BALMAIN | From Shaping Clothes to Fragrance Across Generations

Fashion cannot exist without beauty, and beauty cannot exist without fashion.

— Olivier Rousteing

Pierre Balmain opened his Paris house in 1945 and introduced its first perfume the following year. Shaping the outline of a garment and composing an invisible scent were parallel pursuits from an early stage in the house’s history.

Olivier Rousteing drew on that history when he led the creation of its 2024 fragrance collection. Inherited names and bottles met his own memories of family and discoveries about his origins. Balmain’s perfumes connect the house’s past with the lives of the people who reinterpret it.

Contents

Basic Information
The Founder and the House’s Beginnings
The House’s Approach to Fragrance
References

Basic Information

Founded: 1945. First perfume: 1946. The present Balmain Beauty partnership began in 2022, with its inaugural collection arriving in 2024.
Founder: Pierre Balmain
Place of origin: Paris, France
Official websites: BALMAIN / Balmain Beauty

The Founder and the House’s Beginnings

From the family’s clothing trade and architectural studies to couture

Pierre was born in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, in France’s Savoie region, in 1914. His father Maurice inherited a wholesale drapery business. His mother Françoise and her sisters ran Galeries Parisiennes, dividing dressmaking, millinery, sales and window-dressing between them.

The family shop and the fashionable spa town of Aix-les-Bains gave Pierre subjects to observe and sketch. He began studying architecture in Paris in 1933, then joined British couturier Edward Molyneux’s house the following year. The lines and volumes surrounding a moving body remained central to his work.

Dressmaking is the architecture of movement.

— Pierre Balmain

During his apprenticeship, he first spotted a woman wearing a dress he had helped design. Delighted, he followed her but could not summon the courage to speak. His memoir preserves the pleasure of seeing a drawing become someone’s clothes.

I had seen my childhood dreams take material shape.

— Pierre Balmain

Wartime interruption and independence in 1945

He began working for Lucien Lelong in 1939, before war interrupted his career. Demobilized in 1940, he returned to Aix-les-Bains to help in his mother’s boutique. Back at Lelong’s atelier the following year, he shared responsibility for collections with Christian Dior.

In 1945, Pierre established his own house at 44 rue François Ier in Paris. Resources were limited; his mother even sold her engagement ring to support him. His first collection, presented on 12 October, contained 45 designs. An interest nurtured around the family’s trade had survived apprenticeship and war to become a house bearing his own name.

A telephone number becomes a perfume, followed by Vent Vert

His first fragrance, Élysées 64-83, appeared in 1946. Its name was the house’s telephone number. Perfume was already becoming another way of carrying the Balmain name into the world.

Vent Vert followed in 1947, created with perfumer Germaine Cellier. A pioneering green fragrance, it would become an important reference for the later relaunch. Jolie Madame in 1953 and Ivoire in 1979 also became part of a history in which clothes and perfume developed alongside one another.

Rousteing’s search for another form of expression

Rousteing joined Balmain in 2009 and became creative director in 2011. For him, the house’s past perfumes also held personal associations: his grandmother had worn Ivoire.

After suffering burns in 2020, he began considering ways of expressing himself beyond clothes. He approached perfumery with respect and enrolled in fragrance school, seeking what he called:

a new way of being a creative director.

— Olivier Rousteing

In 2022, Balmain and The Estée Lauder Companies announced a license agreement to develop, produce and distribute beauty products. That business framework and Rousteing’s personal creative exploration converged in Les Éternels de Balmain in 2024.

The inaugural collection comprised eight all-gender eaux de parfum: four reinterpretations of historical names—Vent Vert, Ivoire, Ébène and Carbone—and four new creations. Rousteing participated in the fragrance concepts, packaging and campaign.

His tenure as the house’s creative director ended in 2025, with Antonin Tron taking over that year. Les Éternels belongs to the fragrance work Rousteing shaped before that transition.

The House’s Approach to Fragrance

Reinterpreting historical perfumes from a different generation’s perspective

Les Éternels uses familiar names for contemporary reinterpretations. The new Vent Vert combines green mandarin and jasmine with elements including galbanum and blackcurrant. It carries forward the idea of green fragrance as a portrayal of nature, while remaining a distinct creation from the 1947 perfume.

Ébène connects the house’s Africa-inspired fragrance of 1983 with Rousteing’s own Ethiopian and Somali roots. Its central references are ebony wood, myrrh oil and tobacco leaves. Wood and resin imagery give form to the theme of tracing one’s origins.

Ivoire recalled his grandmother; Ébène connected with his ancestry. Even within the same act of revisiting the past, the relationship changes with the successor’s experience. This personal connection helps explain why the collection goes beyond reproducing old perfumes.

Carbone’s contrasts of musk and rose

Carbone Eau de Parfum, housed in a black bottle, sets musk against rose. The light of white musk meets a tobacco-like shadow in the rose, skin-like suede and the warmth of cumin.

Rather than ending with the flower, its construction places purity and a more carnal character together. Their coexistence gives a tangible form to the collection’s theme of expressing a multifaceted identity.

A bottle shaped by 1946, designed for refilling

The Les Éternels bottle takes the 1946 Élysées 64-83 flacon as its starting point. Its circle-and-square contrast is adapted into an elongated lozenge with ridged glass. The cap’s PB monogram is drawn from the house’s 1970 labyrinth motif.

The collection is designed for refilling by removing the pump, and its packaging dispenses with cellophane wrap. Inherited design and a contemporary approach to keeping and reusing the bottle meet in the same object.

Extending the vocabulary through citrus, leather and rose

Later developments added Blanc Galaxie, with cédrat, myrtle and magnolia, and Cuir Élysées, which brings raspberry and sandalwood into a leather composition. These extend the original collection’s range of subjects and textures.

Eaux de toilette followed, including Carbone, Rouge, Blanc Galaxie and Bleu Infini, alongside Rose de Soie. The latter pairs rose water with roasted tonka sweetness around the idea of silky petals. Extensions under existing names and the creation of a newly named fragrance thus proceed alongside each other.

Destin de Balmain’s fruit and labyrinth bottle

In 2026, Destin de Balmain appeared as a feminine fragrance separate from Les Éternels. Perfumer Quentin Bisch approached its theme of choosing one’s path through the brightness of ripe strawberry.

The fruit’s juicy vivacity brings bright, elevated sweetness to the composition.

— Quentin Bisch

A peony accord carries creamy, lychee-like facets into a composition of sandalwood accord, patchouli and musk. An accord is a combination of fragrance materials constructed to create a particular olfactory impression. Here, the fruit develops into floral and woody textures.

The transparent glass cube has a three-dimensional labyrinth of repeated PB monograms carved across its faces. Its outline differs from Les Éternels, while sharing the practice of translating the house’s design vocabulary into perfume. Both scent and bottle reveal how Balmain turns inherited forms into new expressions.