Scruples (23 page)

A fitter’s hours are long. In a house like Balmain, which dresses not only rich women of the world but also busy actresses, there are many fitting appointments scheduled for early morning and late afternoon. If just one client arrives late, and there is always at least one such tardy lady every day, the tight work schedule becomes a nerve-racking race against the clock. A fitter is on her feet or on her knees all day, except during lunch, and by the time evening comes she is often close to physical and nervous collapse. Before a collection, she will often work until four or five in the morning, fitting the new models on girls who often faint with fatigue. In the fifties and sixties what the French couture was really all about was not the endless succession of “new” looks that the fashion press wrote about so breathlessly but the
fit
of the dress or suit or coat. Without good fitters, any dress house, designer’s inspiration or no, would have been bankrupt within a year. (These days, with only three thousand women in the world regularly buying all their clothes from the Paris couture, the dress houses remain open in order to sell their ready-to-wear and their perfumes; haute couture is merely a loss leader, a loss leader which, nevertheless, makes the world brighter.)

Shortly after beginning to work at Balmain, Hélène O’Neill realized that she couldn’t possibly live in the heart of her family at Versailles. If she added the burden of the journey back and forth each day, on that crowded little train, she could never maintain the stamina necessary for her difficult work. She found a tiny apartment for herself and Valentine in an old building in the network of streets within walking distance of Balmain and arranged for her daughter to begin school nearby. On Sundays and holidays the two of them visited one or another of Hélène’s brothers or sisters who lived as close to each other as possible and vied with each other in spoiling their widowed sister and fatherless niece.

Most French schoolchildren go home for lunch. Valentine’s home became the house of Balmain. By the age of six and a half she was accustomed to walking inconspicuously through the employee’s entrance and being greeted with a grave handshake from the guard. Gliding silently upstairs through the corridors deserted by the lunchtime exodus, she found her mother sitting expectantly in the corner of her atelier, one of the eleven at Balmain. There was always something hot, nourishing, and delicious in Hélène’s covered basket for them to share. Many of the other workers also brought their lunches from home, and soon Valentine found herself adopted by forty women, many of whom were not on speaking terms with each other from one year to the next, but all of whom had a soft word for Madame Hélène’s well-behaved, little half-orphaned daughter.

After school, Valentine refused to go home to an empty apartment. Instead, she took her heavy book bag and crept back into her own corner of the atelier, sometimes doing her homework with quick concentration and sometimes intently observing the busy, self-important comings and going of the room. She took great care to never get in anyone’s way, and within a few months she was such a familiar figure, there in her corner, that the robust, often irreverent working-women spoke as freely to each other as if she hadn’t been there at all. She heard wonderful tales of the clashes of temperament that took place in the fitting rooms, of the good and bad points of customers named Bardot and Loren and the Duchess of Windsor, of the fights to near death between one
première vendeuse
and another over the location of seats for the collections or the possession of a new customer, and of the antics and scenes of jealousy in the
cabine
where the mannequins dressed—gorgeous, dramatic girls with theatrically heavy eye makeup and names like Bronwen and Lina and Marie Thérèse. But, for the most part, when Valentine had time to spare from her homework, she was fascinated not by gossip but by the work she saw going on so steadily: the way in which a dress, which she saw start out as several unpromising pieces of stiff white muslin cut into a pattern, would, over a number of weeks and at least one hundred fifty hours of hand labor and three or more fittings, be worked, stitch by stitch, into a chiffon ball gown destined for a Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld and priced, even in those days, at something between two and three thousand dollars.

It went without saying that the echelon of command at
chez
Balmain did not know that a child was being all but brought up in one of their workrooms. Pierre Balmain, for all his kindness, and Madame Ginette Spanier, the all powerful directrice, who ran the house from her desk at the top of the main stairs, would have taken a decidedly dim view of such a lapse. Several times, on the rare occasions when Madame Spanier, raven-haired, explosive, superbly exuberant, and quite irrepressible, burst into the atelier to successfully mediate an impending revolution, Valentine had always hidden behind a rack of finished ball gowns, which was placed just next to her little stool for exactly that purpose.

When Hélène’s last fitting was finally over and her customer had departed into the Paris night in her waiting limousine—for, in those days, twenty to thirty thousand women flocked to Paris each season to outfit themselves completely in great custom clothes—the mother and daughter would walk home to their simple supper. After they had finished, Valentine always had more homework, but an evening rarely passed without her asking her mother about the happenings at Balmain. The details of workmanship fascinated her. She wanted to know the rationale behind each seam and buttonhole. Why did Monsieur Balmain always use an odd number of buttons, never an even number? Why did Madame Dietrich send one skirt lining back six times to have the seams changed? Wasn’t it just a lining, after all, not the dress? Why were all the ateliers for tailoring completely separated from those for dressmaking? Why was one atelier in charge of the jacket and skirt of a suit, while another worked on the blouse and the scarf that belonged to that suit, since they were destined to be worn together? What was the vast, apparently unbridgeable difference between being able to cut wool and cut silk? Why did men fitters always work on anything that was tailored, and women fitters work the softer designs?

Most of her questions Hélène found easy to resolve, but the one question that interested Valentine the most was one she could not answer. “How does Monsieur Balmain get his ideas?” Finally she told the persistent child, “If I knew that, my little one, I would be Monsieur Balmain—or perhaps Mademoiselle Chanel or Madame Grès.” And they would both giggle at the idea.

Valentine never stopped wondering. One day when she was thirteen she began drawing her own ideas for dresses and found the answer. The ideas just came—that was all. You imagined them and they came and you tried to draw them and if they didn’t look right you tried to think why and then draw them over again, and again, and again.

But that wasn’t enough, of course. You had to know if the sketches you drew would work on a human body. She, Valentine, could sew beautifully. She had been learning from her mother for eight years. But just knowing how to sew could lead, at best, only to a job like her mother’s, which seemed to get more exhausting every year. Or perhaps to becoming a little neighborhood “couturière” who stole ideas from the great collections and reproduced them as best she could for her middle-class clients. Even then Valentine knew that such a future wasn’t good enough.

Valentine had never been just another French schoolgirl. When she arrived in Paris at the age of six she was a boisterous, red-haired American kid ready to fit easily into first grade—in New York. Overnight she had had to turn into a French schoolchild, one of the legion of overburdened, well-behaved, pale, little creatures whose youthful lives are expected to be devoted to learning. Even the smallest French village schoolhouse gives its children an education that puts any American public school to shame. She made the transition well, and by the time Valentine was ten she was studying Latin as well as making her first acquaintance with Molière and Corneille, perfecting her exquisite penmanship, and spending long hours with the terrible labyrinth of French grammar, which can be learned only by years of endless repetition and analysis.

She had become an arresting-looking young girl. Her features, pointed, delicate, and full of quick intelligence, were classically Gallic. Yet her coloring, the furiously red hair, the brilliant, naughty, light green eyes, the three freckles on her nose, the splendidly white skin, all were classically Celtic. Even in the uniform of the French public-school girl—a drab pinafore, always just a little too short, worn over a long- or short-sleeved blouse, according to the season—she managed to stand out from the crowd of others. Perhaps it was the particular way she had of tying back, with bright plaid ribbons, her thick braids from which curls nevertheless escaped. Perhaps it was her vitality, which couldn’t be contained within the strictly required limits of schoolgirl docility. Valentine was always a creature of extremes. She led her class in English and drawing. She was last in math, and as for deportment, it was best not spoken of.

By the time she was a teen-ager, Valentine was the only girl in school who collected Beach Boys records; all the others adored Johnny Halliday. With a sense of dedication she went to American movies every Saturday afternoon, preferring to go alone so that no one could distract her. Although she thought in French, she never allowed her English to be forgotten or even grow rusty, as usually happens with so many languages spoken fluently in childhood. She always remembered that she was half American, but she never talked about it, even with her mother. Her dual citizenship was like a magic talisman to Valentine. Too precious—and too remote—to be exposed.

As Valentine approached the age of sixteen she decided that there was no point in continuing her education. After sixteen she could legally leave school and take a job. What good was there in being able to repeat by heart vast amounts of the literature and poetry of France, to say nothing of more mathematics, for someone who was destined to become a designer? For she was going to be a designer, although she was the only one who knew it.

Even if there had been a Parsons School of Design or a Fashion Institute of Technology in Paris, as there are in the United States, at that time Valentine would not have had the money to pay for years of schooling. The only route for her was to become an apprentice. An apprentice is not supposed to be creative. Even the great fitters and cutters of the couture are not supposed to be creative—creativity is left to the master couturier, each one of whom has learned his métier working for other couture houses, often beginning as a sketch artist. Even Chanel lacked technical knowledge when she started, set up in a hat shop by her lover of the period. It is rare when a designer can actually cut and sew, as can Monsieur Balmain and Madame Grès.

But very few great designers, if any, started in as lowly a position as did Valentine. In 1967 she became a midinette, one of the slaves of the couture. Her mother’s position was responsible for her getting the job, but from then on she was on her own. A midinette can ruin a yard of brocade worth two hundred dollars and that is the last of her. A midinette can take too long to finish basting hemlines and that is the last of her. Every dress in the collection is priced to include the cost of every last stitch, every last hook and eye, every inch of trim, each button, right down to the number of pieces of tissue needed to pack it in the big, white Balmain box. One careless midinette can cost the house its profit on a dress or suit.

For five years, from 1967 to 1972, Valentine progressed steadily, from midinette to second hand to first hand, making, in only a few years, a leap that usually takes twenty years if it is ever made at all. She had started far ahead of the others in technical skill, thanks to the intensive training her mother had given her on the sewing machine at home, and now she absorbed the side of the business that took place outside the atelier. After the first two years she was often needled in the fitting rooms, where princesses and movie stars and the wives of the richest men in South America stood in their lingerie for hours, sometimes with sweat pouring down their faces in the perfumed, airless atmosphere, sometimes in tears of rage and disappointment at the way their new clothes looked on them. Valentine learned to anticipate within seconds the moment at which a woman would try to blame the house of Balmain for the fact that she could not wear a garment with the same allure as could a mannequin who was four inches taller and weighed sixty pounds less than she. She also absorbed the techniques used to deal with this frequent occurrence, techniques developed over lifetimes of selling by the hardened, canny, cynical chief vendeuses. From the women who were fitted, often in pain from the discomfort of standing absolutely still for hours at a time in their beautiful, handmade, high-heeled shoes, she learned the power of vanity and the stubbornness of the determination to possess exactly the right dress, no matter what agony was involved. She learned more about women, especially rich women, than any girl her age should know.

Now Valentine was able to attend the rehearsals of the new collections, held for the staff only, where she could see the dresses she had worked on herself, and hundreds of other designs she had never seen before, pass by on the quick-stepping, nerve-sick mannequins. Now she could watch as Balmain and his assistants conferred over what pieces of jewelry, what gloves, which hat, and what fur scarf was needed to complete each ensemble to perfection. Valentine had been born with taste. Now, daily, it grew in the Balmain forcing garden. She found that she became able to divine accurately, from seeing the rehearsal of a collection, which dresses and suits would sell the most and which original designs would never be bought, not even when they ended up on the sale rack after that particular collection was completed. These dresses are picked over by women who wait like vultures for this occasion, buying dresses that have been worn every day for four or five months by the mannequins, all of whom sweat like racehorses crossing the finish line as they calculate whether or not they have intrigued a customer into ordering the dress they are showing, thereby earning themselves a tiny commission.