To say that the runup to Pierre Balmain ’s first show was fraught with complications is an understatement.

Working out of a cramped Paris apartment where his office was the bathroom — with wooden planks on the bathtub serving as a makeshift desk — the couturier launched his label amid the chaos that followed the liberation of Paris in August 1944.

“We worked that time in what is probably the popular conception of the way fashion collections are prepared: frenziedly, with people fainting, and staff having to be plied with black coffee to keep them going,” Balmain recalled in his 1964 memoir, “My Years and Seasons.”

Having designed for Lucien Lelong through most of World War II, Balmain set up his own couture house at 44 rue François 1er just after occupying German soldiers vacated

See Full Page