Miss Dior

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Miss Dior’ paints a portrait of the enigmatic woman behind the designer Christian Dior: his beloved younger sister Catherine, who inspired his most famous perfume and shaped his vision of femininity. Unlike many of her friends, she survived the horrors of the camp and a death march to Munich as the Allied forces sought to liberate the captives. Picardie’s determination to create a connection between Catherine’s life and her brother’s work results in a truly egregious comparison between inmate portraits (drawn, at great personal risk, by a woman at one of the camps where Catherine was held) to photos of Christian with a fashion model and one of his dresses.

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. I will not disguise the fact that the Beistegui ball is a memory that I am proud to possess,” wrote Christian Dior of a more than usually lavish party he attended in Venice in 1951.Perhaps this is why the author attempts to flesh out Dior’s story by connecting her to her brother Christian’s well-documented career in the second half of the book. 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to let off fireworks… It was reassuring to find that the coarse feasts of the black marketeers were being gradually superseded by the more elegant entertainments of smart society.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.

Picardie dissects this enigmatic woman, her relationship with her brother, and through it takes another look at the designs that defined a generation. The action of the Nazi leaders is particularly hard to read, and yet, at the same time, hard to put down.I loved this book and the characters in it have stayed with me - rather like someone's perfume does when they leave the room. Catherine’s story shines – the quiet Dior who preferred flowers to fashion, the unsung heroine who survived the abuse of the Third Reich to help liberate France. Picardie skilfully interweaves what she has learned about Catherine's experiences in 1944-5 with more general and often illuminating details about the Resistance, the camps, the world of fashion, and the postwar trials . DAILY TELEGRAPH Miss Dior explores the relationship between the visionary designer Christian Dior and his beloved younger sister Catherine, who inspired his most famous perfume and shaped his vision of femininity. A tragic, courageous and powerful story of lesser known sister of Dior, Catherine and her life’s journey.

Obviously, her story and Christian's are intertwined and I liked the way in which this was dealt with in the book.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’. 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.