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

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verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ 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. But for all the romance of the notion that couture represented a quintessentially Parisian art, it was governed by the strictly enforced rule of the German authorities, with dozens of precise regulations controlling everything from textile rationing to the ownership of the ateliers. Jewish proprietors had their businesses confiscated, losing their possessions, their liberty and in many cases their lives.

Watch: Justine Picardie talks about Miss Dior - Faber Watch: Justine Picardie talks about Miss Dior - Faber

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. 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.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.” 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. 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.’

Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture - Goodreads Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture - Goodreads

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.’ The overdue restoration of Catherine Dior's extraordinary life, from her brother's muse to Holocaust survivorOnce 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. 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. In a further sign of the remarkable silence that reigned for so long in France on the subject of the war, Jacques and Lotka’s baby daughter Aude – who was adopted after their death by her father’s brother and sister-in-law – was told nothing about her real parents’ identity and their heroic service in the Resistance. It was only a chance encounter, when she was twenty-three, that finally led to her discovering the truth. Yet the Gestapo and their French collaborators showed no signs of retreating, and as they intensified their investigations into the Resistance, the number of arrests and executions increased. While the Allies fought to gain control of Cherbourg and Caen in northern France, the Gestapo had successfully infiltrated the F2 network in Paris, through a French female informer of the same age as Catherine. She, too, was involved in a close-knit network of agents that had been formed during the Occupation: but their aims were to support the Nazis and annihilate the Resistance. On 6 July 1944, they finally closed in on Catherine: she was arrested on the street by a group of four armed men who took her bicycle and handbag, forced her into their car, blindfolded her and drove her to their sinister headquarters in the heart of Paris. Thus began a lengthy and cruel ordeal that would lead, ultimately, to Catherine’s deportation and imprisonment in a series of German concentration camps.

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

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? 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.’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. Miss Dior is a wartime story of freedom and fascism, beauty and betrayal and ‘a gripping story’ (Antonia Fraser). 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 by Justine Picardie | Faber Long Read: Miss Dior by Justine Picardie | Faber

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. 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.’ 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.This, then, is the context of Catherine’s proud service in F2, the facts of which emerge from the few surviving manuscripts outlining its formation and activities, in the archives of the Resistance. These reveal Catherine’s tireless activities within the organisation in gathering information and compiling intelligence reports to send to the British secret services in London. She wrote up the reports on a typewriter that she continued to use for correspondence throughout her later life. 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. 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.

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