balmain nouveau; The storied Parisian house lands a bold young designer.(Pierre Balmain, Christophe Decarnin )

Byline: Lynn Yaeger

It is nice to know the young man when he is just a young man and nobody knows, and now well I guess very soon now anybody will know," the inimitable Gertrude Stein wrote of her early friendship with Pierre Balmain in the 1940s. That Balmain, whose couture house dressed everyone from Ava Gardner to Brigitte Bardot, was a king of French fashion in the years after World War II.

He passed away in 1982, and the house carried on-first with Erik Mortensen, the couturier's right hand; then, from 1993 to 2001, in the capable hands of Oscar de la Renta. Both of these gentlemen nobly advanced the delicate signatures of the house: the classical underpinnings, the studied opulence.

So it is a bit of a surprise that the guy with the leather jacket and the Adidas trainers and the rakish scarf around his neck, sitting gingerly in a cushy banquette at the Hotel Plaza Athenee, is the latest to inherit the mantle at Balmain. But then again, Christophe Decarnin does remind one a little of the man Stein describes-young and noteworthy and perhaps soon to be as famous as Gertrude's pal. If his bold image for the house comes as somewhat of a shock, he's certainly following in the tradition of so many other frisky fellows currently reviving historic labels-after all, would Cristobal Balenciaga ever have imagined the stringy motorcycle bags and slinky patchworks of Nicolas Ghesquiere? Would the very formal Christian Dior have dreamed in his wildest imagination of John Galliano's demimondaines swanning around in shredded gauze?

Maybe, then, Pierre Balmain would raise half an eyebrow at Decarnin's enthusiasms, which include, to give a few hasty examples, tiny studded goddess dresses worn with platform gladiator sandals and heavily sequined gold leather jodhpurs. But Decarnin, who is charmingly shy and, like so many artists, does not appear to enjoy talking about himself, allows that for him, "Balmain was really about evening dressing, and that's why the first collection I did was really eveningwear, with a lot of pleats and buttons in strange places, decorative both in front and in back-very richly embroidered, but with the Christophe touch."

He refers to his collection-sold only off-the-rack-as being imbued with the couture spirit, by which he means the careful attention to craft, the handwrought details that the garments exhibit.

"I want my clothes to be exclusive but not too exclusive," Decarnin explains. "Always short skirts, a very modern silhouette, matching the way of life of girls today-they want to move in the clothes." His ideal clients are the cool young personalities ...