Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney

Balenciaga argued that if a woman was comfortable in her clothes, she was confident; and if she was confident, she was at her best and wore her clothes with style. He said that some designers put a strain on the client so that she was glad to get the dress off at the end of an evening. He wanted his clients to be reluctant to part with their clothe

That world was disappearing even in Balenciaga’s lifetime. The death of Dior in 1957 was the final fatal blow. Dior was a man who loved rich food, he had fought a constant but losing battle against surplus flesh, and his heart inevitably failed. His funeral was a historic gathering of high fashion: only Chanel, who had returned from her exile in Sw

Picasso was a millionaire by 1914 and a multimillionaire by the end of World War I; and his wealth continued to grow, so that by the time of his death he was by far the richest artist who had ever lived. He made a deal with the French government over inheritance taxes, and as a result, in 1985 the Musée Picasso opened in Paris. There, his work of a

That bag became, and remains, a classic. He borrowed the full-length pinkish satin twice from Manet’s Femme au Perroquet at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and he was not above raiding paintings by more vulgar artists, such as Monet’s Les femmes au Jardin at the Musée d’Orsay. But he was never a plagiarist: he transformed touches of the old ma

“I want to make the rich feel rich again.”

Balenciaga may have felt that Dior did not take the craft seriously enough. By his reckoning, Dior, who could not actually make a dress, was not a couturier, merely a designer. (That was true of virtually all the others, then and since. Chanel claimed that she could sew beautifully. But then she had no respect for truth.) Balenciaga possibly though

In December 1948, Balenciaga’s partner, Vladzio, died at age forty-nine. The master was so upset that he seriously considered retiring and returning to Spain. The word got around, and Dior went to see him on Avenue George V and begged him to stay: “We need your example in all that is best in our trade.” Dior suggested, instead, that Balenciaga shou

He opened a second house in Madrid and a third in Barcelona, all three called Eisa, after his mother.

So the fashionable world went to Paris, and all the great designers were to be found there. Among the foreign-born masters of Parisian fashion, Balenciaga was the greatest.4 Indeed many would rate him the most original and creative couturier in history. And he was a true couturier, not just a designer: that is, he could design, cut, sew, fit, and f