Christian Dior
“The French couturier whose 1947 'New Look' put Paris back at the head of fashion, and who made his name a business of perfume, stockings and licences.”
Christian Dior was a French couturier whose first collection, shown in Paris on 12 February 1947, brought back the rounded shoulder, the narrow waist and the long, full skirt after years of war and rationing. The press called it the New Look, and it made Paris again the capital of fashion. Dior led his house for only ten years, but in that time it became the biggest in Paris, and it gave later fashion companies their model: one famous name on dresses, perfume, stockings, shoes and licences.
He was born on 21 January 1905 at Granville, a seaside town in Normandy, the son of a fertiliser manufacturer, and grew up in Paris from about 1911. His parents wanted a diplomat; he preferred painters and musicians. In 1928, with his father's money, he opened a gallery in the rue La Boétie under the name of his partner Jacques Bonjean, and later worked with the dealer Pierre Colle. Then his mother died, his father was ruined and the gallery failed. Ill and almost penniless, he began at thirty to sell fashion sketches, drew for Robert Piguet from 1938, farmed in Provence in 1940, and from the end of 1941 worked for Lucien Lelong, who taught him the trade through the Occupation.
In 1945–46 the textile magnate Marcel Boussac offered to back him. Dior refused to revive an old house and founded a new one, small and made by craftsmen, at 30 avenue Montaigne, which opened at the end of 1946 with some eighty-five people. His first show, with the Corolle and 'figure 8' lines and the Bar suit, was so successful that the buyers and the press packed the staircase; Carmel Snow of Harper's Bazaar is credited with the name New Look. Some were angry at the metres of cloth, and American women picketed him. Each season after that he announced a new 'line' (H, A, Y, Arrow) and changed hems and shapes so often that the press called him a dictator of fashion.
His second invention was the business. With his manager Jacques Rouët he sold his name: Miss Dior perfume in 1947, a New York house in 1948, licences for stockings, gloves, furs and ties, shoes made with Delman and Roger Vivier, and a London company from 1952. Other couturiers said this cheapened couture, but every large luxury house later copied the model. In March 1957 Time reported Dior companies in twenty-four countries and put him on its cover.
Dior also wrote a memoir, 'Christian Dior et moi' (1956). On 24 October 1957, aged 52, he died of a heart attack at Montecatini in Italy. His funeral was close to a national event. His 21-year-old assistant Yves Saint Laurent took over the house and on 30 January 1958 showed the Trapeze line, which the American press hailed as the biggest change since the New Look. The house, bought out of Boussac's bankruptcy by Bernard Arnault in 1984, still carries his name.
What happened
- 1905
Christian Ernest Dior is born at Granville, in Normandy, to Maurice Dior, a manufacturer of fertilisers and chemicals, and Madeleine Martin. He grows up in the family villa Les Rhumbs on the cliff above the sea, rough-cast in a soft pink, with a conservatory his mother added for her plants.
Granville, Normandy: Dior was born here on 21 January 1905 and grew up in the family villa Les Rhumbs on the cliff, now the Musée Christian Dior- 1911
The family moves from Granville to Paris, to a flat near La Muette in the quarter of Passy, where Dior discovers the 'Louis XVI' taste of the years 1900–14 that he would later put into his house. At school he covers his books with drawings of a woman's leg in a high-heeled shoe.
- 1919
At a bazaar for soldiers near home a fortune-teller reads his palm: poverty first, but 'women are lucky for you', and success through them, and travel. His family laughs; he repeats the prediction all his life and consults fortune-tellers before big decisions.
- 1923
To please his parents, who want him to be a diplomat, he enrols at the École des sciences politiques in Paris after the baccalauréat. He cares more for painters, writers and composers, and meets Henri Sauguet, Christian Bérard, Max Jacob, Pierre Gaxotte and Jean Ozenne.
- 1926
At twenty-one he spends several months in England to improve his English before his military service, 'for the first time in my life absolutely free'. He keeps a lifelong fondness for English clothes, houses and manners.
- 1927
He joins the army as a private in the Fifth Regiment of Engineers at Versailles. He decides there that the sensible profession, 'the deepest folly' to his parents, is to own an art gallery.
- 1928
With his father's money, 'some hundreds of thousands of francs' on condition that the family name stay off the sign, he opens an art gallery in the rue La Boétie with his friend Jacques Bonjean. It is called the Galerie Jacques Bonjean and shows Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Dufy and the younger Christian Bérard, Salvador Dalí and Max Jacob. At a Max Jacob show he meets Pierre Colle, a young poet turned dealer.
34 rue La Boétie, Paris: the Galerie Jacques Bonjean, the art gallery Dior opened in 1928 with his father's money - 1931
A bad year. His brother falls ill with an incurable nervous disease, his mother dies and his father, ruined by real estate, has to sell everything. Dior joins a group of architects on a study trip to the Soviet Union, finds on his return that Bonjean is ruined too, and has to give up the first gallery.
- 1932
He shares the 'even worse luck' of Pierre Colle, whose gallery in the rue Cambacérès keeps showing Surrealist and abstract artists, among them Dalí, while collectors vanish. Dior sleeps in friends' rooms and sells paintings at a loss; the gallery closes in 1933 or 1934.
- 1934
Seriously ill, he is sent by friends to high ground and then to the Balearic Islands for a year; Gale calls it a tuberculosis attack. There, bored, he learns tapestry and discovers the wish to make something with his hands.
- 1935
Back in Paris, jobless, he lives with the designer Jean Ozenne, who sells six of his drawings at twenty francs each, 120 francs: 'the first money I had ever earned by my own creative inspiration'. At thirty he has found his trade. He sells hat and dress sketches to couture houses and drawings to the newspapers.
- 1937
The couturier Robert Piguet buys several of his sketches and asks him to make dresses for his half-collection: 'the first dresses that I really created'. Dior takes the lease of a flat at 10 rue Royale.
- 1938
Piguet takes him on as a regular designer at his new house on the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées; for three collections he learns cutting and construction. His dress 'Café Anglais', with a raised bust and rounded width, is a success, and Marie-Louise Bousquet introduces him to Carmel Snow of Harper's Bazaar.
- 1940
Mobilised in 1939, he is demobilised in the south after the defeat of June 1940 and joins his father and sister Catherine at Callian in the Var. They grow peas and beans and sell them in Cannes; he sends sketches to Le Figaro, which has moved to Lyons.
Callian, Var, Provence: the village where his father had retired and where Dior farmed in 1940–41; he was buried here after the funerals of October 1957 - 1941
Piguet's offer comes too late: Antonio Castillo has the job. Paul Caldagus introduces Dior to Lucien Lelong, who hires him on the spot. Beside Pierre Balmain he learns at Lelong's large house how to run a couture house through the Occupation; he also dresses films, the first being 'Le Lit à colonnes' (1942).
- 1944
His sister Catherine, a member of the Resistance, is arrested and deported, and Dior, in his own words, 'sought forgetfulness in complete absorption in my work'. She comes home in 1945.
- 1945
A childhood friend now working for Boussac's Gaston house asks whether Dior knows 'a man in a million' to revive it; at the third meeting Dior answers, 'Well... what about me?' He tells the textile magnate Marcel Boussac that he would rather found a new house under his own name, small, secluded and 'a craftsman's workshop'. The Boussac group agrees to back it and leaves the creative side free.
- 1946
He remembers two small houses at 28 and 30 avenue Montaigne that he once showed Pierre Colle and, when the hat shop at number 30 closes, takes the house. Victor Grandpierre decorates it in white and pearl grey, with Christian Bérard's advice on the shop; Jacques Rouët runs the business side; Raymonde Zehnacker, Mitzah Bricard and Marguerite Carré lead the studio and workrooms.
30 avenue Montaigne, Paris: the house of Dior, opened at the end of 1946; the first collection was shown here on 12 February 1947Dior leaves Lelong and spends two weeks with his friends the Colles at Fleury-en-Bière, in the snow, drawing his first collection. His father has died during the year, the news reaching him in the middle of his farewell dinner for Lelong's staff.
The house of Christian Dior opens at 30 avenue Montaigne, with three workrooms in the attics, a tiny studio, a salon, six fitting rooms and, in his words, eighty-five people; he had planned the opening for 15 December. It is a new house in new premises, financed by the Boussac group, with the first collection to be shown in the spring.
30 avenue Montaigne, Paris: the house of Dior, opened at the end of 1946; the first collection was shown here on 12 February 1947- 1947
Dior's childhood friend Serge Heftler-Louiche, who runs the perfumer Coty in France, proposes a perfume company even before the house opens; Parfums Christian Dior is set up with Boussac as a partner. Its first scent, Miss Dior, goes on sale in 1947 and is usually said to be named for his sister Catherine.
The house shows its first collection, about ninety models, to a crowd of press and buyers who spill on to the staircase of the salon. Its two silhouettes are the 'corolle' (the Corolle line, a flower's petals) and the 'figure 8' (En 8): rounded shoulders, a raised bust, a hand-span waist and a long full skirt. The star is the 'Bar' suit, a nipped jacket in pale silk shantung over a heavy black pleated skirt; Pierre Cardin runs the suit workroom. Six mannequins show it.
30 avenue Montaigne, Paris: the house of Dior, opened at the end of 1946; the first collection was shown here on 12 February 1947Carmel Snow of Harper's Bazaar names it the New Look, on the spot according to the V&A. Time later quoted her, 'God help the buyers who bought before they saw Dior... This changes everything'; LIFE credited the sentence to an unnamed American. Dior, who had called his lines Corolle and En 8, wrote that the combination was 'instantly baptized the New Look'.
The New Look uses fifteen metres of cloth for a woollen day dress and twenty-five for a taffeta evening gown, in the years of rationing, and causes outrage; in Britain the Board of Trade tries to suppress it. Dior says he designed 'flower women' against the soldier-women of the war and denies that Boussac, a cloth maker, pushed him to use more of it.
He sails on the Queen Elizabeth for his first journey outside Europe, to receive the Neiman Marcus award in Dallas, the first time it went to a French couturier. On his American tour housewives picket him with placards, 'Down with the New Look', 'Dior Go Home', and he walks through them unrecognised.
- 1948
His third collection, spring 1948, offers 143 ensembles, and he opens Christian Dior-New York on Fifth Avenue to sell high-fashion ready-to-wear to Americans who do not come to Paris. While it is being prepared he is summoned to an anti-trust hearing over the contract that bars buyers from copying his models; the contract is annulled, which convinces him that in the United States 'the pillaging of artistic creation' is encouraged.
By 1948 the house has licences for furs, stockings and perfume; Jacques Rouët's plan puts the name on stockings, gloves, ties, furs, hats, handbags and jewellery, and Dior signs agreements abroad with England, Canada, Cuba, Australia, Chile and Mexico. The Chambre syndicale calls it a cheapening of couture; it becomes the model for every later fashion brand. By the mid-1950s the group has eight companies, sixteen affiliates and 1,700 staff in five continents.
- 1950
Dior's first show in Britain, at the Savoy Hotel in London, organised by Doris Langley Moore to raise funds for a costume museum; the next day he shows the collection privately at the French Embassy to the Queen, Princess Margaret, Princess Marina and Princess Olga. The court dressmaker Norman Hartnell calls at the hotel to suggest that the collection should be shown to the Queen, and Dior has to tell him, tactfully, that it already has been.
- 1952
C.D. Models (London) Ltd, set up to sell Dior designs as high-end ready-to-wear to the British, launches its first collection at the Savoy Hotel. It is renamed Christian Dior London Ltd in December 1954.
- 1953
The Tulipe line raises hems to about 16 inches from the floor and causes controversy. The London firm's Plaisir suit is won in September by a Daily Express reader who found the short skirts unsuitable for a woman of fifty-one.
- 1954
The H line (the 'Flat Look') flattens the bust and gives an elongated shape; the press asks whether the H stands for heavenly or horrid. Carmel Snow cables Harper's Bazaar that the H line 'represents an even more important development than the New Look'.
Dior shows his winter collection at Blenheim Palace for the British Red Cross, before Princess Margaret and some 1,500 to 2,000 guests; the girls parade through fourteen salons hung with tapestries of French defeats. Princess Margaret gives him a scroll making him an honorary member of the Red Cross.
- 1955
A student from Oran, Yves Saint Laurent, introduced by Vogue's Michel de Brunhoff, is hired on the spot at 30 avenue Montaigne. He will spend two years at Dior's side, first decorating boutiques.
- 1956
His memoir, 'Christian Dior et moi', appears in Paris (Amiot-Dumont); the English edition follows in 1957 as 'Christian Dior and I' in New York and 'Dior by Dior' in London. He writes that there are two Christian Diors, 'the man in the public eye' and the private man, and ends the book in his house at Montauroux, near Callian.
- 1957
On a visit to the Stockholm department store NK he is given a painted Dalarna horse. Scandinavia is one of the markets that buys from the Paris collections.
Time puts Dior on its cover, 'Dictator by Demand', in his tenth year as a couturier: his firms in 24 countries gross about $15 million a year, he sells more than half of Paris couture's exports, a manufacturer pays a $1,500 deposit to attend a show, and he rebuilds the silhouette each season. His spring line is called Libre, 'free as the Paris air'.
Dior tells Jacques Rouët that his young assistant 'is young, but he is an immense talent', the father of thirty-four of the 180 designs of his last collection, and that the time has come to tell the press. He has already had a heart attack and talks of retiring.
Resting at Montecatini, a spa in Tuscany, Dior dies of a heart attack in the night of 23–24 October at 52, after ten quiet days in Tuscany. Two days later his body leaves Florence for Paris, where the funeral at Saint-Honoré-d'Eylau holds 2,000 mourners in numbered seats with 7,000 outside; he is buried at Callian in the Var, where his father had retired.
Grand Hotel & La Pace, Montecatini Terme, Tuscany: the spa hotel where, according to the local paper La Nazione, Dior died in the night of 23–24 October 1957The owners think of closing the house, but its licensees and the French industry, which owed half its export volume to Dior, will not hear of it. Saint Laurent, 21, is made artistic director (the Musée YSL dates his appointment 15 November 1957) and on 30 January 1958 shows the Trapeze collection, which the American press hails as the first big change since the New Look. Dior's name has become, as Gale puts it, 'synonymous with taste and luxury'.
30 avenue Montaigne, Paris: the house of Dior, opened at the end of 1946; the first collection was shown here on 12 February 1947
