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

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I think my mother was in love with one of the Polish guys in F2. He died during the war, she was left alone, and then my parents met.’ 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. Nevertheless, he could see the powerful bond that existed between his mother and Catherine, which led to Catherine being chosen as his godmother. The two former resistants continued to spend much time together, for though Nicolas and his sister went to school in Paris, his parents had a holiday home in Provence, in a village close to Catherine’s home in Callian. ‘Catherine and my mother trusted each other completely,’ said Nicolas. Their attachment was based on their shared wartime experience in F2, and because Catherine’s own silence had been responsible for saving Lili’s life. Dior, who’d worked for the couturier Lucien Lelong during the war, showed his debut collection at 30 Avenue Montaigne, Paris, on 12 February 1947 (the “new look”, as it was christened by Carmel Snow, the editor of American Harper’s Bazaar ). His sister was in the audience, breathing air that was heady with scent, as well as covetousness: his models wore the soon-to-be-launched Miss Dior, its formula inspired by the jasmine and roses Catherine adored (she was by now working as a florist). But as her biographer Justine Picardie admits, she would only ever be an “intangible presence” at the house. Later, there would be a dress, also called Miss Dior: a gown covered in hand-stitched petals. Catherine, though, was not a fancy dresser. In photographs, she is ever practical-looking. Her clothes are chosen for warmth and ease, not for drawing the eye. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ 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. 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.

Miss Dior: A Wartime Story of Courage and Couture

See Faber authors in conversation and hear readings from their work at Faber Members events, literary festivals and at book shops across the UK. 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.Wholehearted French support for the ‘aryanisation’ of the fashion industry was by no means uncommon, as a feature of the ‘cleansing’ activities imposed by the Third Reich and the Vichy regime. ‘France will be saved and will be rebuilt by elements that are intrinsically her own; the essentials are French blood and the French brain,’ declared the writer François Ribadeau Dumas in November 1940, the same month that the Jewish couturier Jacques Heim was forbidden to do business in Paris. ‘The moment . . . the more than questionable Jewish houses disappear, the atmosphere of the Parisian luxury trade will be purified!’ These, then, were the shadows of devils and the dead that were kept at bay during the gilded age of the Belle Epoque, when Les Rhumbs had not yet been touched by the threat of war or financial ruin. But what of Catherine, born when the battles of the First World War were raging? Her birth certificate gives her name as Ginette Marie Catherine Dior; family lore has it that it was her brother Bernard who first chose to call her Catherine, rather than Ginette, when she was still a baby. Pictures of her at Les Rhumbs show a solemn little girl, dressed in starched white cotton and lace; her parents are stern, somewhat remote, Christian a more gentle-looking figure standing behind them.

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

After 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.’Dior bought La Colle in 1951, four years after his debut “New Look” collection made him the apple of every fashion editor’s eye – and an extremely wealthy man. He could have chosen to live anywhere by then but he settled on here, a decision I can’t help but think, on reading Justine Picardie’s memorable new biography of Catherine, was motivated by a fierce desire to keep his favourite sibling close. Some collaboration with the Germans was inevitable for couturiers such as Lelong who continued to work under the Nazi regime, even though there were those who saw the survival of Paris fashion as a sign that French culture remained invincible in the midst of defeat. The author and journalist Germaine Beaumont, writing in the winter of 1942, observed that a couture dress was ‘such a little thing, so light and yet the sum of civilizations, the quintessence of equilibrium, of moderation, of grace . . . it is gleaned from life and from books, from museums and from the unexpected events of the day. It is no more than a gown yet the whole country has made this gown . . .’