What I learned from reading Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney by Paul Johnson.

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And So 1 more thing before we jump into the incredible story of Balenciaga.

I was so hyped up after studying and then listening to this episode.

The thing I'm going to be, or try to be the Balenciaga of entrepreneurial podcasts.

I do wanna tell you about 1 of the best podcasts I've heard this year.

It is episode 336 of Invest Like the Best with my friend Jeremy Giffin.

It is called Special Situations in Private Markets.

This episode has gone viral undisturbingly so.

I actually saw somebody say that they've listened to 750 episodes of podcasts in the last year and they think it's the best episode they've heard.

I will leave a link down below, but you could probably just search whatever you're listening to this on.

If you search for Invest Like the Best, make sure you follow that show, and then make sure you listen to episode 336.

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 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, no, this is 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 asked 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 it on James Cameron He can do any job that a movie needs to be to be made.

And so back to Balenciaga, it says that he could design, cut, sew, fit and finish.

And 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 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 once you finish this and you go back through, you're like, oh, she was the key the whole time.

She set up as a dressmaker and taught the entire village, a little village, all the women in the village on how to sell Balenciaga at age 3 and a half.

He joins her class and he winds up showing immediately astonishing skill with a needle.

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 works in this industry till the day he dies.

Or I guess right before he dies because he retired and 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 1 of my favorite lines in the 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 and Picasso episode, that is episode 310.

That is based on the same book that I'm reading from and going over with you now.

It's this book by Paul Johnson called Creators.

It profiles, I would say, maybe 20 of the greatest creators in history.

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 something that was unbelievably prolific just like Balenciaga Picasso lived a total of 333003 days with 26, 000 and 75 published works.

That means Picasso averaged 1 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 Charlie Brown check out this crazy Stat from his autobiography beginning with the first strip published on October 2nd 1950 until the last published.

On February 13th 2000 so the fit almost a 50 year run.

Schultz wrote penciled inked and lettered by hand every single 1 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?

Just said Schultz wrote, penciled, inked and lettered by hand every single 1.

We just said that Balenciaga was able to design, cut, sew, fit and finish the exact same idea, just a different industry and a different product that they're making.

Big things start small, something you and I have talked about over and over again.

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.

Because the person that's noticing this, right, just happens to be the great grandmother of the Queen of Spain.

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.

So he's got, he can 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 tap dancing lessons.

To strengthen his ankles and Arnold Schwarzenegger taking posing instruction 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 dancing, like getting tutored one-on-one from a ballet dancer.

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.

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.

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.

That would be like me being able to read 2 books at once, 1 with each eye.

In 1919, so that means Balenciaga is about 24 at this time, He opened his first shop.

So he opened his first shop in San Sebastian on a coast more frequently by high society.

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.

He only wanted to go to the very, very top.

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?

He has a rapid expansion of his business from an early age.

So he's got the first of his shops in San Sebastian.

He opened a second house in Madrid and then a third in Barcelona.

So they're named after his mother, his Spanish 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 eventually is going to reopen in Spain I think just close for 2 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 gonna have to shut down temporarily as well.

So he's 42 years old he's in Paris and he presents his first collection.

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 Saks 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 1 of the major Parisian houses and himself was regarded as the very top dressmaker.

And I do want to pause here because I did something this morning before I recorded because this is another example of like, you and I have talked about this, like 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 1 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.

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, Balmain, I think is how you pronounce it, Yves Saint Laurent.

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 1, 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, my opinion, very ugly.

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, 1 of his basic principles of the products that he made was the importance of permanence.

It blew my mind and I'll get there in a minute.

There is dresses still, like the dresses that he made with his hands are still, women have passed them along to, now I guess it'd be their great, either granddaughter or great-granddaughter.

And so, 1, I just thought it was interesting.

When I went on the walk this morning, I was looking through the store window.

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 dressmaker in the very center of his industry at the time when it was, you know, expanding and there's all this energy and wait till you get to how important the fashion industry was to the Paris economy.

Before we get there, I wanna pull out 1 paragraph that I thought was very interesting because he's deadly serious about his work, deadly serious about the quality.

There's 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.

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.

In France, the fashion industry was regarded as a vital exporter.

Paul Johnson's a great writer and a historian.

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.

1 exported Courtier 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 that doesn't seem real.

The fact is, he was 1 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 1 of 60 firms that the Germans allowed to function.

And so once the war ends, France is devastated.

What's interesting is these are conditions ripe for launching something new.

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 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 that people actually producing like the materials that they're using to make their creation.

But big thing that you're gonna learn about Christian Dior is that you don't get to the top by fitting in.

All this was in preparation for his first proper post-war collection.

When his 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 1 failure after another.

So let me give you background to understand like how unique this was.

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 the first of many episodes that I'll make on Bernard Arnault.

It's very fascinating and 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 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.

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.

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.

My previous note when I just read you was written before I read this sentence and is exactly what had just come to mind without this financial disaster Dior would probably spend 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 jobs.

Like the way you would describe what Christian Dior is doing before he's gonna get this crazy 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 humble 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.

In this book, I do not perhaps pay enough attention to the role of luck in the creative process, especially to the way it sometimes allows a frustrated would-be creator to fulfill his destiny.

I want to pause there before I get into Dior's superstitious behavior.

Last week, in the Paul Graham episode on 314, he said this, because he's read a bunch of biographies just like I have.

When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved.

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#315 Balenciaga and Dior