Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney

His second principle was permanence. While Dior made changes twice a year, Balenciaga was always fundamentally the same, especially in his splendid evening dresses, which were his specialty. A woman could buy one of them as an investment because properly looked after, it would last forever.

Picasso was born two decades before Disney and outlived him by a few years, but both were essentially men of the twentieth century, outstanding creative individuals first and foremost but also representative figures. Each embraced novelty with shattering enthusiasm. But there were essential differences.

There was a porter in blue, but the real keeper of the gate was a dragon called Véra. Indeed, it was a place of women—like a convent vowed to silence (as is usual in Spain)—but any women who were not models or seamstresses were dragons.

There are virtually no photographs of him and none at work, though we know he wore black trousers and sweater and used a curious curved table on which to sew or cut material, with rulers and a square as aids. All the rooms in his atelier, as noted above, were closely guarded, and his own room was totally inaccessible except to the most senior staff

Charles Frederick Worth (1825–1895)

Empress Eugénie

In the twentieth century, then, new experiences for our eyes were the product both of relentless impersonal forces frog-marching humanity forward and of powerful creative individuals striving to wrest control of change in order to realize their personal ways of seeing things. Among this last group none were more successful than Pablo Picasso (1881–

Then, that month, he met Marcel Boussac, a textile magnate who was called “King Cotton.” Boussac wanted to own a big Paris fashion house to give prestige to his booming but humdrum business; and he had a crumbling house called Philippe et Gaston. Someone told him that Dior might be able to produce ideas—hence their meeting. Dior told him:

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