The Biography of Balenciaga

“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.”

“Rockefeller, he was asked questions like, who's the best businessman you ever know, you've ever known, and he said, without hesitation, Jay Gold, and then Cornelius Vanderbilt, when he was in his seventies and by far the richest American alive, he said that Ja…”

“For the next 74 years, he could and did so superbly, and kept his hand in by doing a piece of sewing every day of his life.”

“Picasso lived a total of 33,403 days with 26,075 published works. That means Picasso averaged one new piece of artwork every day of his life from age 20 until his death at 91. He created something new every day for 71 years.”

“Beginning with the first strip published on October second, 1950, until the last published on February 13th, 2000 of almost a 50 year run. Schultz wrote, penciled, inked, and lettered by hand every single one of the daily and Sunday strips to leave his studio.…”

“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 a 180 in a day.”

“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.”

“If your industry has some kind of, like, city center where all the talent is, it's probably a good idea to go there.”

“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.”

“In 1938 and 19 39, one exported courtier dress would pay for 10 tons of imported coal, and a liter of exported perfume would pay for two tons of imported gasoline.”

“So he was able to reopen, ah, his fashion house in September, 1940. And he was just one of 60 firms that the Germans allowed to function.”

“Without this financial disaster, Dior would probably have spent his life as a middle-ranking art dealer and died unknown.”

“Boussac's business is the business that a young Bernard Arnal buys. I think he's like, 35 years old at the time.”

“During this decade, Dior sold over 100,000 dresses made from 16,000 design sketches and using 1000 miles of fabric.”

“The sheer volume that they produce, being prolific, increases your surface area of luck.”

“Dior could not actually make a dress. He was a designer, as Coco Chanel said, not a courtier.”

“Dior dressed the rich. Balenciaga the very rich. And this was known at the time. It says during the 19 fifties, a woman graduated from Dior to Balenciaga.”

“He never gave interviews except once to the London Times when he decided to retire.”

“In fact, a seventeen-year-old Givenchy tried to work for him, and he said no.”

“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, sewed like the others, but never identified as his.”

“Abruptly, he retired, shut down his Paris house completely because there was no possible successor, and returned to Spain.”