Miss Dior

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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.’

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. 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 Mail I close my eyes, searching for Catherine, trying to envisage her as a small child in the garden, just outside, playing hide and seek. Catch me if you can, whispers the imaginary child, and then her voice is gone, and I can hear only the sound of the wind murmuring in the chimney, sighing in the empty fireplace beside me.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 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.

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. 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. 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. Catherine Dior in the “Doris” dress from Dior’s spring/summer 1947 collection at the baptism of her godson Nicolas Crespelle in Neuilly-sur-Seine on Feb. 15, 1948. DR/Collection Christian Dior Parfums + Fonds Nicolas Crespelle

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I enjoyed reading Miss Dior, though Picardie can be a bit wafty; she’s always communing with spirits. It’s horribly fascinating to me that while Dior waited for news of his sister – was she dead or alive? – he was working on the Théâtre de la Mode, an exhibition comprising a series of doll-sized mannequins dressed in couture outfits (a publicity stunt by the Paris fashion industry that would raise a million francs for war relief). The book is full of things like this: unlikely, even bizarre, shafts of light that have you blinking, given the darkness all around. It’s also beautiful; her publisher has done her proud. But it comes with so much padding. A long account of the relationship of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, for instance, cannot be justified by the fact that the former was a client of Dior (their connection with Catherine is nonexistent). Like a dress by some wilfully edgy label – think JW Anderson, or the wilder shores of Cos – its constituent parts seem not to go together. The sleeves don’t match the bodice, and there’s a gaping hole where there really shouldn’t be one. The overdue restoration of Catherine Dior's extraordinary life, from her brother's muse to Holocaust survivor 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. Catherine’s story is beautifully, hauntingly told in spare and elegant prose by Picardie . . . awe-inspiring.” —Laura Freeman, The Times (UK) 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

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.

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ 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. 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. 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. Miss Dior is a wartime story of freedom and fascism, beauty and betrayal and ‘a gripping story’ (Antonia Fraser).