Pierre Balmain

Savoie, Aix-les-Bains, and an abandoned architecture degree, 1914–1934

Pierre Alexandre Claudius Balmain was born on 18 May 1914 in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, an alpine town in Savoie, the only child of a drapery owner and a mother who ran a fashion boutique with her sisters. His father died when he was seven. At eleven he won a scholarship to a boarding school at Chambéry.

The education that mattered happened at weekends. An uncle took him to Aix-les-Bains, a spa town half an hour away that in the 1920s was a resort for wealthy Europeans and Americans, with a casino, an international tennis tournament and luxury hotels. Balmain watched what the women there wore through the years when dress was changing fastest, and he later named the designers he formed his eye on: Madame Premet, Paul Poiret, Jean Patou, Coco Chanel and, above all, Jacques Doucet.

In 1933, at nineteen, he moved to Paris to study architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts. He met the designer Robert Piguet, who had just opened his own atelier, and sold him three fashion sketches. That settled it. He left the school and in 1934 took a job with the couturier Edward Molyneux.

Molyneux, the war, and Lucien Lelong, 1934–1945

Molyneux taught him restraint, in a formula Balmain kept: strip away anything unnecessary, and let an ornamental detail stand only if it makes a constructive contribution to the dress. Called up in 1936, Balmain served in the air force, then the Pioneers of the Foreign Legion, and at the outbreak of war with the Chasseurs Alpins in his own Maurienne mountains. France fell in 1940 and he was demobilised.

Back at Aix-les-Bains, where his mother now had a boutique, he met Lucien Lelong, who offered him work in Paris. Lelong taught him the other half of the trade. Lelong did not design clothes himself. He ran a house, and ran it through an occupation, managing supply, quality, staff and marketing. He had launched the first ready-to-wear line by a couture house in 1934, and in 1940 he persuaded the Germans to let the Paris houses stay open.

The designers on Lelong's floor in those years were Balmain, Christian Dior and Hubert de Givenchy, all learning the same lessons at once. Balmain's biggest success there was a plain black dress he called Petit Profit, small profit, and he noted carefully that 360 clients ordered it.

The House of Balmain and Gertrude Stein, 1945–1950

In early 1945 Balmain opened his own house at 44 rue François-Ier, in the luxury quarter known as the Golden Triangle, in a grand building belonging to the family of the Princesse de Broglie. His mother sold her boutique to fund it, which let him hire sixteen seamstresses. The first show, in his own atelier on 12 October 1945, put fifty models into flannel trousers, loose homespun Breton jackets, wool kimonos trimmed with Persian lamb and brocade evening dresses.

The launch was helped enormously by a friendship. Balmain had met Gertrude Stein at Aix-les-Bains in 1939, and she became his closest friend; she liked telling people he had made her clothes during the war. As a collector and salon host she arrived with a list of rich acquaintances, and she got a photograph of one of his dresses into Time. Four clients came out of that first show: Josephine Baker, Helena Rubinstein, Wallis Simpson and Lilian Baels, the wife of the King of Belgium. For the rest of his career Balmain put one outfit in every show in navy and black, the Duchess of Windsor's favourite pairing.

After his 1946 collection, Alice B. Toklas reviewed the show and the piece was published as A New French Style: Eight Models from Pierre Balmain. He went to New York for the first time that year, and took Lelong's line that a French couturier abroad was there to represent French culture. He kept going back for the rest of his life, lecturing to clubs and women's colleges, opened a New York store in 1949, and began designing lines specifically for American buyers.

Jolie Madame

When Dior launched the New Look in 1947, with long bell-shaped skirts falling from a tight waist, Balmain was already making that shape. What he added was a two-piece suit that softened the angular 1940s line with a relaxed skirt and his own six-button tailored jacket, and a willingness to put shift dresses and fur shawls into daywear. The result was named Jolie Madame after his 1953 perfume, and it defined how a certain kind of wealthy woman dressed for a decade.

His own description of the work was the architecture of movement. The aim was opulence that stayed practical and comfortable, which is a narrower target than it sounds and is the reason his clothes were bought by women who had to spend all day in them.

Perfume was in the plan from the beginning. Through Robert Piguet he had met the perfumer Germaine Cellier, and the two worked together for thirty years on Elysées 64-83 in 1946, Vent Vert in 1947, Balmain in 1948 and Jolie Madame in 1953. He sold the fragrance division to Revlon in 1960 but kept creating the scents himself.

Film, the stage, and Queen Sirikit

From 1947 Balmain designed costumes for stage and screen, always for the leading women, and dressed actresses in eighty-eight films. Sometimes it was a single gown; sometimes a full wardrobe, as for Vivien Leigh in The Deep Blue Sea, Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman and Carroll Baker in Station Six-Sahara. He made Audrey Hepburn's wedding dress when she married Mel Ferrer in 1954, and Patrice Wymore's when she married Errol Flynn. For the stage he dressed Katharine Hepburn in The Millionairess in 1952 and Josephine Baker's 1964 revue, and won the Drama Desk Award for Happy New Year in 1980.

The largest commission of his career was diplomatic. In 1958 Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej and Queen Sirikit planned a six-month tour of the United States and fifteen European countries, and Thailand had no national costume to travel in. Sirikit devised one, a set of eight gowns drawn from Thai dress and history, and chose Balmain to make them and the rest of her wardrobe. He worked in Thai silks. When the tour ran in 1960 the press printed an estimated thousand photographs of it, and The New York Times wrote that Thailand had found a new language, elegance.

The end of the couture age, 1960–1982

By 1960 the working woman was displacing the woman with time to be fitted, and couture was becoming impractical as a business. Balmain concentrated on keeping the house solvent, using the Revlon sale to finance ready-to-wear and sportswear, and took commercial work that a couturier of the previous generation would not have touched. He designed the delegates' uniforms for the 1968 Winter Olympics at Grenoble, the Singapore Airlines cabin uniform, the uniform for Air France's first woman pilot, Danielle Décuré, and the uniform for women in the French civil service.

The assistants he trained went a long way. Gérard Pipart, John Cavanagh and Karl Lagerfeld all worked for him. In 1977 he sold the House of Balmain to Léo Gros of the knitwear company Montagut and stayed on as creative director.

Balmain kept three homes: an apartment on the boulevard Suchet in Paris, a chateau at Croissy-sur-Seine, and the modernist Villa Balmain on Elba, which he designed himself in 1960 with the architect Leonardo Ricci. In 1947 he had hired a young Danish assistant, Erik Mortensen, who became his partner and collaborator for the rest of his life.

Pierre Balmain died of liver cancer at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 29 June 1982, aged 68. Mortensen scattered his ashes in the Maurienne valley he came from, at the foot of the Saint-Sorlin-d'Arves glacier, and took over the house.