Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture (from the acclaimed author of Coco Chanel)

Product Information

Both Jacques and Lotka were kept in solitary confinement, and repeatedly interrogated and tortured at Montluc prison in Lyons, which was run by the notorious SS officer Klaus Barbie. On 19 August – four days after the Allies had landed on the Mediterranean coast – they were executed by a firing squad, part of a group of twenty-four resistants murdered there during the final atrocities of the Occupation. A few days later, the Germans abandoned Montluc, and Lyons was liberated on 3 September 1944. There are many different ways of viewing the activities of Lelong and his colleagues during the Second World War. According to Dior himself, ‘the couture houses had reopened their workshops, as much to provide employment for thousands of workers as out of patriotic pride . . . Such an apparently frivolous and futile occupation risked earning the displeasure of the Germans: but somehow we managed to exist until the day of Liberation.’ His debut collection, shown in Paris on 12 February 1947, had been christened the New Look. But despite the name, it was as much a nostalgic reimagining of the Belle Epoque, the golden years before the Great War. This was the era of Christian’s early childhood, growing up in the secure surroundings of the Dior family home in Granville, on the coast of Normandy. His mother, Madeleine, had dressed in the romantic, sweeping gowns of the period, and it was these that inspired Dior’s creation of swishing full skirts and a rounded hourglass silhouette, achieved with a corseted waist and padded bust. Yet equally important to Dior’s conception of ‘flower-like women’ that emerged in his couture salon in Paris was his mother’s love of gardening.

Miss Dior by Justine Picardie review – fashion meets the

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. You don't have permission to access "http://www.dior.com/es_sam/beauty/perfumes/perfumes-femeninos/miss-dior" on this server.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.

Miss Dior | Perfume | Dior - Boots Miss Dior | Perfume | Dior - Boots

It had been a difficult decision for Christian to leave Catherine in Provence in 1941. ‘I disliked intensely the idea of returning to a humiliated and beaten Paris,’ he wrote in his memoir. ‘I also had to consider the future of our agricultural venture if it was left under the sole supervision of my sister.’ He does not explain what, exactly, gave him the impetus to resume his previous career in fashion; but in any event, he found a job working for Lucien Lelong, who was also the president of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, the official trade federation for the industry, and as such, responsible for negotiating with the Nazi authorities in Paris.Once I step inside the inner courtyard, the noise of the city becomes less insistent, and within the apartment itself there is a sense of quiet. But knowing, as I do, that Catherine Dior was being hunted by the Gestapo when she sought refuge here in 1944 casts the apartment in a different perspective. Looking out of its windows, across the rooftops of Paris, it becomes evident that there is only one way in and out; so while you could feel safe, you might equally be trapped, with no effective escape route. In the course of researching this book, I have been fortunate to meet Liliane’s son, Nicolas Crespelle, who was the much-loved godchild of Catherine Dior. We met in Paris for tea one day, at a café in the same street as the Dior archives, and he appeared to me as quintessentially Parisian as his mother did to Gitta: distinguished-looking, urbane and unruffled, despite having arrived by bicycle. Nicolas was very generous in sharing what he knew, while also emphasising how much had been kept secret from the post-war generation. He was born in February 1947, in the same week as the launch of the New Look collection, and his sister Anne in 1945. ‘No one told us about the war,’ said Nicolas. ‘Catherine only talked to me about it on one occasion, when she said she had been in a camp in Germany.’ All he knew about his mother’s role, at least while she was still alive, was that she had ridden a bicycle during the war; but whenever she started to talk about why she had spent so much time on these cycling expeditions, his father would say that it ‘wasn’t interesting’.

Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture (from the acclaimed

A dossier in the military files of the Resistance notes that Catherine performed a vital role in the operation of the Cannes office, not only by transporting reports for Hervé des Charbonneries and Jacques de Prévaux, but also hiding this incriminating material from the Gestapo during a raid, before delivering it safely to another key member of the F2 network, thereby proving her ‘composure, decisiveness, and sangfroid’. Other Resistance archives show that she worked closely with one of the original leaders of the network, Gilbert Foury, covering the entire Mediterranean zone. Their clandestine operations included making surveys of the coast around Marseilles and drawing maps with details of German infrastructure, fortifications and landmines, all of which were transmitted to the intelligence services in London. 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 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 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. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Catherine’s dearest friend, Liliane Dietlin, was also in F2; and it is thanks to another of Liliane’s friends, the acclaimed Austrian-born investigative journalist Gitta Sereny, with whom I myself worked many years ago, that I know something of what Gitta described as ‘the unsung hero­ism’ of these women in the Resistance. General de Gaulle had called for French men – soldiers, sailors and airmen – to join him in the battle against Nazism. Yet just as many women rallied to the cause of freedom, some of them very young and without any military training. As Gitta recalled in a tribute to Liliane, written soon after her death in February 1997: ‘I can barely think of Lili as old; to me she was always and remained throughout her life as I saw her when we first met – the epitome of the young Parisienne.’