoyed customizing his footwear, adding red laces, for instance, to compliment his ruby cufflinks. His footwear wardrobe was extraordinarily vast. For each of his suits he had four pairs of shoes or boots made, in order to maximize the number of looks for each trouser/jacket combination. Considering he owned over 150 Savile Row suits, this was no small footwear collection.  Bunny often had several pairs of the same shoe made when he found a favorite leather color or type; he owned no fewer than 14 pairs of pale blue and white kid spectator brogues. He was a great fan of Whisky Cordovan leather, the palest shade of shell cordovan, notoriously difficult to obtain due to the difficulty in tanning to such a light “tea” hue.

Did I mention that he loved to dance? He could really move those size seven feet.

From his obituary:
“Bunny was true: beneath his mauve mannerisms he was stalwart, frank, dependable and undeceived; to onlookers a passing peacock, to intimates a life enhancer and exemplary friend.”

There will never be another one like him. Have a gander at the goods in his closet: