Balmain Opened New York Flagship Store

Balmain is pleased to announce the opening of its first American flagship. Set on 100 Wooster Street, in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, the boutique offers the brand’s men’s, women’s and accessories collections.
For Olivier Rousteing, there was never any question where Balmain’s first American boutique would be located. Cutting and pasting the Parisian flagship’s iconic Haussmannian décor into SoHo’s unique 19th-Century industrial streetscape of brick façades, cobblestones and iron columns “was never an option.
For the 2,150-square-foot (200m2) interior, Olivier Marty and Karl Fournier of Studio KO give a fresh twist to the house’s recent retail design choices. While Balmain’s Paris flagship is imagined as a classic Parisian apartment for founder Pierre Balmain and the London boutique is designed as his would-have-been Mayfair pied-à-terre, the new SoHo space riffs on Villa Balmain, the beautiful mid-century vacation home on the Italian island of Elba that served as M. Balmain’s retreat.
Behind the restored 19th-Century black façade, the architects have arranged a succession of clean, white residential-like spaces, all set on one central axis. Inspired by postwar American design’s generosity of volume and love of simplicity, the overall ambiance is one of lightness and clarity.
There are also several allusions to the house’s original flagship and ateliers, including repeated touches of gold and brass, impressive mirrors and re-editions of classic 20th- Century. Balmain’s ateliers—with the architects imagining “taking a sledgehammer” to those cool geometric patterns of repeated black-stone insets, creating a novel Italian opus of irregular shapes that would not have looked out of place in M. Balmain’s mid-century Mediterranean dwelling.