Word: balenciaga
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...gentle fall weather. At Longchamps the crowds were out for the running of the race of the year, the 40 million-franc Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. Men in morning coats and grey cravats walked amid the drift of chestnut leaves with elegant women in Balenciaga and Dior gowns and outsize souffle hats. A few miles across town in the cavernous glass-roofed Grand Palais, thousands of other Frenchmen thronged the annual Salon de l'Auto to stare with passionate absorption at the chromium flash and gadgets of the 1959 model cars. These people, the acquisitive bourgeois...
They are seen everywhere in West Germany these days: plump, well-barbered, aggressive men, their eyes alert for opportunity or slightly lidded after a heavy meal. They travel from factory to bank to hotel in chauffeur-driven Mercedes 3005's; their women are gowned by Dior, Heim, Balenciaga. Liveried servants attend them at banquets in redecorated medieval castles. They are the new German millionaires, whose energy, efficiency and shrewdness have contrived, organized and engineered the astonishing miracle of West Germany's economic rise from the ashes...
Some of the talent, like Norman Chandler's wife Buffie, is home-grown and thrives on achievement. Trim and smart (dresses by Dior and Balenciaga) at 56, Buffie Chandler first dived energetically into public life in 1935 as a volunteer at the Los Angeles Children's Hospital, inevitably became a trustee. Inevitably, too, she became a regent at the University of California, almost singlehanded rescued the foundering Hollywood Bowl concerts, collected civic committee chairmanships like baubles on a charm bracelet. It was she, says her husband, who steered the Times into its long war on the great...
...Spaniard. In this close, inner world of high fashion, Dior is sometimes deprecated as "the General Motors of Fashion." For the few women who can wear his severely elegant suits and dresses, the designer's designer is a handsome Spaniard named Cristobal Balenciaga. His admirers speak of him as of a dark, mysterious priest in an inner shrine. Said one elegant Parisienne: "Dior is a great publicist, a kind of Barnum of fashion. He has superb workrooms, everything is beautifully and interestingly done. But the only real designer is Balenciaga." Son of a Spanish boat captain, 61-year...
...Beginning in Manhattan, the Dean family and the play move from one hotel suite to another (Manhattan, Paris, Seville, Rome, Paris). Father, despite a heart of gold, is a bit Babbitty, short-tempered and over-possessive of his two daughters; Mother Knows Better and, between visits to Dior and Balenciaga, smooths things out; one daughter acquires a pianist and the other a painter. The usual names are on the Deans' list-the Sistine Chapel, the Catacombs, the Louvre; Mr. Dean's sharp-tongued sister and her husband keep barging in; a maid keeps talking French, Mr. Dean keeps...