00:02:17

(someone): 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. And many would rate him the most original and creative couturier in history. And he was a true couturier, not just a designer. That is, he could design, cut, sew, 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 couturier in history. I'm always fascinated by these people where their peers, the people are doing very similar things of them. It's like, no, no, this is the the person you should pay attention to. Christian Dior called Balenciaga the master of us all. And Coco Chanel said that Balenciaga was the only couturier in the truest sense of the word and that everybody else was simply a fashion designer. I've come across this level of adulation for peers in the same industry before. I was reading a bunch of books on John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt, and I was shocked because I didn't know who Jay Gold was at the time. And Rockefeller, he was asking questions like, who's the best businessman 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.

00:33:06

(someone): He's aiming for permanence. He was impressed by the way dresses, hats, and even accessories in 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 dressmakers, 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. Well, we would use wear. But he would say this is the proper way to present it. Third principle. Right. World class products are going to contain world class 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, embroiderers and specialists lined up for appointments to see him and often collaborated with him to produce completely new complex materials. And because he could do everything himself, that's allowed him to recognize a true genius. Somebody is way better at that activity than he is.

00:31:57

(someone): a second skin. Listen how he talks. This reminded me of Enzo Ferrari, the first person that put this idea in my mind. You can tell when people really have soul in the game. It's 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 in certain old masters remained elegant after hundreds of years, and he constantly got ideas from them.

00:25:53

(someone): 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 will 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 Iveen 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. and every other way Balenciaga was immeasurably superior. And why? Because Dior could not actually make a dress. He was a designer, as Coco 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? Because he's also a very smart businessman. He realizes that more new customers in the Parisian fashion industry is good for everyone in the 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.

00:13:55

(someone): 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 his fashion houses in Spain, he has to do the same thing in Paris. Balenciaga 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 researched it in 1938 and 1939. One exported courtier dress would pay for 10 tons of imported coal. and a liter of exported perfume would pay for two tons of imported gasoline. Seeing words on paper doesn't that doesn't seem real.

00:15:10

(someone): and a liter of exported perfume would pay for two tons of imported gasoline. Seeing words on paper doesn't that doesn't seem real. That's incredible. So 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 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 up to this point. He only had like a 10 year run or something like that because he winds up dying young. But he comes in and he realizes like, oh, the conditions are ripe for launching something exciting, giving the people something to be excited about after going through, you know, what is six 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 creation.

00:16:17

(someone): 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 creation. So I'll get there in a minute. But big thing that you're going to learn about Christian Dior is that you don't get to the top by fitting in. 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 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 shit 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 Arnault's LVMH empire. If you haven't learned about that connection, go back and listen to the first of many episodes that I'll make on Bernard Arnault. It's episode 296. It's very fascinating.

00:17:36

(someone): It's episode 296. It's very fascinating. he's gonna 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 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 sisters 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 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 an 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. It frequently appears after a loss.

00:29:37

(someone): 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 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 will 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 trusted assistants and often turned down promising juniors. In fact, a 17-year-old Givenchy 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 dint of intense concentration. Where have we seen that again? Edwin Land 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.

00:19:50

(someone): 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 Dior certainly believed in luck. he would go and he just believed in fortune tellers. 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 did I mean by that? As of July 1946, Dior was a 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 yours. Life opportunities, a strange beast. It frequently appears after a loss. So he gets this meeting in this month. He meets Marcel Boussac. Now the crazy thing is this is the business. Boussac's business is the business that a young Bernard Arnault 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 Boussac, right?

00:03:30

(someone): And Rockefeller, he was asking questions like, who's the best businessman 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 Coco Chanel and Christian Dior, super successful. in their own right in the same industry like 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 the upset 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 so fit and finish and some of his finest dresses were entirely of his own work and is 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 isa She set up as a dressmaker and taught the entire village, a 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.

00:31:57

(someone): a second skin. Listen how he talks. This reminded me of Enzo Ferrari, the first person that put this idea in my mind. You can tell when people really have soul in the game. It's 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 in certain old masters remained elegant after hundreds of years, and he constantly got ideas from them.

00:09:45

(someone): Remember this for more later when he's compared to Christian Dior. OK, 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 design for the queen? They're going to want your stuff, too. He has a rapid expansion of his business from from an early age. So he's got the first the first of his shops in San Sebastian. 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'd I say? She's the key to everything. Wait till you get to the end. He's got like a shrine to her. 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 100 working in Barcelona.

00:08:37

(someone): He starts sewing at three and a half. He's apprenticing at 12. He's in a luxury shop at 18. You see this 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 3, 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 ambidextrous. 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. In 1919, so that means Balenciaga is about 24 at this time, he opened his first shop. He's still in Spain. He has not gone to Paris yet. So he opened his first shop in San Sebastián 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 later when he's compared to Christian Dior. OK, this is very, very important.

00:33:06

(someone): He's aiming for permanence. He was impressed by the way dresses, hats, and even accessories in 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 dressmakers, 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. Well, we would use wear. But he would say this is the proper way to present it. Third principle. Right. World class products are going to contain world class 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, embroiderers and specialists lined up for appointments to see him and often collaborated with him to produce completely new complex materials. And because he could do everything himself, that's allowed him to recognize a true genius. Somebody is way better at that activity than he is.

00:02:17

(someone): 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. And many would rate him the most original and creative couturier in history. And he was a true couturier, not just a designer. That is, he could design, cut, sew, 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 couturier in history. I'm always fascinated by these people where their peers, the people are doing very similar things of them. It's like, no, no, this is the the person you should pay attention to. Christian Dior called Balenciaga the master of us all. And Coco Chanel said that Balenciaga was the only couturier in the truest sense of the word and that everybody else was simply a fashion designer. I've come across this level of adulation for peers in the same industry before. I was reading a bunch of books on John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt, and I was shocked because I didn't know who Jay Gold was at the time. And Rockefeller, he was asking questions like, who's the best businessman 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.

00:11:51

(someone): 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. The example I use, there's a bunch of examples, but I think the best one is actually if you are a young, mechanically declined man interested in building a car and you were alive in 1900, you better get your ass to Detroit. That's where all the talent was. They wind up knowing each other. 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, Balmain, I think is how you pronounce it, Yves Saint Laurent. They're all in this book. And I went and walked through 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 Balenciaga now, I think of like, you know, it's kind of like loud, trendy, in 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 gonna get to this later, but he designed, one of his basic principles of the products that he made was the importance of permanence.

00:15:10

(someone): and a liter of exported perfume would pay for two tons of imported gasoline. Seeing words on paper doesn't that doesn't seem real. That's incredible. So 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 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 up to this point. He only had like a 10 year run or something like that because he winds up dying young. But he comes in and he realizes like, oh, the conditions are ripe for launching something exciting, giving the people something to be excited about after going through, you know, what is six 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 creation.

00:23:08

(someone): 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, they call one of his 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 Boussac. And this is a response. Boussac liked the idea and offered to set Dior up immediately with an investment of 10 million francs. And this was later increased to 100 million francs. And we see that Dior came out of the gates swinging. Remember what James Laysen said, difference for the sake of it. 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 postwar 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, 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.

00:25:53

(someone): 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 will 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 Iveen 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. and every other way Balenciaga was immeasurably superior. And why? Because Dior could not actually make a dress. He was a designer, as Coco 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? Because he's also a very smart businessman. He realizes that more new customers in the Parisian fashion industry is good for everyone in the 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.

00:17:36

(someone): It's episode 296. It's very fascinating. he's gonna 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 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 sisters 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 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 an 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. It frequently appears after a loss.

00:35:17

(someone): 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, materials 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 crayon 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, 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 the 70-year career? He's wealthy. He's rich. He's got houses in Paris, in Madrid, in Barcelona, in Basque. 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 three and a half years old. The centerpiece of the 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 abhorrent. He's remember he's going for permanence.

00:13:55

(someone): 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 his fashion houses in Spain, he has to do the same thing in Paris. Balenciaga 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 researched it in 1938 and 1939. One exported courtier dress would pay for 10 tons of imported coal. and a liter of exported perfume would pay for two tons of imported gasoline. Seeing words on paper doesn't that doesn't seem real.