Balls - my favourite!

Seventy years ago today, Don Carlos de Beistegui y de Yturbe held a masked costume ball, which he called Le Bal oriental, at his Palazzo Labia in Venice.

From an article by Nick Foulkes in The Rake:

Don Carlos de Beistegui, or Charlie, as he was known to his circle of intimates (of whom there were few), was one of a small group of cosmopolitan plutocrats who dominated European high-life in the years between the Second World War and the beginning of the Jet Set era. They swept into mid 20th-century Europe on a tide of money. Their fortunes, built on the backs of labourers in Central and South America, may have come from unpleasant and malodorous beginnings in silver mines or the exploitation of centuries-old deposits of guano, but they dissipated them in Europe with style and liberality. In the first half of the 20th century the words ‘South American millionaire’ had much the same ring to them as ‘Russian oligarch’ or ‘Chinese billionaire’ have today...

...In 1948 he had happened across the crumbling Palazzo Labia, and, as he walked into the once-grand, dilapidated ballroom, with its flaking frescoes and peeling walls, he was able to see beyond the years of neglect. According to Life magazine, he bought the palace for a reported half a million dollars and spent another three-quarters of a million dollars doing it up.

Then, in the spring of 1951, cards inviting everyone from New World film stars to Old World nobility began to arrive, requesting the honour of their presence at half-past-ten on the evening of September 3 at the Palazzo Labia for an 18th-century costume ball at which masks would be worn. In all, 2,000 of what Life dubbed “the world’s most blueblooded and/or richest inhabitants” were invited.

However, it would have been a mistake for anyone to regard this as a jolly evening on the Grand Canal underwritten by an eccentric millionaire. “Ce n’était pas un bal pour s’amuser,” says Jacqueline de Ribes, who attended the ball as a young woman. “...It was a ball to be happy. But not for fun.”

For Beistegui, his guests were little more than living pieces of furniture with which to dress his Venice creation; as well as wearing costumes, they would also have to make an entrance... literally present a tableau vivant, which would require careful thought and could involve a dozen other, appropriately costumed, guests...

...Venice never had and never would again see anything like it. Over the coming days the city would witness the sort of grandiosity, imperious behaviour and outrageous displays of opulence not seen since the days of the doges. Only the doges did not have to contend with the world of colour magazines and gossip columnists, who were drawn to Venice like iron filings to a magnet...The Duchess of Devonshire wrote to her sister Diana: “I must say, it was fascinating in its way, and the ball itself a real amazer.” Even the private detective who screened each guest on arrival was in period clothes. Anyone who did not adhere to the dress code was quickly whisked out of sight, though most people had invested months and huge sums in their costumes - this was fancy dress as an Olympic sport, and just as competitive.

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Arturo López Willshaw, the multi-millionaire scion of a Chilean guano dynasty who lived in an intriguing ménage with his wife, Patricia, and his wan young lover, Baron Alexis de Redé, was said to have spent $55,000 on a set of costumes that represented an 18th- century Chinese ambassador and his wife. Of course, his lover, de Redé, was a member of the party, clad in robes embroidered with real gold thread, along with a number of other friends and relatives as attendants ... all with masks and excessively long false fingernails, their entrées enhanced by accessories such as songbirds in gilded cages.

...“Daisy Fellowes, regularly voted the best-dressed woman in France and America, portrayed the Queen of Africa from the Tiepolo frescoes in Wurzburg,” recalled the Duchess of Devonshire in 2010. “She wore a dress trimmed with leopard print, the first time we had seen such a thing (still fashionable today, 60 years on).” She accessorised this memorable outfit with her famous ‘Hindu necklace’, a platinum-set suite of jewels by Cartier combining diamonds, emeralds and sapphires in the fashionable ‘tutti-frutti’ style. She completed her outfit with a phalanx of scantily clad male attendants.

And standing there, at the top of the stairs, was the host.

Beistegui was transformed from his normal 5’6” in height to nearly seven-feet tall in giant 16-inch platform shoes concealed by scarlet robes of a Procurator of the Venetian Republic, his disdainful features framed by the curls of a huge wig that cascaded over his shoulders and down his chest...



















Oh! How I wish I could have been there...

Style is what makes you different

Vanity Fair, September 2010:

On the evening of December 5, 1969, the beau monde was assembling for dinners at the most elegant tables in Paris, pre-gaming for the fancy-dress party of the year, if not the decade — Baron Alexis de Redé’s “Bal Oriental.” Among the most impenetrable of these preparatory gatherings was that of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the international jet set’s de facto king and queen.

Dining with the elect at the Windsors’ that night was couturier Oscar de la Renta. “The first course, the second course, the third course, and finally dessert arrived,” de la Renta recalls, “and still Jacqueline de Ribes had not appeared. The Duke was furious!” Suddenly the dining-room doors opened, and in glided the Vicomtesse de Ribes. An exotic vision, the aristocratic beauty was swaddled from the pinnacle of her tasseled hat to the tips of her pointed slippers in a fantastically opulent Turkish disguise, ingeniously cobbled together by the Vicomtesse herself from three of her old haute couture dresses; organza lamé from a remnant market; and a sable cape, acquired from an impoverished ballerina. Recalls de la Renta, “It was a show. And she was the star. No one knew like Jacqueline the power of an entrance.”

People magazine, December 1985:

Yves Saint Laurent once gushed, "She is the pearl in the king of Poland's ear, the Queen of Sheba's tallow-drop emerald, Diane de Poitiers' crescent tiara, the Ring of the Nibelungen. She is a castle in Bavaria, a tall, black swan, a royal blue orchid." Yves, in short, kind of liked her.

Her idea of the common touch is to wear Calvin Klein jeans at home. If the candles in the candelabra aren't all the same height, the servants get a stern lecture.

New York Times, 12th April 2010:

Fashion and style are two of the great loves in the life of the vicomtesse, who was launched into society by her marriage in 1948 at age 18; and who was on the Best Dressed list so often that she had entered the Hall of Fame by 1962. By then photographers such as Richard Avedon, Horst and Irving Penn had captured her elegant profile above the silhouette that her husband described last week as of a "magnificent gazelle."

"They say I am the last survivor of the Beistegui ball - it sounds like surviving the Titanic," said the countess, referring to one of the grandest social events of the 20th century: the masked oriental ball thrown in 1951 in Venice by Mexican/French heir Carlos de Beistegui, with the clotted cream of international society from the Duchess of Windsor to the Aga Khan.

It Girl blog:

In 1983, during Paris Fashion Week she presented a 14 look collection at her house. Yves Saint Laurent lent her his lighting and sound people and he sat front row along with Pierre Bergé, Ungaro and Valentino. "Everybody was prepared to ridicule the society lady making fashion. But she made beautiful clothes. Jacqueline's an elegant lady with a naughty twist," said Women's Wear Daily.

"I'm designing for a woman with my sense of elegance," de Ribes says, "someone who is astonishing without creating astonishment. I want to dress the anti-tarty, sexy woman."

The collection was a critical and commercial hit. Saks Fifth Avenue signed her to an exclusive three-year contract. Saks even made mannequins that were replicas of her own image!

"Style is what makes you different" – Vicomtesse Jacqueline De Ribes (born 14th July 1929)



Jacqueline De Ribes in Wikipedia

"All I want is the best of everything"

Alexis von Rosenberg, Baron de Redé, was a remarkable aesthete, art collector and host of some of the most magnificent society parties of 20th century Paris. His was the most luxuriantly camp world, and one we can only dream of here at Dolores Delargo Towers...



From a fabulous article by Christopher Petankas in the New York Times:

By his own reckoning, de Redé was self-centred, impatient, indifferent to affection, unimpressed by royalty and always, as he famously told the wife of the mayor of Paris one night at dinner at the Elysee Palace, très occupé doing nothing. His life was dedicated to manners, protocol, museum-quality collecting and entertaining on a huge and hugely imaginative scale. As de Redé had the money to support his pastimes and was not shy about spending it, doing rien wasn’t an empty threat.

In 1956 he hosted the Bal des Têtes, introducing an unknown assistant at Dior named Yves Mathieu Saint Laurent to Paris society through the decorations and confectionery headpieces of plumes and paillettes that the baron had commissioned. Thirteen years later he bested himself, by all accounts, with the Bal Oriental, designed by the brilliant but forgotten team of Valerian Rybar and Jean-Francois Daigre, complete with life-size papier-mâché elephants, a cabaret à la Turc and bare-chested bodybuilders brandishing flaming torches and costumed as Nubian slaves.

“All I want is the best of everything, and there’s very little of that left,” de Rede once said, helping himself to that marvellous line minted by Lucius Beebe, the society columnist for the New York Herald. Among his other peccadilloes, the baron was severely repulsed by men who crossed their legs to expose a sun-starved length of calf; he pooh-poohed dining rooms (“I set up a table wherever it suits me”); he thought it bad taste to speculate as to who might or might not have good taste; and he held that nothing less than a whole rose head per finger bowl would do, petals being for concierges.

Quoted on Wikipedia: "Redé's notoriety rested on being the best kept man in Paris: his wealth derived from his lover Arturo Lopez-Willshaw, who continued to maintain a formal residence with his wife in Neuilly. (Their) Hôtel Lambert dinner parties were at the centre of le tout Paris."

On the death of his erstwhile lover in 1962, Redé inherited half of the Lopez-Wilshaw fortune, which, thanks to some judicial investments, made him very rich and very extravagant indeed.



The illustrator and "collector of the exotic" Philippe Jullian described the world of Lopez-Willshaw and Redé as "like a small 18th-century court, with all the usual intrigues".





Indeed, the guest list at his Bal Oriental in December 1969 reads like a "Who's Who" of the upper echelons of society at the time - including Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild and Baron Guy de Rothschild, the Bolivian billionaire Antenor Patiño, Comtesse Jacqueline de Ribes, Prince Johannes of Thurn and Taxis, Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein, Baron Arnaud de Rosnay, art collector Jean Claude Abreu, artist Salvador Dalí, Vicomtesse Dale de Bonchamps, society hostess Sao Schlumberger, the Duke and Duchess of Cadaval, couturiers Oscar de la Renta and Hélène Rochas, ballet dancer Serge Lifar, film producer Vincente Minnelli (Liza's dad), jewellery designer Kenneth Jay Lane, socialite Dolores Guinness, industrial magnate Konrad Henkel, Lazard bank chairman Michel David-Weill, and superstar Brigitte Bardot.



The unbridled decadence of de Redé's life continued to expand as he formed a society alliance with Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, creating lavish and extravagant themed parties with her at which members of the "new society" of the 60s and 70s were the much-photographed guests - Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the Stones (in whom de Redé had a business, as well as personal, interest) and Liza Minnelli among them. Alexis de Redé was himself named on the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1972. He lived on in solitary luxury (Marie-Hélène died in 1996) in his beloved Hotel Lambert until 2004.



The last word on "La Pompadour de nos Jours" (as Nancy Mitford called him) is in a reference to his notoriously camp memoirs (partly written by writer and broadcaster Hugo Vickers), again from the New York Times:

A reader of Alexis’s memoirs is left with the impression that, along with the Lambert, it was his practice of misting the flowers just before sitting down to dine - "It makes them look as though the dew is on them" - that formed the most meaningful part of his legacy. It’s hard to imagine anyone really believing that squirting a bunch of roses required special skill, or a fancy silver-plate vaporizer from Puiforcat. But the Baron was insistent. "Others have tried to copy", he wrote, "but usually fail."

Alexis von Rosenberg, Baron de Redé obituary in The Telegraph