Pierre Balmain

Balmain tends to get mentioned in the same breath as Dior - usually as "the other one" who worked at Lelong - and I think that's a bit unfair. He opened first, he got to the longer, fuller postwar line first, and for a couple of years he was the most exciting new name in Paris.

He came to fashion sideways. Born in 1914 in the Savoie, he studied architecture in Paris in the early 1930s, and he always talked about dressmaking as a kind of architecture of movement - which is easy to believe when you see how carefully his clothes are balanced. He left his studies to work for the couturier Edward Molyneux, whose clean, elegant restraint left a lasting mark on him, and after war service he joined Lucien Lelong's house in the early 1940s. There he worked side by side with Christian Dior through the occupation, the two of them designing Lelong's collections under the constraints of rationing and German oversight.

In October 1945, only a year after the Liberation, Balmain left to open his own house on the rue François-Ier. His first collection is the one to know: it showed long, bell-shaped skirts, narrow waists, and softly rounded shoulders at a moment when most women were still wearing the short, boxy wartime line. It had most of the ingredients of the postwar softening that Dior would take to its dramatic extreme in 1947. His friend Gertrude Stein, who had befriended him in the 1930s, wrote enthusiastically about the collection for American Vogue, which gave him valuable attention in the market that mattered most.

What set Balmain apart from Dior, for me, is temperament. Dior's New Look was a manifesto; Balmain's clothes were about refinement - beautifully made suits, polished day dresses, and grand, embroidered evening gowns for a wealthy and increasingly international clientele. He launched his first perfume, Vent Vert, in 1947. His biggest fame came in the 1950s, but the 1940s are where he did the most historically interesting thing: reading the postwar mood correctly, before almost anyone else, and cutting it into cloth.