Secret Resistance figure who fought the Nazis and inspired brother’s timeless scent: The incredible story of the real Miss Dior

Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture - Goodreads

See Faber authors in conversation and hear readings from their work at Faber Members events, literary festivals and at book shops across the UK. 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.’While her extreme bravery during the war is not in doubt, there’s little for Picardie to go on even in that period 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. 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!’ 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. Miss Dior is a wartime story of freedom and fascism, beauty and betrayal and ‘a gripping story’ (Antonia Fraser).

Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture 9780571356522: Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture

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!”’ Faber & Faber was founded nearly a century ago, in 1929. Read about our long publishing history in a decade-by-decade account. 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. I close my eyes, searching for Catherine, trying to envisage her as a small child in the garden, just outside, playing hide and seek. Catch me if you can, whispers the imaginary child, and then her voice is gone, and I can hear only the sound of the wind murmuring in the chimney, sighing in the empty fireplace beside me.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. 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. 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 Crespelle