The Dresser
This article is only a portion of the full article. If you are already a premium subscriber please login. If you are not a premium subscriber, please subscribe for access to all of our content.

The Master of Us  All: Balenciaga, His Work,
His Rooms, His World
by Mary Blume
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
240 pages, $25.

WHILE ostensibly telling the story of the great fashion designer Cristóbal Balenciaga, Mary Blume offers a wider view of the French fashion scene and larger social significance—wider, perhaps, than some might think it deserves. She relates how France’s ascendancy to haute couture “began when Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Batiste Colbert, informed the king that the silk weavers of Lyons were as valuable to the French economy as the gold mines of Peru were to Spain. … Having shown that it had a use, fashion came to have a meaning. It spoke volumes to Balzac and Baudelaire and Proust.”