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

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The black Bakelite phone on Christian Dior’s desk at La Colle Noire, the couturier’s Provençal hideaway, had a direct line marked to his sister Catherine. But when I’d found out the minimal information that there was about Catherine, I became really intrigued and fascinated by her story. Gitta was unaware of the activities of F2 until the early 1970s, when she published her book Into That Darkness, about Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland. But some of his acquaintances in Paris society did not share Catherine’s courage or her convictions.

Miss Dior: el perfume para mujer con miles de flores | DIOR Miss Dior: el perfume para mujer con miles de flores | DIOR

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. Europe was tired of dropping bombs and now only wanted to let off fireworks… It was reassuring to find that the coarse feasts of the black marketeers were being gradually superseded by the more elegant entertainments of smart society. Hence the decision to turn it into a museum that cherishes his heritage, while the surrounding garden, created by his mother, has become a park open to the public. Clearly, it was very much on the mind of Christian Dior, when he wrote his memoir in 1956, the year before his sudden death.If she’d been found with the radio listening to De Gaulle, she would have been arrested and imprisoned. In July 1943, Georges Makowski, Jacques de Prévaux’s Jewish righthand man in Nice, was warned that he had been betrayed by an informer. And despite Madeleine Dior’s strictness with the children, Catherine made a brief yet intriguing reference to her mother ‘closing her eyes’ and giving them the freedom to create two flowerbeds, one in the shape of a tiger, and the other a butterfly.

Miss Dior (Hardback) | Faber Miss Dior (Hardback) | Faber

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.Instead, Catherine would become associated with the scent of Miss Dior, a perfume launched at the same time as the couture brand. 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. But while Christian became one of the most famous Frenchmen in the world – a celebrated name alongside Charles de Gaulle – the remarkable story of Catherine Dior has never been fully explored. 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. Despite Catherine’s unwavering support for General de Gaulle – which was shared by Hervé – F2 in fact had closer links with the Polish and British intelligence services.