Nina Ricci

Opening a couture house in 1932 sounds like a terrible idea. Wealthy American clients had stopped crossing the Atlantic, established houses were cutting staff, and the Depression was at its worst. Nina Ricci did it anyway, and her house grew steadily right through the decade, which tells you a lot about how well she understood what women actually wanted to buy in hard times.

She was born Maria Nielli in Turin, and her family moved to Florence and then to France while she was still a child. She started working with a dressmaker in her early teens and had spent decades in the trade - most of them as a designer at the house of Raffin - before she set up on her own at almost fifty. Her son Robert Ricci ran the business side, which was a genuinely modern arrangement: she designed, he handled money, marketing, and later the perfume. That partnership is why the name still exists today.

Her way of working was hands-on. Rather than sketching, she draped fabric directly on the model and pinned it into shape, which puts her in the same broad tradition as Vionnet, though her clothes were far less radical in construction. What came out of that process was soft, feminine, and easy to wear: gently draped bodices, flattering natural waists, fluid skirts in silk and crepe, and a lot of careful detail at the neckline and shoulder. She was never the boldest name in Paris - that was Schiaparelli's job - but boldness wasn't what she was selling.

What she was selling was reliability at a fairer price. Ricci is generally described as keeping her prices more moderate than those of the grandest houses, and as offering clothes that would flatter a real client rather than a fashion-plate ideal, which made the house attractive precisely when customers were counting every franc. By the end of the 1930s it had grown from a small workroom into a large operation employing hundreds of people. I find her an encouraging figure: a woman who spent most of her working life behind other people's names, then built her own house at nearly fifty, in a slump, on nothing more flashy than good cutting and a clear sense of her customer. The famous perfume, L'Air du Temps, came later, in 1948, but the house it sold was built in the 1930s.