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This season, Olivier Rousteing will add couturier to his résumé as he relaunches the category at the house that Pierre Balmain built. Now a shadowy figure of fashion history, Balmain was born in 1914 in Savoy and came to Paris as a young man to study architecture, which he soon abandoned in favor of his first love, fashion. He trained at the house Molyneux and worked alongside Christian Dior chez Lucien Lelong. Though Balmain and Dior discussed a joint venture, in the end they forged individual paths. Both are credited with helping revive the French fashion industry postwar, with varying aesthetics. While Dior dreamed of a femme fleur, Balmain was perfecting the chic, if staid, jolie madame look, which was conservative, correct, and aimed at a mature woman. “A garment made by Pierre Balmain was the very quintessence of haute couture,” noted Diana Vreeland.
Balmain worked with big stars including Marlene Dietrich, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, and Josephine Baker on their various creative projects; he is most remembered for his work during the golden age of couture. Respected and hardworking, he sketched his last collection on his deathbed.
Today, the house of Balmain is known for glamour and shine and sex. While it’s true that Pierre Balmain was not averse to some glitz—he designed a dress for Queen Sirikit of Thailand made of 24-karat gold embossed in crystal, and a character in Judith Krantz’s 1978 novel, Scruples, worked at the house—this designer was solidly on the side of the establishment. The stars of his front row were Gertrude “A rose is a rose is a rose” Stein and Alice B. Toklas, American expats associated with the intelligentsia. Rousteing’s shows are draws to the trendsetting Kardashians. New day, new approach. Still, then as now, new entries on the couture calendar are few, and cause a stir. In advance of Rousteing’s star turn, we reprint the essay that Stein penned for Vogue, 74 years ago when Pierre Balmain made his debut on Rue François 1er.
Below, the full text of Gertrude Stein’s essay and a look back at some of Pierre Balmain’s best appearances in Vogue.
“Pierre Balmain—New Grand Succès of the Paris Couture Remembered from Darker Days...” by Gertrude Stein, was first published in the December 1, 1945, issue of Vogue.
There were dark days when we first knew Pierre Balmain. We met his mother in ’39 at Aix-les-Bains and she said she had a son up there in there in the army in the snows of Savoy and he read my books, would I dedicate him one, naturally I was pleased and then came ’40 and the defeat, and we wondered about Pierre Balmain whom we had never seen but who was up there in the snows, and then at last we heard he was safe and then he was back and then we met him. He used to come over on his bicycle, we were many miles away but nobody minded that and the winter was cold and we were cold and he made us some nice warm suits and a nice warm coat, and Alice Toklas insists that one of her suits was as wonderful as any he was showing at his opening and there was no reason why not, after all didn’t he design it and didn’t he come over on his bicycle to oversee and was it not as it all just is in dark days, there are high spots. Well we got to know him better and better, some children played some of my plays and he showed us the chic of making a very tall girl taller by putting her on a footstool. These were nice days in those dark days and then Pierre used to go to and fro from Paris, and he brought us back a breath of our dear Paris and also darning cotton to darn our stockings and our linen, that was Pierre, and then he kept moving around as young men had to do in those days, not to be sent away into Germany and then there was the liberation and then in Paris here we all were and Pierre just full of what he was going to do and we were sure he would do it and he has. I suppose there at the opening, we were the only ones who had been clothed in all those long years in Pierre Balmain’s clothes, we were proud of it. It is nice to know the young man when he is just a young man and nobody knows, and now well I guess very soon now anybody will know. And we were so pleased and proud. Yes we were.
