Ballard
Bettina was a journalist. During the 1950s she was editor-in-chief of Vogue America. She wrote a memoir called In My Fashion. Italian fashion owes her a great deal, as it also owes to Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar, Sally Kirkland of Life, Eugene Sheppard and Hebe Dorsey of the New York Herald Tribune, Fay Hammond of the Los Angeles Times, Nancy White of Life, and Matilde Taylor (she was a supporter of the correspondent Elisa Massai) of Women’s Wear Daily which, in the season of the first presentations, supported it enthusiastically In February 1951, a few days after the first shows in Florence which gave Made in Italy its start, and at which only five Italian journalists appeared, Giovanni Battista Giorgini, the organizer, received this letter from Bettina Ballard: “Actually your event was too close to the French Collections to allow me to leave Paris. But I received excellent news from Jessica and Franco of Bergdorf Goodman and from Cole of Leto Chon Balbo. They all seem very interested in Italy, and Vogue is too. I’m sure that we will do something together very soon.” That “soon” came quickly. On July 19th of the same year, Ballard sat in the first row at the Grand Hotel in Florence for the second Italian High Fashion Show. In her memoir, she commented on the success of Italian clothing remembering her time in Rome as a Red Cross nurse right after World War II: “When I saw those aristocratic ladies in Rome wearing dresses that were from before the war but made of flowered silk, with sandals like those worn by friars or else that were jewel-shaped, with large, fringed straw hats, I, who was dressed in the latest Paris fashion, felt very out of fashion. The victory of the Italian style was determined, indeed, by its imagination, by the inspiration of a fashion not made for special occasions, and not for the liturgy, but a fashion inspired by the Mediterranean and by living in its light and midst its colors.”