In September 1992, Twenty-one young girls from top European families came together at the Hotel de Crillon, for the haute couture show that would become ‘le Bal’. Each girl – known as a ‘debutante’, or ‘deb’ – modelled three different gowns, provided by one couturier.

The event was presided over by a fashionable committee, including the likes of Jacques Mouclier, then president of the federation of couture, Countess Heléne de Mortemart and the Duke of Saint-Bar, then president of the New York Debutantes Committee.