My top 10 highlights from Balenciaga and Dior (Chapter 13 of Creators)

1. Dior dressed the rich, Balenciaga the very rich.

2. Of all the creative people I have come across, Cristóbal Balenciaga was easily the most dedicated to the business of making beautiful things.

3. From the age of three to his mid-twenties he learned every aspect of his trade.

4. He could design, cut, sew, fit, and finish, and some of his finest dresses were entirely his own work.

5. 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, indeed sacerdotal.

6. Trendy was an expression that Balenciaga found abhorrent.

7. He never commented on other designers.

8. For the next seventy-four years he could, and did, sew superbly, and kept his hand in by doing a piece of sewing every day of his life.

9. He wanted his dresses to be bequeathed.

10. Cut against the bias.

Listen to Founders #315 Balenciaga