Jean Royère had no formal design education. Born in 1902, he was the only son of a high-ranking civil servant from Brittany and his French wife, who had been raised in Vienna and was related to Charles Darwin and the founders of Wedgwood ceramics.

‘He grew up in a cultivated and cosmopolitan environment in the Champs-Elysées district of Paris, later attending balls with the bourgeois and aristocratic elite, and frequenting a circle of intellectuals who revolved around the writer and philosopher Paul Desjardins,’ says Martin-Vivier.

After studying classics at Cambridge University, Royère worked with his uncle, a powerful figure in the import-export trade in Le Havre. In 1931, however, at the age of 29, he gave it up to become a...