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

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The overdue restoration of Catherine Dior's extraordinary life, from her brother's muse to Holocaust survivor 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. Instead, I’m hoping to discover an earlier era, when Catherine was a child. She seems absent, however, even in the small bedroom that had been hers, where a short text explains her role in the story of Christian Dior: Catherine was Christian’s favourite sister, and when he introduced his first perfume in 1947, he christened it Miss Dior for her, and described it as ‘the fragrance of love’. So it seems appropriate that I should be wearing the same scent on my trip to Granville. The original formula is classed, in the specialist terminology of perfumery, as a ‘green chypre’, blending complex notes of galbanum (a distinctive-smelling plant resin), bergamot, patchouli and oakmoss, with the warmth of jasmine and rose at its floral heart. And just for a moment, standing in Catherine’s former bedroom, I become aware of this unmistakable scent; not on my own skin, but emanating from some other, unseen source … perhaps the huge flagon of perfume presented to Princess Grace by Christian Dior, on show in a nearby gallery? 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. 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.

Miss Dior by Justine Picardie | Waterstones Miss Dior by Justine Picardie | Waterstones

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.’ 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. 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.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.

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

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 CrespelleAfter the defeat of France in June 1940, Gitta became a volunteer nurse for a charity in the Loire Valley, looking after children who had lost their parents. (Such was the chaos at the time, as vast numbers of refugees fled the advancing German army, that many families were separated for months on end.) Gitta seldom came to Paris, but when she did, on one occasion in the winter of 1941, she arranged to meet Lili at a café. ‘I questioned her choice of meeting place – the Right Bank was full of Germans, the Champs-Élysées worst of all. “The safest places in Paris are those where they congregate,” she said in her light voice.’ 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. 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 by Justine Picardie Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture by Justine Picardie

One of the words most often used about Catherine Dior, by her few surviving friends and relatives, is ‘discreet’; and it is telling that even a decade after her death, several of those who knew her still request anonymity when answering my questions about her relationship with Hervé des Charbonneries.

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. 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.’

Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture|Hardcover Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture|Hardcover

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. 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 Despite his sacrifice, more arrests were to follow: on 29 March 1944, Jacques de Prévaux himself was apprehended by the Gestapo in Marseilles, along with several other members of F2. That same day, his wife Lotka was captured at their home in Nice (her parents had already been deported from Paris to Auschwitz the previous year). When the Gestapo arrived at their apartment, Lotka had just enough time to entrust the couple’s baby daughter into the care of their nanny, who safely hid her for nine months before taking her to Jacques’s brother and sister-in-law in Paris after the Liberation.

The first Frenchman to join F2 was a former racing driver, Gilbert Foury, who swiftly expanded its operations into the port cities of Le Havre, Brest and Bordeaux, to spy on German submarines. He was subsequently joined by a senior French naval officer, Jacques Trolley de Prévaux, and his Polish-Jewish wife Lotka. In the autumn of 1940, F2 established itself in Toulon and developed a network along the Mediterranean coastline, in Cannes and Nice. Hervé des Charbonneries was a notably courageous agent in this section, and he in turn recruited Catherine Dior. Christian Dior’s friend and colleague at Lelong, Pierre Balmain, gives a vivid account in his memoir of the customers they were obliged to see, and Dior’s own sardonic response. ‘The clientele at Lelong during the Occupation consisted mainly of wives of French officials who had to keep up appearances, and of industrialists who were carrying on business as usual. Apart from Madame Abetz, the French wife of the German Commissioner, few Germans came to us. Nevertheless, there was still a somewhat unreal, strange atmosphere about the showings. I remember I was standing with Christian Dior behind a screen, scanning the audience awaiting the first showing of 1943, the women who were enjoying the fruits of their husbands’ profiteering. “Just think!” he exclaimed. “All those women going to be shot in Lelong dresses!”’ verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Catherine’s story is beautifully, hauntingly told in spare and elegant prose by Picardie . . . awe-inspiring.” —Laura Freeman, The Times (UK) 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