Ginette Spanier
fashion-house director
Jenny Yvonne "Ginette" Spanier (7 March 1904 – 1 April 1988) was a French director of the House of Balmain, a Paris fashion-house, and was decorated for her wartime work.
Early life
Spanier, who was Jewish, was born in Paris on 7 March 1904 and raised in Hampstead, London, England and attended Frognal School there.
War years
While in Paris as a buyer for Fortnum & Mason, she met Paul-Emile Seidmann, a doctor. In 1939, they married. Shortly afterwards, during World War II, they fled Nazi-occupied Paris by bicycle. She was subsequently awarded the Medal of Freedom for assisting the American Army of Liberation. Seidmann was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur for his work with concentration camp survivors.
Balmain
After the war, the couple lived for many years on Paris' Avenue Maurice, and she became directrice (director) at Balmain from 1947 to 1976. The first of her two volumes of autobiography, It isn't All Mink (1959), had a foreword by Noël Coward, the second volume, And Now It's Sables (1970), had one by Maurice Chevalier.
Spanier appeared as a castaway on the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs on 21 June 1965.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ginette Spanier” as fashion-house director. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as fashion-house director. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17438425. VIAF identifies the subject as 35701744. The Library of Congress control number is n50053796. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1988, 1939 and 1947.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ginette Spanier” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.