Miss Dior

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Long after Christian discovered the delights of the capital city, he remained devoted to the family home in Granville, and to the grounds in which he had spent so much time as a small boy. In 1925 – when he was supposed to be hard at work in Paris as a student of political science, having been refused permission by his parents to study architecture – Christian found the time to design a new garden feature at Les Rhumbs, with arched trellises covered by roses surrounding a pool of water, complete with a small fountain. As subtle as it is fragrant, Justine Picardie’s book casts a strong spell that lingers.” —Benjamin Taylor, author of Here We Are and The Hue and Cry at Our House A soft rain is falling over the midsummer roses that are blooming in the garden of Les Rhumbs, and a sea mist is gathering, veiling the solid lines of the house. This substantial late-nineteenth-century villa, positioned high above the Normandy town of Granville, overlooking the English Channel, was the childhood home of Christian Dior. Hence the decision to turn it into a museum that cherishes his heritage, while the surrounding garden, created by his mother, has become a park open to the public. It is surprisingly quiet this morning in the grounds, perhaps because of the damp weather, although the museum has several dozen visitors who have come to see a new exhibition, dedicated to Princess Grace of Monaco, and displaying clothes designed for her by Christian Dior.

There are points in this book when it feels traitorous to be considering skirt lengths in the same breath as gas chambers, antitheses that, on the whole, Picardie navigates with the intelligence and sympathy you would expect. “There should be a vast gulf between them – a chasm…” she writes, “and yet they coexist.” Dior, who’d worked for the couturier Lucien Lelong during the war, showed his debut collection at 30 Avenue Montaigne, Paris, on 12 February 1947 (the “new look”, as it was christened by Carmel Snow, the editor of American Harper’s Bazaar ). His sister was in the audience, breathing air that was heady with scent, as well as covetousness: his models wore the soon-to-be-launched Miss Dior, its formula inspired by the jasmine and roses Catherine adored (she was by now working as a florist). But as her biographer Justine Picardie admits, she would only ever be an “intangible presence” at the house. Later, there would be a dress, also called Miss Dior: a gown covered in hand-stitched petals. Catherine, though, was not a fancy dresser. In photographs, she is ever practical-looking. Her clothes are chosen for warmth and ease, not for drawing the eye. Dior bought La Colle in 1951, four years after his debut “New Look” collection made him the apple of every fashion editor’s eye – and an extremely wealthy man. He could have chosen to live anywhere by then but he settled on here, a decision I can’t help but think, on reading Justine Picardie’s memorable new biography of Catherine, was motivated by a fierce desire to keep his favourite sibling close.The Dior family in their garden, c.1920.Catherine sits in the middle, between her parents. Behind them, left to right, Christian, Jacqueline, Bernard and Raymond. As for the uncertainty regarding Catherine’s relationship with the Miss Dior dress: a clue may lie in the name of the collection where the gown first appeared, which Christian himself baptized the “Trompe-l’œil” line. The literal translation of the phrase is “deceiving the eye”; what might be the visual illusion at work here? That the flowers of the Miss Dior gown were real? That the original Miss Dior was untouched by the horrors of war, remaining safely in the past, an innocent young girl in the rose garden of Granville? Or is it simply as Dior described it in the program notes for the collection: “There are two principles on which the ‘Trompel’œil’ line is founded: one is to give the bust prominence and breadth, at the same time as respecting the natural curve of the shoulders; the other principle leaves the body its natural line but gives fullness and indispensable movement to the skirts.” Catherine outlived her brother by five decades, and died in June 2008, not far from La Colle Noire, at her home in the neighbouring village of Callian. Here she too cultivated roses, both for her own pleasure and to be distilled as an essence for Dior’s perfume manufacturers in nearby Grasse. She had been a loyal and loving sister throughout her brother’s life, and continued to be so after his death, honouring his legacy in many ways, including her consistent support for the Christian Dior museum that was eventually established in Granville. Christian’s surviving writing also provides a sense of the emotional resonance and powerful influence of the landscape. The young trees that were planted, as he described them in his memoir, ‘grew up, as I did, against the wind and the tides. This is no figure of speech, since the garden hung right over the sea, which could be seen through the railings, and lay exposed to all the turbulence of the weather, as if in prophecy of the troubles of my own life … the walls which encompassed the garden were not enough, any more than the precautions encompassing my childhood were enough, to shield us from storms.’

Her husband, Maurice Dior, had inherited the family fertiliser business, and on days when the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, the stench of his factories would drift across the town, although seldom as far as Les Rhumbs. But for all its unsavoury connotations, the guano industry paid for Madeleine’s magical creation on a barren cliff top: tender flowerbeds protected from the salt-laden storms by hardy conifer trees, and most importantly of all, the roses that were (and remain) the centrepiece of the garden. Yet the calm professionalism of this explanation is at odds with the emotional intensity that Dior reveals in his memoir, when he declares that he is “obsessed” with the clothes he creates: “They preoccupy me, they occupy me, and finally they ‘post-occupy’ me, if I can risk the word. This half vicious, half ecstatic circle, makes my life at the same time heaven and hell.” The passionate art of his couture therefore resists being fully dismantled, and examined as a logical, rational craft. His most precious designs may have seemed alive to him—whether as beloved daughters or trusted friends—but they also possessed him, embodying an idealized version of femininity that could never exist in a real woman. Miss Dior is born of a dream, a compulsive desire to create perfection. Adored by her maker, she seems more than an artifact. But like the alchemist’s treasured doll in Hoffmann’s eerie tale of The Sandman, she is unable to take on a life of her own. Though 12 years his junior Catherine (1917-2008) was close to Dior in temperament and shared particularly his devotion to flowers. As children, growing up in the grand Villa les Rhumbs near Mont-Saint-Michel, he and she were allowed to create flower beds in the shapes of a tiger and butterfly. The juxtaposition of terrible shadows and dazzling light is one of the great strengths of this book . . . [Miss Dior] is a very personal, very passionate book.” —Artemis Cooper, Times Literary Supplement Picardie . . . has nearly unassailable fashion knowledge. She reconstructs with ease and confidence how fashion restored luxury to its French perch after the war." —Ruth Peltason, Air MailMiss Dior is a wartime story of freedom and fascism, beauty and betrayal and ‘a gripping story’ (Antonia Fraser). Picardie’s research is remarkable, her writing grabs and holds the reader tight from beginning to end . . . An exceptional discussion on France during WWII and the couture industry, [Miss Dior] is fascinating reading and will not disappoint.” —Judith Reveal, New York Journal of Books Tracing the wartime paths of the Dior siblings leads Picardie deep into other hidden histories, and different forms of resistance and sisterhood. She discovers what it means to believe in beauty and hope, despite our knowledge of darkness and despair, and reveals the timeless solace of the natural world in the aftermath of devastation and destruction. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Exceptional . . . Miss Dior is so much more than a biography. It’s about how necessity can drive people to either terrible deeds or acts of great courage, and how beauty can grow from the worst kinds of horror.’

When the French designer Christian Dior presented his first collection in Paris in 1947, he changed fashion forever. Dior’s “New Look” created a striking, romantic vision of femininity, luxury, and grace, making him—and his last name—famous overnight. One woman informed Dior’s vision more than any other: his sister, Catherine, a Resistance fighter, concentration camp survivor, and cultivator of rose gardens who inspired Dior’s most beloved fragrance, Miss Dior. Yet the story of Catherine’s remarkable life—so different from her famous brother’s—has never been told, until now. Instead, like his sister Catherine, he preferred to stay at home and help their mother in the garden, away from the malodorous Dior factories. Christian went so far as to learn by heart the names and descriptions of flowers in the illustrated seed catalogues that were delivered to Les Rhumbs, while Madeleine Dior’s love of roses was inherited by her youngest child, Catherine, who made it her life’s work to grow and nurture them. If the Dior children regarded their parents as distant figures of authority – as is suggested by Christian’s biographer, Marie-France Pochna, who noted that they were raised in an era ‘when open demonstrations of affection were considered likely to weaken the character and strictness was the norm’ – it might also be possible that the way to their mother’s heart was through her cherished garden. Just along the path, I find a maze made out of privet hedges, and remember that one of the curators in the Dior archives told me that Catherine, in old age, had described this to him as an important feature of the garden in her childhood. I am tall enough to be able to see over the hedges, but a little girl, running through the green labyrinth, would have to know it very well to find her way out. I know my own way, comes a whisper in my head, though I cannot be sure whether it is mine, or a memory of my lost sister’s voice, when we played together in the secret gardens of our own childhood. Aside from the garden, the place that Christian felt safest in was the linen-room, where ‘the housemaids and seamstresses … told me fairy stories of devils … Dusk drew on, night fell and there I lingered … absorbed in watching the women round the oil-lamp plying their needles … From that time I have kept a nostalgia for stormy nights, fog-horns, the tolling of the cemetery-bell, and even the Norman drizzle in which my childhood passed.’

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While her extreme bravery during the war is not in doubt, there’s little for Picardie to go on even in that period

Inventive and captivating, and shaped by Picardie’s own journey, Miss Dior examines the legacy of Christian Dior, the secrets of postwar France, and the unbreakable bond between two remarkable siblings. Most important, it shines overdue recognition on a previously overlooked life, one that epitomized courage and also embodied the astonishing capacity of the human spirit to remain undimmed, even in the darkest circumstances. At first, as I began to explore Catherine’s history, and realized that she was more or less invisible to Christian’s acolytes, I felt angry on her behalf. And then I wondered how Catherine had navigated the arena of Parisian fashion, with its brittle etiquette, guarded cliques, and whispered gossip. Was she received with respect when she came to see her brother’s couture collections at Avenue Montaigne, amidst the chattering swarm of journalists, editors, celebrities, and socialites? Did they even recognize her as Christian’s sister, or appreciate her association with Miss Dior? The overdue restoration of Catherine Dior's extraordinary life, from her brother's muse to Holocaust survivor

None of the rooms in Les Rhumbs is furnished. Instead, they are lined with museum cabinets for the display of artefacts, drawings and photographs; on this occasion, relating mostly to Princess Grace’s wardrobe. Yet for all the poignancy of these objects – in particular, the image of a youthful Grace Kelly, wearing an ethereal white Dior gown at the ball celebrating her engagement to Prince Rainier in 1956, unaware that she would die before growing old – Les Rhumbs remains a monument to a more distant past. For this is the place where Maurice and Madeleine Dior moved at the beginning of the century and raised their five children. They had married in 1898, when Madeleine was a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl; Maurice Dior, at twenty-six, was already an ambitious young man, intent on expanding the fertiliser manufacturing business that his grandfather had set up in 1832. By 1905, Maurice and his cousin Lucien were running the flourishing company together, and its growing success was reflected in their social ascendancy. Lucien Dior would become a politician, and remained in parliament until his death in 1932, while a rivalry developed between his wife Charlotte and Madeleine, apparently arising from their competitive aspirations to be the most fashionably dressed chatelaines of the wealthiest households. I did not hear Catherine’s voice; the blue skies did not open. But the scent of the roses seemed to contain within it a question: was it conceivable that so much beauty had arisen from the ashes of the Second World War? And if so, what message might Catherine Dior have for us today, even if she never said another word. These, then, were the shadows of devils and the dead that were kept at bay during the gilded age of the Belle Epoque, when Les Rhumbs had not yet been touched by the threat of war or financial ruin. But what of Catherine, born when the battles of the First World War were raging? Her birth certificate gives her name as Ginette Marie Catherine Dior; family lore has it that it was her brother Bernard who first chose to call her Catherine, rather than Ginette, when she was still a baby. Pictures of her at Les Rhumbs show a solemn little girl, dressed in starched white cotton and lace; her parents are stern, somewhat remote, Christian a more gentle-looking figure standing behind them. Catherine’s voice appears rarely in the book. She was, as a godson recalled, a woman of very few words, and much as Picardie has done an exceptional job of piecing her life together from contemporaneous accounts, Catherine – Miss Dior – remains the hollow at the book’s centre.