Sally Berg

Berg was born in Warburg, in Westphalia, on 16 January 1857. He was one of eight children from the second marriage of the textile merchant Salomon Berg to Sophie Wittgenstein; his father had four children from an earlier marriage, and three of the twelve died young. The family name had been taken by Berg's grandfather in 1807, when the Jews of the new Kingdom of Westphalia were emancipated. Four of Berg's brothers became textile merchants like their father.

He went to Brussels as a teenager and was apprenticed at the fashion house of Léo Hirsch, another Westphalian, where he met Sylvain Kahn, a Jewish apprentice of the same age from Alsace. Within about ten years the two had risen to senior posts, Kahn as head of silks and Berg as head of haute couture.

In 1895 Kahn and Berg bought the Vienna fashion house of Drecoll. Kahn became increasingly occupied with Drecoll, and Berg took over the general management of the Amsterdam house. In 1902 the partners opened a Drecoll house in Paris, of which Kahn became general manager. Berg continued to take a large part in designing the couture for all the partners' houses, assisted by Marguerite von Wagner-Besançon, who had earlier worked for Hirsch in Amsterdam, but never put his own name to the designs. The Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD), drawing on Dieuwke Grijpma's history of Dutch couture, records him as working in Paris from 1902 to 1912.

The house's new building on the Leidseplein, designed by Jacot, opened in November 1912 with a fashion show that the Textile Research Centre in Leiden calls the first in the Netherlands for an invited audience. Around the same time Berg opened a perfume factory in Neuilly-sur-Seine, which the RKD, following Grijpma, identifies as the d'Orsay factory and dates to 1912–1917.