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

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I wrote some notes, and walked down to the meadow of roses, where butterflies danced about the petals, accompanied by a chorus of birdsong and bees.

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

There are points in this book when it feels traitorous to be considering skirt lengths in the same breath as gas chambers, antitheses that, on the whole, Picardie navigates with the intelligence and sympathy you would expect. From 1940 onwards, Otto Abetz, the German ambassador to Paris, and his French wife Suzanne ruled over the new version of high society from their palatial embassy, the Hôtel Beauharnais on Rue de Lille, entertaining senior military staff, diplomats, politicians, industrialists, actors, artists, authors and couturiers. The prisoners were made to walk despite exhaustion and illness, threatened by dogs and armed SS guards. The two fell in love, and by the end of the year, Catherine Dior – the sister of the illustrious fashion designer Christian Dior – had joined him in a Resistance network.

Britain gave her the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom, recognising foreign nationals having aided Allied forces. The name would suggest so, and he certainly gave Catherine outfits from each of his collections, yet it seems unlikely that she would ever have chosen to wear the Miss Dior dress. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. Christian’s earliest memories were rooted at Les Rhumbs, which remained the family’s primary residence, although they also spent some time in Paris.

Miss Dior Perfume | House of Fraser Miss Dior Perfume | House of Fraser

In fact, the Germans took a close interest in the Paris fashion business, and proposed that it should be moved to Berlin; indeed, as early as August 1940, Nazi officials had visited Lelong and told him that the decision had been made to transfer the couture ateliers to Germany, where they would operate under the direct rule of the Third Reich. Nicolas wondered if his father was jealous of Lili’s love affair with another member of the Resistance before they met, or whether it was simply that people of his parents’ generation avoided discussing the German Occupation of France. 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. 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.She discovers what it means to believe in beauty and hope, despite our knowledge of darkness and despair, and reveals the timeless solace of the natural world in the aftermath of devastation and destruction.

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

A member of the Resistance, Catherine had been arrested in July 1944, brutally tortured, and deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp. 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).

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. Catherine Dior would become a crucial figure of the French Resistance, arrested and tortured by the Gestapo in 1944 and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp before her escape near Dresden in 1945. Picardie, whose previous books include a biography of Coco Chanel, was invited by Dior to look at their archive, “perhaps with a view of doing a biography of Christian Dior”. 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.

Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture by Justine Picardie Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture by Justine Picardie

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’. One of the earliest and most effective of the Resistance groups operating in France, the F2 network had initially been established in July 1940 by three Polish army intelligence officers who had found themselves stranded in Toulouse, behind enemy lines, after the German invasion.On one occasion, she hid “incriminating material” from the Gestapo during a raid, later earning praise for her “composure, decisiveness, and sang-froid”. Catherine wasn’t far from it when, in 1944, she was arrested by the Gestapo for her role in the Resistance. 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.