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 1960s 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 korer in history and he was a true korer not just a designer that is he could design cut so 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 cier in history I'm always fascinated by these people where they're peers the people are doing very similar things of them it's like no no this is the the the person you should pay
attention to Christian Dior called Balenciaga the master of us all and Koko Chanel said that Balenciaga was the only Couture in the truest sense of the word and that everybody else was simply a fashion designer I've come across this level of agulation for peers in the same industry before I was reading a bunch of
books on Johny Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt and I was shocked because i' never I didn't know who Jay gold 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 gold and then Cornelius Vanderbilt when
he was in his 70s and by far the richest American alive he said that Jay gold who was in his 30s at the time was the smartest man in America and so we see something similar Happening Here with Koko Chanel and Christian Dior super successful 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 in 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 her name is Issa uh she set up as a dress maker and
taught the entire Village the little village 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 going to 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 cuz he retired and then then died of a broken heart and so it says 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 that is insane sewing every day for 74 years I've never even heard of anything like that remind me of what Paul Graham said in his essay on episode 314 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 310 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 20 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 someone that was unbelievably prolif just like Bago Picasso lived a total of 33,43 days with 26075 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 I've also seen this before a long time ago I think it was on episode 154 I read the autobiography of Charles Schultz Charles Schultz is the animator the guy that created peanuts and like char Brown check out this crazy uh stat from his autobiography beginning with the first
strip published on October 2nd 1950 until the last published on February 13th 2000 so it's a almost a 50-year run Schultz wrote penciled ined and lettered by hand every single one of the daily and Sunday strips to leave his studio 17,897 in all in an almost 50-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 balanciaga was able to design cut sew fit and finish it's 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 Valencia'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 cuz 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 12 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 got to 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 taping lessons uh to strengthen his ankles and Arnold schweger taking posing instruction from
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 obtain skills few others in your industry possess by age 18 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 12 he's in it he's in a luxxury shop at 18 you see
this PO 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
20s 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 ambidextrious 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 mean Balenciaga is about 24 at this time he opened his first shop he's still in Spain he has not gone to Parish 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 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
suspension in 1931 he was working for the Queen and guess what happens if other people know that you designed for the queen they're going to want your stuff too he has a rapid expansion of his business uh from from an early age so he's got the first uh the first of his shops in s sebasian then he's going
to expand he opened a second house in Madrid and then a third in Barcelona all three were called Issa 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 tour 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 hundred working in Barcelona and so then the Spanish Civil War breaks out
and he's going to have to shut down so he would be around early 40s 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 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 going to have to shut down temporarily because War obviously going to Paris when the Nazis invade he's going to have to shut down temporarily as well so he's 42 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 saaks 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 1960s he was one of the major perisan houses and
himself was regarded as the very top dress maker 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 have 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 there's a bunch of examples but I think the best one is actually if you are young mechanically declined man uh interested in building a car and you were alive in 1900 you better get your ass to Detroit
that's where all the was they wind up knowing each other it just makes for a very fascinating life story and so you see the same thing that's happening in the 1930s and 1940s in Paris and so there's a bunch of examples in the book it's like Dior Coco Chanel Balenciaga balain I think is how you pronounce it e
e St lauron 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 80 years later or whatever the case is but when I think
of valenciaga 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 going to get to this later but
he designed one of his b basic principles of the products that he made was the importance of permanence I have 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 I was looking I 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 40 years from now where you literally have examples of people wearing a dress that he made 75 years ago and so that came to mind when I read that line where it's like no no this guy
was the top dress maker in the the very center of his industry at at the time when it was you know expanding 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 because 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 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 valenciaga 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 research it in 1938 and 1939 one exported cortier dress would
pay for 10 tons of imported coal and a liter of exported perfume would pay for 2 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 is 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 60 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 he's an older person in the sense that like Christian Dior wasn't a successful fashion designer to this point he only had like a 10-e run or
something like that because he winds up dying young but he comes in and he realizes like oh the conditions are right for launching something exciting giving the people something to be excited about after going through you know what 6 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 Creations so I'll get there in a minute but big thing
uh that you're going to 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 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 in the literal sense and
what's crazy is 50 years from now right from where we are in the story Dior would be the beginning of Bernard o n'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 Bernar on all uh it's episode 296 it's very fascinating and he's going
to come up a few times in Dior 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 people that you and I talk about true interest is usually revealed early he loved drawing he loved dressing up he would design like fancy clothes for his sister 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 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 if frequently appears after a loss my previous note what I just read to you was written before I read this sentence and this 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 drops like the way you would describe what Christian Dior is doing before he's going to get this easy opportunity like you won't even believe what's about to happen was that he was essentially hovering on the
fridges of the fashion industry right he was broke taking hble 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 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 or is like superstitious Behavior last week in the Paul Graham episode on 314 he said this
cuz he's read a bunch of biography 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 deor certainly believed in luck he would go and like he just believed in fortune tellers and and so one of his fortune tellers told him that women will be very lucky for you
you will earn 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 wasn't nobody who was in his 40s 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 busac now the crazy thing is this is the business bus's business is the business that a young Bernard anal buys
I think he's like 35 years old at the time so Bernard is going to buy this business 40 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 busac right busac at the time is a textile magnet who was called the king of cotton busac wanted to own a big Paris
fashioned house to give Prestige to his booming but kind of boring business and so someone had told busac 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 reestablish in Paris a salon for the greatest luxury and the highest standards of workmanship it will cost a great deal of money money and
entail much risk now this is fascinating cuz 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 going to hire the best Craftsman in the world we're going to reestablish Paris as a salon for the greatest luxury and the highest standards of workmanship and by the way busack it's going to cost you a great deal of money and entail much risk most people would run away from that busac
runs towards it and to 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 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 deliver 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 busac this is what the founder the entrepreneur Pony Express said this is the ad for that wanted young skinny wiry fellows not
over 18 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 founders 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 busac and this is a
response busac liked the idea and offered to set Dior up immediately with an investment of 10 million Franks and this was later increased to 100 million Franks and we see that Dior came out of the gates swinging remember what James Lon 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 10 years up to dior's death in 1957 by which time the house employed 1,000 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 1,000 mil 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 is 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 cortier never present just one line they produce a variety of styles in each collection and though for publicity 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 May me think of Picasso where you know Picaso is one of the 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 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 Jimmy iven 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 coko 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 cuz he's also a very smart businessman he realizes that more new customers in the Parisian fashion industry is good for everyone in the in 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 1950s 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 going to bring him more customers it just may 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 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 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 founders approach to his business balenciaga's house in Paris looked like
a church and they compare it to some of the other designers at the time and some looked like a London Town townhouse 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's very very much like you would you would feel like almost like monk likee 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 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 were 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 200 and 250 designs all of which he completed himself since he had few tressed assistants and often turned down promising juniors in fact a 17-year-old
gavinci 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 Dent of intense concentration where have we seen that again Edmund Lan 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 to a fitting session for 180 outfits by Dent of intense concentration and by working with a team
who knew exactly what his gestur signified for few words were spoken his fundamental Principle as a dress maker so there's three principles we're going to go over this is the first one his fundamental Principle as a dress maker 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 cuz when you look when I see these designs I would like oh 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 comtable 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 that put this idea in my mind you
can tell when people really have soul in 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 18 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 and 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 dress makers 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 worldclass products are going to contain worldclass 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 embroiders and Specialists lined up for
appointments to see him and often collaborated with him to produce completely new new complex materials and because he could do everything himself that's allowed him to recognize a true genius somebody's way better at that activity than he is he could die himself and 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 there that somebody has soul in the game this is this is how you could tell and this is how you could tell somebody'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 penaga the essence of his you really think about let me back up you really think 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 invent of 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 material 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 cray 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 will 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 70-year career he's he's wealthy he's Rich he's got houses in Paris in Madrid in Barcelona in bask but the way he designed his main resident
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 3 and2 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 1960s come everybody goes to like trendy new designs he found the word trendy abhorent he's remember he's going for permanence so it says Balenciaga continued designing for time and it is significant that his dresses of the late 1960s against the trend cut against the bias as he put it that is a great
maximum that's what he there a direct quote from him cut against the bias cut against the bias is a great maximum so it says Balenciaga continued designing for a time and it is significant that his dresses of the late 1960s 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 dress maker 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 197 too it is most improbable that the kind of dresses Balenciaga created in the 1950s
and 1960s will ever be made again they are indeed Museum pieces to inspire women are among the fortunate descendants of its 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 said before go through the table 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 1,000 too and I'll talk to you again soon