My Years and Seasons: The Autobiography of Pierre Balmain

By Pierre Balmain

Pierre Balmain ranks with the greatest couturiers of the mid-twentieth century. He created dresses for royalty, stage and screen stars with customers including Marlene Dietrich, Katherine Hepburn, Sophia Loren, Gertrude Stein and the Duchess of Windsor. More recently, his vintage gowns have been worn by Penelope Cruz and Angelina Jolie.

During his early career Balmain worked alongside Christian Dior for the couturier Lucien Lelong. The two became great friends, planning to set up a business together, but eventually went their separate ways – and in 1945 Balmain opened his own salon. In his autobiography Balmain recalls his single-minded journey to success, from life as the son of a rural draper to renowned designer.

First published in 1964, this book is part of the V&A Fashion Perspectives Series. Selected by V&A publishing in consultation with our world-leading fashion curators, the Fashion Perspectives series offers an access all areas pass to the glamorous world of fashion. Models, magazine editors and the designers themselves take readers behind the scenes at the likes of Balenciaga, Balmain, Chanel, Dior, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue in the golden age of couture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: V&A Publishing
• Release date: Feb 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781838510329

Book preview

PREFACE

One day towards the end of the Occupation I was on my way to lunch with the Philippe Diolés when at a bookshop where I was a regular customer I bought a de luxe edition of a recently published book, Etat de Veille, by Robert Desnos. To my surprise the poet was one of the guests at the lunch.

He was amused by the coincidence and also, I think, a little flattered by my evident interest in his work, when it became obvious that, not knowing he was to be present, I could not have purchased the book merely to please him.

Because of his friendly interest I chatted to him of my childhood and what I knew of my family history and, when lunch was finished, he offered to autograph my copy of his book. His enthusiasm was such that he wrote the following poem on the flyleaf:

15.XII.43

à Pierre Balmain

Cet état de veille

en espérance du lendemain

très amicalement

DESNOS

Dans la combe où descendit le bonhomme

U y a un bouillon blanc

Lustre jaune dans le salon de soie,

On y sert le thé de sang

Aux dépens d’une espèce de chose

D’une espèce de bête

Aux yeux très doux

Qui ne s’est pas cassé quatre pattes

En descendant du ciel.

Alas, the hope for the morrow which he evoked was to be cruelly mocked. The next day, in fact, he went the way of the Nazi torture camps and never came back.

His poem refers to the story I had told him.

During the Middle Ages, certain nomadic groups crossed the Alps by a route which took them through the little village of St-Sorlin d’Arve, situated high above one of the most picturesque valleys of Savoy. In those times when the rigour of living conditions stifled all pity, these human herds left their sick and injured behind them for dead.

One day the villagers found a young man lying unconscious. They looked after him and brought him back to life but he did not say anything that they could understand. Later, when he had learnt enough of their language to talk to them, he could not remember where he had originally come from. For want of a name, the villagers, who had discovered him on the slopes of a mountain called the Balme, christened him Balmain.

The archives of the village church having been burned during the Revolution, there is no material proof to substantiate this story.

CHAPTER ONE

In the Beginning

Dressed in a costume of navy blue crêpe-de-Chine with a small white motif that had the air of a fashion house of distinction, the Englishwoman made a picture of elegance as she strolled through streets drowsy under the exceptional heat of the May morning and the lull that descends upon Paris during the sacrosanct hour of lunch. She was a lady of a certain age, as the French say of those whose years are no longer for counting, and had recently become less at ease than when she first left her hotel – no doubt the Ritz. She was sure she was being followed: by a tall young man with long brown hair, who, in a suit with shoulders a little too square, trousers a little too wide, and stripes a little too loud, certainly displayed no British elegance. A Frenchman or possibly an Italian, whose dark eyes never left her. Perhaps she thought they were fixed on her Hermès handbag or heavy gold bracelets. She quickened her pace down the Rue Caumartin, towards the Rue de la Paix, from the Rue Royale.

Her anxiety was needless. The young man was following her, but only because he was entranced by the most inspiring experience in his life; by seeing for the first time someone wear in public a dress that he had helped to design.

The alarming young man was myself.

Her Hermès handbag, I assessed critically, was a shade casual for the costume, and her Hellstern shoes should have been in a narrower fitting: I did not then know of the English preference for comfortable feet!

Could I summon up enough courage, I wondered, as I continued to dog her footsteps into the Rue de la Paix, to tell her that I had just begun the fascinating career of couturier with Molyneux, and thank her for the thrill she had given me in choosing a dress of my creation?

It was no good. I did not dare; and to this day I have never had enough effrontery to tell an unknown woman – even when, as has happened, she has been sitting near me on a flight from Paris to New York, or travelling in the adjoining wagon-lit on the night train to Rome – that I had designed the dress she was wearing. So, torn between reactions of pleasure and shyness, and paralysed by the wall of reserve which I deplore but cannot prevent sometimes springing up around me, I watched her acknowledge the salute of the gold-braided commissionaire and pass into Cartier’s, which was reopening after lunch.

Still slightly dazed, I realized that I should be late back at Molyneux and have to face a reprimand from the strict manager, Monsieur Georges. But I was ready to brave anything. I had seen my childhood dreams take material shape.

There are many ways into the world of haute couture. Some, like Lucien Lelong, inherited their businesses. Christian Dior, whose studies were cut short by family financial troubles, started work in an art gallery before he began selling designs to couturiers and modistes. For myself I do not remember a time when I was not interested in dress design and the intriguing play of materials against the feminine form. The world of fashion has always fascinated me, although I come from a background in which there were few couturiers and no one to encourage me in my ambition.

I was born at eight o’clock on Monday morning, 18 May 1914, at St-Jean-de-Maurienne, not far from Aix-les-Bains. My parents were well-to-do tradespeople. My mother’s father, Pierre Ballinari, a native of Ticino, Switzerland, had set up as a building contractor at Aix-les-Bains, where he met and married the daughter of a small hotel-keeper. They had four sons and three daughters one of whom was Françoise, my mother. After the sudden death of their father at the age of forty-eight, the three girls took over the management of a dress shop, the Galeries Parisiennes, which some family friends had opened in the small mountain town of St-Jean-de-Maurienne.

Marie, who had a taste for dressmaking and made the family’s clothes, took over the couture side; Louise, who had learnt hat-making at Chalon-sur-Saône, was the modiste; and seventeen-year-old Françoise, the youngest and prettiest of the three, who knew nothing except how to sing at the top of her voice and flash her sparkling teeth as she laughed, was salesgirl and windowdresser. Their arrival at the Galeries Parisiennes caused a sensation. Every evening the shop window attracted a parade of seven or eight of the town’s gilded youth, all anxious to make contact with the young ladies on the other side.

It was behind the wheel of the only sports-car in the district, a big Philos Torpedo, with glittering brass-work, that my mother first saw the man she was to marry – Maurice Balmain, who had just inherited the largest wholesale drapery business in the district, from his father. He was then twenty-seven, with thinning hair and a pince-nez – always replaced by a dashing monocle when he swaggered along the main street – to correct his short-sightedness. He had studied at Chambéry, done his military service at Lyons, and taken advantage of the numerous opportunities offered by his travels to ensure that his sentimental education was not neglected. He had more or less abandoned himself to a life of pleasure. His other hobbies were photography – he developed his own plates in an extravagantly installed darkroom at the end of the garage where he housed the Philos – and the theatre. He was adept at the chansonnette, played the piano and cornet, and was a member of the town’s musical society, ‘La Lyre Mauriennaise’. He also took a keen interest in local politics, and particularly supported campaigns for road-building and electrification.

For Maurice Balmain it was love at first sight for the gay, fresh young girl, so different from the easy adventures of his student and garrison days. One evening he drew up in his shining sports-car outside the Galeries Parisiennes. Françoise, still in mourning for her father in a mauve dress with sailor collar, answered the tinkling doorbell. Fiddling nervously with his monocle, he introduced himself with old-time gallantry. The other sisters quickly found a pretext to come and join them. There was no question of inviting him up to the apartment, and it was in the midst of hatstands and dummies dressed in coney seal coats made from rabbit skins, that their first meeting took place. He asked permission to return, and soon afterwards told Marie that he wished to marry her young sister.

His mother, the austere widow of Alexandre Balmain, did not like the idea at all. I was told she fought strongly against the marriage, but her son’s calm, unshakeable determination eventually overcame her fierce objections. Then she tightened her thin lips once and for all, and wrapped herself in a heavy hostility towards my mother which lasted eight years until 1921, when she lay dying in great pain. Then, she would allow no one but her daughter-in-law to care for her. Only from my mother would she take a few drops of water which the fever dried on her parched lips.

There was little in common between the two families united by the marriage of Maurice Balmain and Françoise Ballinari. Throughout their nomadic, somewhat chaotic family life, the Ballinaris had known many fluctuations in fortune, and struggles for existence. This had not, however, been allowed to affect their carefree, good-humoured nature, and belief that life was meant to be lived in the atmosphere of an Italian feast-day with songs and mandolins. They displayed typically Latin exaggerations of character, a touchy sense of honour that took instant offence at the suspicion of an offhand greeting or cold look, but they possessed, too, the generosity, the lack of calculated cunning, all the human warmth that was typical of their native Ticino.

The Balmains were quite different. My grandfather Alexandre did not leave his mountain village until he was thirty. He had lingered there because he was the only one in the neighbourhood who knew how to read, write and do sums. Thus, he was both the clerk at the Mairie and the village schoolteacher. Then one day he went off with his mule and cart to St-Jean-de-Maurienne. He knew at first hand what kind of supplies the mountain villages and their small shops needed, and began organizing their distribution. His business did so well that within a few years he was able to build a three-storey house in stone – the finest in the district. I remember hearing in my childhood how, like some biblical patriarch, he had his workers paid each week from a wheelbarrow full of coins, with his steward counting out to each man his due.

His first wife, a local girl, died young, soon after presenting him with a daughter, Josephine, and leaving him with quite a problem, for his long business trips in horse and cart, visiting customers, made it impossible for him to look after the baby. This was a not-to-be-missed chance for the town’s well-meaning, matchmaking women who promptly set about finding a new wife for him. They decided on Marie Meunier, a woman in her thirties who was slowly turning into an embittered spinster. She belonged to a good bourgeois family from Chambéry, was a fervent Catholic and sold shoes in the shadow of the Cathedral. For want of a more attractive opportunity she resigned herself to marrying a widower with a child, and arrived, as the second Madame Alexandre Balmain, to sweep the narrow pavements of St-Jean with her silk petticoats and install herself for Sunday Mass right in the centre of the church: the place that her detested daughter-in-law was later to occupy, and where now I never fail to kneel when I spend a Sunday in my home town.

She proved to be a perfect wife, and a mother whose strictness was not without a certain compassionate quality which she took pains to try and conceal. My first cousin, who is now a general, told me recently that when a young man, who was desirably rich but of Italian origin and radical political opinions, wanted to marry my Aunt Marthe, there was a crisis in the Balmain family. They feared they would lose the valuable custom of the convents. But Aunt Marthe was as obstinate as her brother had been, and married him all the same.

My mother brought to her marriage all the spontaneous gaiety of her seventeen years, a well-supplied trousseau, but no dowry. Madame Alexandre Balmain saw to it that the marriage contract was drawn up in accordance with her instructions. The lawyer was a family friend in whom my father had complete confidence; and in his casual, good-natured fashion he signed without reading the contract which provided that the inheritance should eventually pass to any children of the marriage and carefully excluded the intruder into the family – my mother.

The Ballinaris were far too proud to discuss such mundane matters, and in any case did not regard the contract as very important: they took it for granted they would live for ever! Alas, when my father died eight years later, my mother was left all the worries of administering an estate that belonged to me. Incidentally, as soon as I was twenty-one I gave her a complete discharge from the responsibility for my affairs – an administration so catastrophic that we found ourselves almost destitute.

In spite of these rather sordid manoeuvres and the hostility of Madame Alexandre Balmain, who did not hide the effort she was making in being present, the wedding – a simple one in view of the recent mourning in both families – took place at Bletterans. No one else from her side of the family attended, but the kindness and cheerful friendliness of the swarm of Ballinari brothers and sisters made up for the absence of the Balmain clan.

That evening the newly-weds left for the Ballinari family home in the Ticino, a large, old house on the shores of Lake Maggiore, before settling down in Savoy. Nine months and fourteen days later, I appeared on the scene.

On the day of my christening, Mother, who had become the Galeries Parisiennes’ best customer, paraded triumphantly in a violet dress with hobble skirt, draped and trimmed with satin, and crowned by a huge cloche hat. The outfit was much too old for her eighteen years, and I am told that as she proudly promenaded me on the pavement outside the Balmain house, a neighbour remarked cuttingly: ‘Why not a canopy for the little prince?’

Soon afterwards, the 1914 war summoned all young men to the colours. Mother was aggressively patriotic, and carried me with a large tricolor rosette pinned to my swaddling clothes, to the station to see my father off to Lyons. When she returned home she gave the Red Cross all his suits, his dozens of shirts and underclothes, and his three hundred pairs of white socks, as if she believed she would never see him again. She was probably glad of the chance to get rid of them for she detested those socks as much as she disliked the vast amount of linen needed because of the Balmain family’s habit of doing the laundry only twice a year.

Two months later, however, my father was sent home with a rupture of the hernia from which he had suffered for a long time in his youth. He had dared not mention it and receive treatment, because of my grandmother’s excessive sense of modesty. This was another incident which did nothing to improve relations between my mother and her mother-in-law.

To offset the shamefaced life of what he regarded as a ‘shirker’, my father began making reckless donations to charities, with casual disregard for the fact that he was rapidly demolishing the middle-class fortune that my grandfather had so carefully built up.

Nevertheless it was a beautiful twilight of prosperity. Mother, as lady