Earlier this year it premiered on the Disney+ platform Cristobal Balenciaga, created by Lourdes Iglesias, Aitor Arregi, Jon Garaño and Jose Mari Goenaga, and starring Alberto San Juan. The series, which generally received very good reviews, provoked renewed interest in the elusive, mysterious and at the same time completely fascinating figure of the Basque couturier, his work and his private life, which he always took care to protect as much as possible. Anyone who approaches the series will be unable to resist the seductive influence of that atmosphere that floated in the great salons of Parisian haute couture in the mid-20th century. A somewhat distant and almost mystical elegance in the case of the Getaria genius that, in addition to the designs themselves, was also summarized and crystallized in the house’s models.
According to the journalist and writer María Fernández-Miranda in her biography of the designer, The Balenciaga enigma (Plaza & Janés, 2023), the couturier personally instructed his models not to smile at any time or look directly at the select clients and journalists who attended his shows. The Balenciaga models walked in a peculiar way, “placing the toe first and then the heel, so that rather than walking it seemed like they were sliding on the ground,” the author writes. “An elegant woman must be somewhat unpleasant,” the teacher seems to have said. Balenciaga, who liked to control to the millimeter everything that happened in his house, he also chose the models himself. Sometimes, more than for their beauty, he selected them for their class and his unusual style, and he enjoyed acting as Pygmalion with the new mannequins, teaching them to pose according to the rules of the house. Yours.
Like most couturiers, he also had his fetish models. The general agreement is that in the 1950s his muse was Colette (not to be confused with the writer, who at that time was already around 80 years old). Later, in the sixties, that role was filled by Danielle Slavik, who last year returned to the catwalks to parade again for the firm, now under the command of Demna. But they were not the only ones who dazzled the couturier. Recently, it was discovered that one of those women was born in Zamora and had grown up in Zaragoza. This is María Nieves Hernández Ortiz, known familiarly as Meyesa peculiar woman who came to work for the house thanks to a long series of coincidences and contacts.
The figure of Meyes Hernández would have remained a simple curiosity, one of those that is sometimes told at family dinners, if it had not been for the efforts of the designer and fashion historian from Zaragoza Enrique Lafuente, who discovered his story through his niece, the Zaragoza chef Marta Navarro. She has given Lafuente access to memories, images and family anecdotes and arranged interviews with Meyes’ brothers who are still alive to gradually reconstruct the model’s biography.
“Meyes Hernández was born circumstantially in Zamora in December 1924. His parents were civil servants and were stationed in that city,” Lafuente explains to EL PAÍS. “She was the third of seven siblings and the oldest of the girls. After a few years in the Castilian city, the family lived in Pamplona and, finally, ended up in Zaragoza, where they settled permanently in a large apartment in the center of the city.” The family soon connected with the “good society” of Zaragoza at the time, which, in the end, would be fundamental for Meyes to end up walking under the orders of Balenciaga. However, at that time, she was still a simple teaching student, although, yes, she was closely related to the cultural avant-garde of the capital of the Ebro thanks to her brothers and her partner, the young Zaragoza architect Javier Bald.
The Balenciaga Connection
In that student and intellectual environment is where the future model met the young law student Ramón Esparza. Esparza, more than law, was interested in drawing and, without finishing his degree, he left for Barcelona to perfect his technique and work as an illustrator for a Catalan fashion house. Later, in 1949, his steps headed towards Paris to continue expanding his artistic training.
According to researcher Ana Balda in her conference Ramon Esparza. A name in the shadow of Balenciaga, Esparza and Balenciaga met in the summer of 1950 through mutual friends in Lesaka, Ramón’s town. “Wladzio d’Attainville, Balenciaga’s partner and right-hand man, had died in 1948 and, probably, the couturier saw in Esparza someone with good taste who, in addition to drawing well, could help him as an assistant and right-hand man, partly covering the responsibilities that had been previously managed by d’Attainville,” says Balda. From then on, Esparza would design the firm’s hats and become the Basque designer’s right-hand man. Also in his partner. A union that lasted until the teacher’s death in 1972.
“For Meyes, Zaragoza soon became very small. He was drowning in that provincial city in which the religious and military atmosphere of the postwar period permeated everything. And he belonged to a certain economic and cultural elite of the city,” says Lafuente. “It was too much modern to be a girl from Zaragoza of her time, whose usual destiny used to be simply to get married and have children.” Precisely for this reason, she decided to go to Paris to work as au pair at just over 26 years old and, once there, he contacted Ramón. “Esparza advised her to join a gym to adapt her figure to the beauty standards of the moment with the idea of proposing her to Balenciaga as a booth mannequin,” explains Lafuente. “We know that in 1950 she had already begun to work thanks to a portrait that the Bilbili-born painter Mariano Gaspar Gracián made of her in which she already appears as a sophisticated mannequin.”
The job of a cabin model consisted of enduring long hours standing while they first tested the prototypes and toiles of the dresses and, later, the definitive models for each season’s collection. The model was also in charge of wearing it for the catalog photos and in the presentation show in front of the press, buyers and private clients.
“The first collection of which Meyes photos exist is the autumn-winter collection of 1951-52, presented in Paris on August 6, 1951,” notes the historian. “The model was known at Balenciaga as Mery and she was in charge of wearing some of the most legendary models of those years. Which gives us the idea that she was a highly appreciated mannequin in the house.”
The fact that she was Spanish, a friend of Esparza, and that she understood the comments and jokes that Esparza and Balenciaga exchanged during the endless fittings in the workshop, surely made the bond between the three of them much more special than with the rest of the models. “She was very funny and she really liked to sing and dance at the festivals of Sainte Catherine (patron saint of dressmakers) or at carnivals,” explains Lafuente. All this, moreover, in one of the brightest moments of the house. As Fernández-Miranda explains in his book, in 1950 Balenciaga had a total of 232 workers, including operators, cutters, workshop managers and mannequins. He made two collections a year, each with around 200 designs that the press and buyers eagerly awaited.
The Parisian years
Unlike the Basque couturier, known for his reduced social life, Meyes greatly enjoyed his Parisian period. He “he met Colette, the great Balenciaga mannequin, who was still active in the fifties. She became good friends with another French model from the house named Michèle Farine. They would be intimate for life, there also strengthening the ties of friendship with the future designer André Courrèges, who also worked for Balenciaga since 1950,” recalls Lafuente.
According to his family, Meyes, as in Zaragoza, also connected with the Parisian intellectual environment of the time, which met in places in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood such as Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, the bar Le Montana and the jazz clubs in the area, where he met people like Juliette Gréco, Boris Vian, Roger Vadim and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as fellow models and artists like Annabel Schwob. However, she never lost touch with her city, where she traveled whenever her busy life allowed. In Zaragoza she also frequented the most fashionable places of the moment, such as the Royalty bar, the boîte Pigalle, decorated by Alfonso Buñuel, or the then recently opened Las Vegas Cafeteria. According to the family, on one occasion Meyes made the Paris-Zaragoza trip on a Vespa. Quite a feat that demonstrates his strong character.
Life after Balenciaga
Modeling was not without sacrifices. Maintaining the line and standing for hours on end was not easy and, in 1956, Meyes decided to quit. They had been six intense years, but those that followed were no less so. “Taking advantage of the fact that his brother José Antonio finished her law studies in Zaragoza,” recalls Lafuente, “she decided to see the world with him, forming a singing and dancing musical duo with flamenco and coplero airs. At that time, with tourism to Spain in full expansion, Spanish clichés were fashionable in half the world.”
They named themselves María and Antonio and embarked on a tour of England and Scotland, where they once performed before Queen Elizabeth II. The group also performed in Denmark and Sweden until their separation due to José Antonio going to live in the United States.
The rest of the fifties Meyes dedicated to another of his passions: jewelry design, which he had made in a workshop in the historic center of Zaragoza. Also, thanks to his experience in Paris, he worked for a time at Elizabeth Arden when the company arrived in Spain in 1959. However, Meyes’ busy life came to an abrupt and unhappy end. After marrying Paul-Louis Calvet, a senior Parisian banking executive, in 1960, and becoming pregnant with her first child, the model was affected by a serious infection that ended her life on July 10, 1962, with only 37 years old.
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