Balmain is a French luxury fashion house founded by Pierre Balmain in 1945. In the period followed by world war 2, Pierre Balmain became “a king of French design”, and worked with lots of stars at the time. He managed to open his own fashion house just months after peace was declared and released his first collection in October 1945. After Pierre’s death in 1982, Balmain, as in the brand, have had multiple head designers.
It was first in 2005, when Christophe Decarnin came into the house, that the brand went through a revolution. Unlike the previous designers, he favoured extreme prices and was extremely interested in fame and star status. In the end, he cared more about the luxury and fame, rather than the actual design and clothes. This led to the brand compete in the top-industry, among Chanel, Gucci, Dior and etc., where their main consumers are the biggest celebrities in the world.
In 2011, Olivier Rousting joined the company, and became the next head-designer. He loved the aesthetics in the clothes, but he wanted more finer aspects of French couture. He also wanted to make the clothes more Asian influenced, because a large part of the buyers is Asian. Balmain expected to reach 150 million euros in 2017, but beyond that, Balmain do not provide financial information regularly.
The design itself can reminiscent of art, and especially modern art. A lot of contemporary artists believe that the message behind the artwork is more important than the artwork itself, which is kind of what I mentioned before about Christophe Decarnin´s view of the design. This is a trait of modernist, as well as the clothes have straight lines, often in black and white and have unusual shapes. All the designers have adjusted the aesthetic, while still staying true to Balmain. They also kept their most known garment, which is the famous blazers in all kind of shapes. Both the classy and expensive appearance and celebrities wearing their clothes on special events, makes the brand one of the world’s top brand. Even with the 1940´s look.
In 2015, Balmain wanted to reach out to a bigger audience and started to collaborate with H&M. Because of this, the clothes got to be shipped out worldwide and “normal” people would be able to reach and buy the clothes. In this collection, Balmain toned the luxury down, and made the clothes become more everyday. The clothes still had their distinctive character and the trait of modernist.
Making sense of art and design industries 