#315 Balenciaga

Of all the creative people I've come across, Balenciaga was easily the most dedicated to the business of making beautiful things. His work absorbed him totally, and there was no room in his life for anything or anyone else. When the cultural revolution of the nineteen sixties made it impossible, as he saw it, to produce work of the highest quality, he retired and quickly died of a broken heart. Among the masters of Parisian fashion, Balenciaga was the greatest.

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 finish, and some of his finest dresses were entirely his own work. Let me just pause there when he says, indeed, many would rate him the most original and creative couturier in history. I'm always fascinated by these people where their peers, the people that are doing very similar things of them, it's like, no, no, no, this is the the the person you should pay attention to.

Christian Dior called Balenciaga the master of us all. And Coco Chanel said that Balenciaga was the only couturier in the truest sense of the word, and that everybody else was simply a fashion designer. I've come across this level of adulation for peers in the same industry before. I was reading a bunch of books on, uh, John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt, and I was shocked because I'd never I didn't know who Jay Gould was at the time.

And Rockefeller, he was asked questions like, Who's the best businessman you ever know, you've ever known? And he said, without hesitation, Jay Gould, and then Cornelius Vanderbilt when he was in his 70s and by far the richest American alive. He said that Jay Gould, who was in his 30s at the time, was the smartest man in America. And so we see something similar happening here with Coco Chanel and Christian Dior, super successful i in their own right in the same industry.

And they're like, No, no, no, Balenciaga is the greatest. And part of that is tied to that he could do every single aspect of his work. We just saw this with, uh, the episode I did on James Cameron, he can do any job that a movie needs to be to be made, James Cameron can do it. And so back to Balenciaga, it says that he could design, cut, sew, fit, and finish, and some of his finest dresses were entirely of his own work.

And there's a bunch of hints in his early life to how he became, uh, the greatest. So, he's born in 1895 in Spain in a little fishing village. His father was a sailor, but he died young, leaving his wife and his children very badly off. And so his mother is left with not a lot of money and has to raise her kids on her own. She is the key to all of this, which I didn't understand the first time I read this.

But as I once you finish this and you go back through, you're like, Oh, she she was the key the whole time. So sh- her name is Isa. Uh, she set up as a dressmaker and taught the entire village, the little village, uh, all the women in the village on how to sew. Balenciaga, at age three and a half, he joins her class and he winds up showing immediately astonishing skill with a needle. So we saw this with Tiger Woods, we saw this with Mozart.

You're gonna see it over and over again. You have some kind of level of innate talent for what you're doing, and then you start unbelievably young. He starts at three and a half. He works in this industry till the day he dies, or I guess right before he dies, cause he retired and then then died of a broken heart. And so it says, for the next seventy four years, he could and did sew superbly and kept his hand in by doing a piece of sewing every day of his life.

That is insane. Sewing every day for seventy four years. I've never even heard of anything like that. Reminded me of what Paul Graham said in his essay on episode three fourteen, one of my favorite lines in that essay, he said that being prolific is underrated. In fact, I said this in the Picasso episode. So if you haven't listened to the Walt Disney Picasso episode, that is episode three ten. That is based on the same book that I'm reading from and going over, uh, with you now.

This is about Balenciaga and Dior. It's this book by Paul Johnson called Creators. It profiles, I would say maybe twenty of the greatest creators in history. I highly recommend buying the book. Do not read it in chronological order, just pick the people that you're most interested in. Shakespeare, Twain, whoever it is, Dior, Disney, Picasso, and just go straight to those chapters. And so in that Picasso episode, I'm pretty sure I said this, but here's another example of somebody that was unbelievably prolific, just like Balenciaga.

Picasso lived a total of three thirty three thousand four hundred three days, with 26,075 published works. That means Picasso averaged one new piece of artwork every day of his life from age twenty until his death at ninety one. He created something new every day for seventy one years. I've also seen this before a long time ago, I think it was on episode one fifty four. I read the autobiography of Charles Schultz.

Charles Schultz is the animator, the guy that created Peanuts and, like, Charlie Brown. Check out this crazy, uh, stat from his autobiography. Beginning with the first strip published on October second, 1950, until the last published on February thirteenth, 2,000. So it was a fi- almost a fifty year run. Schultz wrote, penciled, inked, and lettered by hand every single one of the daily and Sunday strips to leave his studio. 17,897 in all, in an almost fifty year run.

What did we just say on the previous page, right? Just said, Schultz wrote, penciled, inked, and lettered by hand every single one. We just said that Balenciaga was able to design, cut, sew, fit, and finish. It's the exact same idea, just a different, uh, industry and a different product that they're making. Back to Balenciaga's early life, big things start small, something you and I have talked about over and over again. Balenciaga's first product was for a cat.

His first original work was a collar set with pearls for his cat. The collar was noticed by a grand lady of the neighborhood. So, like, increasing your surface area for luck is really smart, something really smart to do. Because the person that's noticing this, right, just happens to be the great grandmother of the Queen of Spain. So she becomes his first patron. At twelve, he becomes an apprentice at a tailor to learn cutting, an art that few dress designers actually possess.

So that's another, you can't just skip over that. You gotta pause, like, wait a minute. So he's got he could do everything himself, and then he's also adding other skills that other people in his industry lack. How can you obtain skills few others in your industry possess? This reminds me of Kobe Bryant taking tap, tap dancing lessons, uh, to strengthen his ankles, and Arnold Schwarzenegger taking posing instruction from ballet dancers. There's very few NBA players that were in the tap dance class, and maybe none, and very few or none in the ballet, uh, dancing, like getting tutored one on one from a ballet dancer.

That is a really smart idea. How can you attain skills few others in your industry possess? By age eighteen, he was learning the women's wear trade in a store in San Sebastian, in a luxury shop. And so Balenciaga is this great illustration of this maxim. The public praises people for what they practice in private. He starts sewing at three and a half, he's apprenticing at twelve, he's in a he's in a luxury shop at eighteen. You see this pop popping up later on in his career.

Experts as well as customers marveled at the speed he went about his work, especially the difficult business of fitting models with scores of garments just before a collection. He could do 180 in a day. The explanation is that from the age of three to his mid-twenties, he learned thoroughly every aspect of his trade. In other words, he's practicing in private. This is way before he was regarded as the best designer in Europe. He put in decades of practice, building on his immense natural gifts.

He had, for instance, strong, powerful, but also delicate hands, and this is wild. And he's also ambidextrous. He could cut and sew with either hand. That would be like me being able to read two books at once, one with each eye. Like, that's crazy. Uh, in 1919, so that means Balenciaga's about twenty four at this time. He opened his first shop. He's still in Spain. He has not gone to Paris yet. Uh, so he opened his first shop in San Sebastian on a coast more frequently by high society.

Go to where your customers are. He only from the very beginning, he only wanted to dress the very best. Remember this for more and later when he's compared to Christian Dior. Okay, this is very, very important. He only wanted to go to the very, very top. Go to where your customers are. He's like, All right, I'll go to where the rich people are, because that's the people I want as customers. And this works because he gets the attention of the Spanish royal family.

He was soon in demand at court in the Spanish royal family. In the last phase of the Spanish monarchy before its suspension in 1931, he was working for the Queen. And guess what happens if other people know that you design for the Queen, they're gonna want your stuff too. He has a rapid expansion of his business, uh, from an from an early age. So he's got the first, uh, the first of his shops in San Sebastian.

Then he's going to expand. He opened a second house in Madrid and then a third in Barcelona. All three were called Isa after his mom. What I say, this is she's the key to everything. Wait till you get to the end. He's got like a shrine to her. So they're named after his mother, his Spanish business. This was a family run business. His Spanish business was run with the help of his sister, his brother, and other relatives, and was from the first to the very last time, very much a family firm, though it was a very substantial scale.

They had 250 people in the Madrid house alone and another one hundred working in Barcelona. And so then the Spanish Civil War breaks out and he's gonna have to shut down. So he would be around early forties at this point. And so he's got to figure out where to go. If you're interested in fashion, you know where you're going, he's going to Paris. He eventually is going to reopen in Spain. Uh, I think he's just closed for two years, but most of the industry attention and energy is in Paris.

And important to note, this is not the first time that he's gonna have to shut down temporarily because war, obviously, going to Paris when the the Nazis invade, he's gonna have to shut down temporarily as well. So he's forty two years old, he's in Paris, and he presents his first collection. Uh, the next year, for his second collection, he actually gets the Duchess of Windsor as a client. And then for his third collection the next year Saks Fifth Avenue places a giant order so from here on in it says he was launched and thereafter until his retirement at the end of the nineteen sixties he was one of the major Parisian houses and himself was regarded as the very top

dressmaker and I do want to pause here because I did something this morning before I recorded because this is another example of like uh you and I have talked about this like if you ha- if your industry has some kind of like city center where all the talent is it's probably a good idea to go there this has been like shown over again in history Uh, the example I use, uh, there's a bunch of examples, but I think the best one is actually if you are a me young mechanically declined man, uh, interested in building a car, and you were alive in 1,900, you better get your ass to Detroit.

That's where all the talent was. They wound up knowing each other. It just makes for a very fascinating, uh, life story. And so you see the same thing that's happening in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties in Paris. And so there's a bunch of examples in the book. It's like Dior, Coco Chanel, Balenciaga, Balmain, I think is how you pronounce it, E. Se. E. Saint Laurent. They're all in this book. And I went and walked through, uh, the design district, which is like where all these people are housed in the city that I live in.

And one, I thought it was interesting that a lot of these brands are still alive, you know, eighty years later or whatever the case is. But when I think of Balenciaga now, I think of like, you know, it's kind of like loud, trendy, my opinion, very ugly. It wasn't like that. It was the opposite of like that when Balenciaga was running it himself. I think, in my opinion, if he was alive, the founder would be rolling over in his grave.

I'm gonna get to this later, but he designed one of his ba- basic principles of the products that he made was the importance of permanence. I had never heard of this. It blew my mind, and I'll get there in a minute. His dresses were bequeathed. There is dresses still, like the dresses that he made with his hands are still women are have passed them along to now, I guess it'd be their great either granddaughter or great granddaughter.

I had never even heard of such a thing. And so I one I just thought it was interesting. Was looking, I was I when I went on the walk this morning, I was looking through the store window. Everything was closed. It was early in the morning. I was like, wow, this stuff is really ugly and very trendy. And I just can't imagine somebody wearing this, you know, forty years from now, where you literally have examples of people wearing a dress that he made seventy five years ago.

And so that came to mind when I read that line where it's like, no, no, this guy was the top dressmaker in the the s very center of his industry at the at the time when it was, you know, expanding and there's all this energy. And wait till you get to how important the um, the the fashion industry was to the Paris economy. Before we get there, I want to pull out one paragraph that I thought was very interesting, cause he's very he's deadly serious about his work, deadly serious about the quality.

It's not a game to him at all. He gets invited to like design, there's like a collection of dolls that they're giving to some princesses, I think they might be in England or something. And so all the top Parisian fashion designers were invited to make pieces for the wardrobe of the dolls, and Balenciaga was not having it. It says the fact that Balenciaga was invited to contribute underlined his membership in the Parisian elite, but he declined, not wishing to take part in mere public publicity stunts, a characteristic assertion of his high seriousness.

And then we see again, just a few years after having to shut down, uh, his fashion houses in Spain, he has to do the same thing in Paris. Uh, Balenciaga soon had to contend with a new war. This is Hitler's war, the World War II in September 1939, and shut down his Paris house for a time. In France. Now, this is what I mentioned earlier. This surprised me. In France, the fashion industry was regarded as a vital exporter.

I don't even know. Paul Johnson's a great writer and a historian. I read this, I'm like, there's no way this could be true. But if it's in the book, I trust that Paul researched it. In 1938 and 1939, one exported courtier dress would pay for ten tons of imported coal, and a liter of exported perfume would pay for two tons of imported gasoline. Seeing words on paper doesn't even that doesn't even seem real.

That's incredible. So he's he's closed down for a year or two. The fact that he was one of the few that were allowed to reopen because he his ally, Balenciaga's ally, was King Franco of Spain. Remember, Balenciaga was from Spain, and Franco was an ally of Hitler. So he was able to reopen, uh, his fashion house in September 1940, and he was just one of sixty firms that the Germans allowed to function. And so once the war ends, France is devastated.

It's bitterly divided, it's impoverished. What's interesting is these are conditions ripe for launching something new. And then this is where we have this. He's rather, uh, he's an older person in the sense that, like, uh, Christian Dior wasn't, uh, a successful fashion designer up until this point. He only had like a ten year run or something like that, cause he winds up dying young. But he comes in and he realizes, like, oh, the conditions are ripe for launching something exciting, giving the people something to be excited about after going through, you know, what is six years of war or whatever it was.

Now, this is really important that I mentioned earlier. Industry specific talent tends to cluster in the same physical location. And this is important because both Dior and Balenciaga would insist on the very best, like subcontractors, the people actually producing, like the materials that they're using to make their creation. So I'll get there in a minute. But big thing uh that you're gonna learn about Christian Dior is that you don't get to the top by fitting in.

You you need to stand out. This is the James Dyson approach, right? Difference for the sake of it. All this was in preparation for his first proper post-war collection. This is Christian Dior now, when a sensation was caused by an unknown designer, that's Dior. Dior was using prodigious quantities of precious materials and thumbing his nose up at wartime austerity. And what's fascinating about Dior is he kind of comes out of nowhere, right? He just went from a series of kind of one failure after another.

So let me give you background to to understand, like, how unique this was. First of all, this was fascinating. So Dior's father was a successful businessman who ran a fertilizer factory. His dad specialized in producing liquid manure. Another way to think about this is the foundation of the Dior empire was literally shit, in the literal sense. And what's crazy is fifty years from now, right from where we are in the story, Dior would be the beginning of Bernard Arnault's LVMH Empire.

If you haven't learned about that connection, go back and listen to the the first of many episodes that I'll make on Bernard Arnault. Uh, it's episode two ninety six. It's very fascinating, and he's gonna come up a few times in Dior's story as well. But back to his dad, this idea where the fact the only reason that Christian Dior could afford, like how he got to Paris, was that his dad's liquid manure business was so profitable that he had a bunch of houses, and one of those houses was in Paris.

And even before he was a fashion designer, we see that, uh, with like a lot of the people that you and I talk about, true interest is usually revealed early. D he loved drawing, he loved dressing up. He would, uh, design like fancy clothes for his sisters when he was like a young kid. But what was fascinating and surprising about that is he didn't first go into the fashion business. In fact, he also loved art. So he actually the prehistory of Dior's fashion business is the fact that he becomes a partner in an art business in Paris.

His father put up the money so he could get into the business. And then when I read this next paragraph, let me tell you what I thought. Let me read the paragraph to you first. It says, Then troubles came. Dior said, I never really got over them. His brother was locked up in an insane asylum, his mother died, and during the depression, his father went bankrupt. And at the same time, Dior's art gallery failed. And so I wrote, Would there be a Dior fashion brand if this never happened?

Opportunity is a strange beast. It frequently appears after a loss. My previous note, what I just read to you was written before I read this sentence, and it's exactly what had just come to mind. Without this financial disaster, Dior would probably have spent his life as a middle ranking art dealer and died unknown. And so he takes this opportunity, he just takes a bunch of like random jobs. Like the way you would describe what Christian Dior is doing before he's gonna get this crazy opportunity, like you won't even believe what's about to happen, was that he was essentially hovering on the fringes of the fashion industry, right?

He was broke, taking humble jobs in the industry that he wanted to work in. And then let me read this to you. This is fascinating. Then came a unique stroke of fortune that transformed his life. And this is what Paul writes in this book. I do not perhaps pay enough attention to the role of luck in the creative process, especially to the way it sometimes allows a frustrated would be creator to fulfill his destiny. Dior certainly believed in luck.

I want to pause there before I get into Dior's like superstitious behavior. Last week, for in the Paul Graham episode on three one four, he said this, uh, because he's read a bunch of biographies, just like I have. When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting or by reading a book they happen to pick up.

So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way you do that is to be curious. This is exactly what's about to happen to Christian Dior. So let's go back to this idea that Dior Dior certainly believed in luck. He would go and like, he just believed in fortune tellers. And so one of his fortune tellers told him that women will be very lucky for you, you will earn, uh, much money from them, and you will travel widely.

And so he believed that, even though he had no reason to believe that at that point. What does I mean by that? As of July 1946, Dior was a nobody who was in his forties with nothing in his design career to suggest a genius. Yet it is at this precise time, right? This is the stroke of fortune that changed Dior's life. Opportunity is a strange beast. It frequently appears after a loss. So he gets this meeting in this month.

He meets Marcel Boussac. Now, the crazy thing is, this is the business. Boussac's business is the business that a young Bernard Arnault buys. I think he's like thirty five years old at the time. So Bernard is going to buy this business forty years from where we are in the story. I love how all this stuff connects together. It's always fascinating to me. So Dior meets Boussac, right? Boussac at the time is a textile magnate who was called the King of Cotton.

Boussac wanted to own a big Paris fashion house to give prestige to his booming but kind of boring business. And so someone had told Boussac that Dior might be able to help produce his ideas. That's the reason for the meeting. Now, this is wild. Think about how courageous Dior had to be at this point, right? And this is what Dior responds to. I am not interested in managing a clothing factory. What you need and what I would like to run is a craftsman workshop in which we recruit the very best people in the trade to re-establish in Paris a salon for the greatest luxury and the highest standards of workmanship.

It will cost a great deal of money and entail much risk. Now, this is fascinating because if you stop and think what's happening, you need to know who you're talking to. For some people, a slight minority of humans, they're not trying to go through the easiest route for life. They want to go for great. And so this idea where it's just like, oh, what you really want is we're gonna hire the best craftsmen in the world.

We're gonna re-establish Paris as a salon for the greatest luxury and the highest standards of workmanship. And by the way, Boussac, it's gonna cost you a great deal of money and entail much risk. Most people would run away from that. Boussac runs towards it into an astonishing degree, which I'll get to in a minute. But I couldn't help but think I've seen this before, where it's like, okay, uh, a few weeks ago, I did the the episode on Mark Twain.

One of the things that Mark Twain wanted to see when he was a young man, he was going west across, uh, uh, the United States, or I guess it wasn't even United States back then, or at least a lot large parts of where he was covering wasn't yet part of the United States, I guess the way to put it. And so he was fascinated by this new thing called the Pony Express. Pony Express, right? When they wanted to, they delivered mail rapidly, way faster than anyone else could.

And so when they want to attract the right kind of risk taking people, you see that in in how you present this to him. Just like Dior presented this to Boussac. This is what the founder of the entrepreneur Pony Express said. This is the ad for that. Wanted young, skinny, wiry fellows, not over eighteen, must be expert riders, horse riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. What was the result? Hundreds of adventure seeking young men actually responded to that ad.

Go back even further in the founder's archives. I did an episode on Ernest Shackleton, the famous polar explorer, right? He has a world famous, uh, they they call one of his, uh, his ad, one of the greatest job ads of all time. He said, men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success. There's an element in that into what Dior is pitching Boussac, and this is his response.

Boussac liked the idea and offered to set Dior up immediately with an investment of 10 million francs, and this was later increased to 100 million francs. And we see that Dior came out of the gates swinging. Remember what James Joyce said, difference for the sake of it. Uh, so it says Dior doubled the risk of opening a new house with his revolutionary quote unquote new look, a deliberate and defiant return to the most extravagant use of material.

He spat in the face of post war egalitarianism and said, I want to make the rich feel rich again. His first collection turned out to be the most successful in fashion history, with no expense spared and endless trouble taken. Dior recruited and continued to employ the best people to be found in France, France, men and women who would die rather than turn out an article which was in the tiniest degree below the best in the world.

That is how you win. The success of the house was immediate and prolonged, and the volume of business continued to grow steadily in the ten years up to Dior's death in 1957, by which time the house employed one thousand of the finest experts ever gathered together under one roof. They are the Pixar of fashion houses. During this decade, Dior sold over 100,000 dresses, made from 16,000 design sketches and using one thousand miles of fabric.

Again, another example that being prolific is underrated. And another thing that being prolific does, it increases your surface area of luck. It was it's present in, I think, a lot of industries, but it's explicit in the fashion industry. It has to be understood that designers or courtiers never present just one line. They produce a variety of styles in each collection, and though for publicity pur purposes, they stress a particular favorite, they know that in the end, the magazine writers, the big buyers, and above all the individual customers will decide which is dominant.

The sheer volume that they produce being prolific increases your surface area of luck. Made me think of, uh, Picasso, where, you know, Picasso is one of the may the most famous artists in history. He produced 26,000 or whatever it was. We only remember a few, and somebody responded to me. They're like, Yeah, but most of his stuff was crap. And I go, that's the point. One of the most important ideas that we fundamentally do not understand that is counterintuitive to how our brain naturally works.

People don't remember the crap. Another way to think about this is what Paul Graham said in that essay from last week's episode. You can't have a lot of good ideas without also having a lot of bad ones. If you have great ideas, no one will remember the bad ones. Now we go back to Balenciaga. Balenciaga never commented on other designers. Another way to say is Balenciaga focused on his own house, or Jamie Iveen would have said Balenciaga had blinders on.

And yet, as successful as Dior was, everybody knew that Balenciaga was a one of one. It says in every other way, now comparing directly comparing Balenciaga and Dior, in every other way, Balenciaga was immeasurably superior. And why? Because Dior could not actually make a dress. He was a designer, as Coco Chanel said, not a courtier. And then Paul Johnson, the author, says this was true of virtually all of the others then and since. And in fact, he encouraged what Dior was doing.

Why? Because he's also a very smart businessman. He realizes that more new customers in the Parisian fashion industry is good for everyone in the industry. Balenciaga did not regret the success of the new look. He was a businessman and a very astute one, and he recognized that it had done wonders for the Parisian fashion industry and everyone involved in it. Himself, perhaps most of all, had benefited from the publicity. He certainly did not see Dior as a rival, and he had no fear that his own claims to excellence would ever be overlooked.

Dior dressed the rich, Balenciaga, the very rich. And this was known at the time. It says during the nineteen fifties, a woman graduated from Dior to Balenciaga. So what is Dior doing for Balenciaga? He's filling the top of the funnel. He's just gonna bring him more customers. It just might take a few years. And then to Dior's part, he recognizes, like, I'm not Balenciaga. Dior was never jealous of Balenciaga's superior skills. He recognized them and revered the man who possessed them.

Dior always called Balenciaga master. And again, they know each other. That's why it's so important for to getting to the wherever your industry is like located. When Balenciaga's partner, this was, uh, his lover, died, Balenciaga was so upset that he seriously considered retiring. And then Dior went to see him and begged him to stay. We need your example and all that is best in our trade. And so, what kind of person gets to the absolute very top of their profession?

We're gonna we've seen this before. Balenciaga had a religious level devotion to his craft. He regarded making dresses as a vocation, like the priesthood, and an act of worship. He felt that he served God by suitably adorning the female form, which God had made beautiful. His approach was reverential and indeed sacred. His premises reflected his own vocational tone. So this part was fascinating. So what they mean is not only does the the best companies take on the personality of their founders, but their actual headquarters will look like the founder's approach to his business.

Balenciaga's house in Paris looked like a church, and they compared it to some of the other designers at the time, and some looked like a London town house or something that's like warm and inviting. And so it says his house was like a church, and indeed, a monastery. When people visited, they said it was like entering a covenant. They would describe the atmosphere as monastic in both an architectural and in a spiritual sense. And even the environment within, like the working environment, with it, it's very much like you would you would feel like almost like monk like.

Nobody spoke. If it was absolutely necessary to speak, the voice had to be hushed or reduced to a whisper. Security was intense. It was difficult not just to get in at all, but to move from one room to another, for all entrances were guarded. Customers, which were called patrons, were only allowed in by appointment. And then the room where Balenciaga actually worked, it was totally inaccessible except to his most senior staff. This was hilarious. At one time, it was widely believed that he did not actually exist and that Balenciaga was a pseudonym.

So they talked about the fact that he would never court public uh publicity. He wouldn't go out to dinner. He was in it for the work itself, to the activity of making beautiful, beautiful dresses that would be bequeathed, which we'll get to in a minute. He definitely preferred to move in silence. He never did anything to court popularity. He never gave interviews except once to the London Times when he decided to retire. He never went out in society, and there are virtually no photographs of him and none of him at work.

His remoteness was not a pose, but part of his dedication to his art. He worked fanatically hard. Each collection that he made had between two hundred and two hundred fifty designs, all of which he completed himself, since he had few trusted assistants and often turned down promising juniors. In fact, a seventeen-year-old Givenchy tried to work for him, and he said no. More on how he worked, he never raised his voice. Indeed, silence was his norm. There was something noble about him.

In just one day, he could get through fitting sessions for 180 outfits by dint of intense concentration. Where have we seen that again? Edmund Land said, intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had. It's one of the key traits that Balenciaga used to get through these crazy days. So in one day, he could get through a fitting session for 180 outfits by dint of intense concentration and by working with a team who knew exactly what his gestures signified.

For few words were spoken. His fundamental principle as a dressmaker, so there's three principles we're gonna go over. This is the first one. His fundamental principle as a dressmaker was to make women happy. And this description of what he made shows that he was a true master at work. His clothes were above all comfortable to wear. That's incredible because when you look when I see these designs, I would like, like, that has to be uncomfortable. So his clothes were above all comfortable to wear, an amazing fact, and it was a fact considering their grandeur, their complexity, and the magnificence of their materials.

And he had a reason for doing this. This is what he said. 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 out of the dress at the end of the evening. He wanted his clients to be reluctant to part with their clothes, which had become an integral part of their body, a second skin.

Listen to how he talks. This reminded me of Enzo Ferrari is the first person I put this idea in my mind. You can tell when people really have soul in the uh soul in the game, is because they'll describe their products the way you would describe your lover. He wants you to not want to take off your dress. He wants it to become an integral part of your body. He wants it to be a second skin.

This is not normal language that people usually associate with products, right? Inanimate products. It's incredible. 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. And this is what I meant about blowing my mind, right? A woman could buy one of them as an investment because properly looked after, it would last forever. In 2003, I saw a young woman of eighteen wearing a superb dress.

Is that not a Balenciaga? I asked. Yes, she said, it belonged to my grandmother. Balenciaga wanted his dresses to be bequeathed. How many people have ever made a dress that could be bequeathed? A dress worn a quarter of a century after its creator had died. Permanence, he's aiming for permanence. He was impressed by the way dresses, hats, and even accessories in certain old masters remained elegant after hundreds of years, and he constantly got ideas from them.

So again, my favorite line in this book is that all creative individuals build on the works of their predecessors. No one creates in a vacuum. Balenciaga took a ton of ideas from past dressmakers, past painters, past artists, and then transformed them and added his own touch to create something new. Balenciaga also would create his own words for his work, right? You don't wear a Balenciaga dress, you present it. That's how he would talk to his patrons, his customers, right?

You're not wearing this. This is how you present. This is the proper way to wear it, right? What we would use wear, but he would say, This is the proper way to present it. Third principle, right? World class products are gonna contain world class ingredients. This applies to your company too. Great companies are full of great people, right? Balenciaga's third principle was the central importance of material in his designs. Textile and lace manufacturers, embroiderers, and specialists lined up for appointments to see him and often collaborated with him to produce completely new, complex materials.

And because he could do everything himself, that's allowed him to recognize a true genius, somebody that's way better at that activity than he is. He could dye himself and, uh, and often did. His skill at embroidery enabled him to pick out the occasional genius. To him, a first class textile creator was an equal. He patronized the best embroiderers in the world. That's something Steve Jobs would do. There are no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with people.

It's one of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes. How again, how do you know that they're that somebody has soul in the game? This is this is how you can tell, and this is how you can tell somebody who's doing their life's work. He's making it and not even telling people that he did it. He often sewed to keep his hand in, and for every collection he designed, cut, sewed, and finished entirely himself, a little black dress, usually of silk, sold like the others, but never identified as his.

He had that compulsion to create. And this is one of my favorite paragraphs about Balenciaga. The essence of his, you really think about, let me back up. You really think about this is handmade craftsmanship, right? The essence of his creation was the work of human hands, bringing into existence the images projected on paper from his powerful and inventive brain. The archives of his company survive intact, and they reveal the extent to which everything was done by hand.

The exact sums paid by his celebrated clients, dates for fittings and deliveries, all entered in fine pen and ink, materials supplied in detail, and the prices paid, and countless pieces of paper showing the process whereby each garment was created in ink and pencil and crayon, with pieces of the material used pinned on by the master sketcher, a lost world of agile, tireless fingers before the computer or even the typewriter took over. I want to draw the parallel to Enzo Ferrari yet again.

When he first launched his cars in America, this is what was said about them. Nothing like a Ferrari had ever graced American roads. They were cars built by Italian artisans, every detail down to the steering wheel, handcrafted, using some of the same methods used to make Roman suits of armor and the royal carriages of ancient kingdoms. And the result of this seventy-year career, he's he's wealthy, he's rich, he's got houses in Paris, in Madrid, in Barcelona, in Basque.

But the way he designed his main residence, something there's a line in there that stuck out to me that I realized his mom was key to all of this. Remember, she teaches him how to sew at three and a half years old. The centerpiece of that house was a vast antique wall table with his mother's old Singer sewing machine in a solitary state beneath a vast and fearsomely realistic crucifix. And then the nineteen sixties come. Everybody goes to, like, trendy new designs.

He found the word trendy abhorrent. He's remember, he's going for permanence. So it says Balenciaga continued designing for a time, and it is significant that his dresses of the late nineteen sixties against the trend cut against the bias, as he put it. That is a great maxim. That's what he there's a direct quote from him. Cut against the bias. Cut against the bias is a great maxim. So it says Balenciaga continued designing for a time, and it is significant that his dresses of the late nineteen sixties against the trend cut against the bias, as he put it, are now the ones most admired, collected, and copied.

Balenciaga has been genuinely regarded as the greatest dressmaker in the world. Abruptly, he retired, shut down his Paris house completely because there was no possible successor, and returned to Spain. He died in 1972. It is most improbable that the kind of dresses Balenciaga created in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties will ever be made again. They are indeed museum pieces to inspire women or among the fortunate descendants of his clients, heirlooms to be treasured and on grand occasions flaunted.

What an ending. For the full story, highly recommend buying the book. If you buy the book using the link below, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. I would not recommend reading it in chronological order, like I said before. Go through the table of contents, find the people you're most interested in, and read that chapter. It's the perfect book to jump around in. That is 315 books down, one thousand to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.