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

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Vincent had known Catherine – before moving to his job at the Dior archives in Paris, he worked for the museum in Granville – and they corresponded, whenever he had queries that she could answer about her brother. But the one thing they do agree on was that it was love at first sight: or in the more powerful French phrase, un coup de foudre (a stroke of lightning). He launched his first collection on 12 February 1947, in a salon sprayed with his Miss Dior fragrance. Her name is Catherine Dior, and she arrived as I wandered through the garden of La Colle Noire, her brother Christian’s graceful château in the hills of rural Provence; a place she often visited, and a house where she lived for a while, after his sudden death of a heart attack at the age of fifty-two, in 1957. I think it’s important to say that her first act of Resistance was what led her to meeting Hervé,” she says.

Miss Dior by Justine Picardie, review: the haunting story of Miss Dior by Justine Picardie, review: the haunting story of

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? As Picardie points out, she was only briefly mentioned in a report by the French daily newspaper Le Monde (without an acknowledgment of her connection to Christian Dior), and left out of other media reports. Vincent had occasionally corresponded with Catherine but she gave nothing away of her wartime experiences, and he said that he felt it would have been impolite to press her for more information.

There were no latrines; rations were minimal (nothing more than watery soups and the occasional piece of dry bread). This, then, was the environment in which Christian Dior found himself when he joined Lucien Lelong in Paris, a city that had been conquered by the Nazis, and a business that was subjugated to the will of the Third Reich. Instead, Catherine would become associated with the scent of Miss Dior, a perfume launched at the same time as the couture brand.

Miss Dior: A Wartime Story of Courage and Couture Miss Dior: A Wartime Story of Courage and Couture

One of the Dior archivists, Vincent Leret, had come to meet me at La Colle Noire on this particular Sunday morning, to discuss the possibility of me writing a new biography of Christian Dior. There, she tended her garden and the fields of jasmine and roses that were key ingredients for the production of Dior perfume. 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. 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.And the lightning struck at a time when France seemed shrouded in the darkness of its defeat by Germany and its collaboration with the Nazis. 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. 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. Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. 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.