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

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It had been a difficult decision for Christian to leave Catherine in Provence in 1941. ‘I disliked intensely the idea of returning to a humiliated and beaten Paris,’ he wrote in his memoir. ‘I also had to consider the future of our agricultural venture if it was left under the sole supervision of my sister.’ He does not explain what, exactly, gave him the impetus to resume his previous career in fashion; but in any event, he found a job working for Lucien Lelong, who was also the president of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, the official trade federation for the industry, and as such, responsible for negotiating with the Nazi authorities in Paris. 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. Just along the path, I find a maze made out of privet hedges, and remember that one of the curators in the Dior archives told me that Catherine, in old age, had described this to him as an important feature of the garden in her childhood. I am tall enough to be able to see over the hedges, but a little girl, running through the green labyrinth, would have to know it very well to find her way out. I know my own way, comes a whisper in my head, though I cannot be sure whether it is mine, or a memory of my lost sister’s voice, when we played together in the secret gardens of our own childhood. Aside from the garden, the place that Christian felt safest in was the linen-room, where ‘the housemaids and seamstresses … told me fairy stories of devils … Dusk drew on, night fell and there I lingered … absorbed in watching the women round the oil-lamp plying their needles … From that time I have kept a nostalgia for stormy nights, fog-horns, the tolling of the cemetery-bell, and even the Norman drizzle in which my childhood passed.’

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

Miss Dior is a wartime story of freedom and fascism, beauty and betrayal and ‘a gripping story’ (Antonia Fraser). Despite his sacrifice, more arrests were to follow: on 29 March 1944, Jacques de Prévaux himself was apprehended by the Gestapo in Marseilles, along with several other members of F2. That same day, his wife Lotka was captured at their home in Nice (her parents had already been deported from Paris to Auschwitz the previous year). When the Gestapo arrived at their apartment, Lotka had just enough time to entrust the couple’s baby daughter into the care of their nanny, who safely hid her for nine months before taking her to Jacques’s brother and sister-in-law in Paris after the Liberation.

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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. The overdue restoration of Catherine Dior's extraordinary life, from her brother's muse to Holocaust survivor The juxtaposition of terrible shadows and dazzling light is one of the great strengths of this book . . . [Miss Dior] is a very personal, very passionate book.” —Artemis Cooper, Times Literary Supplement

Miss Dior by Justine Picardie | Faber Long Read: Miss Dior by Justine Picardie | Faber

Instead, I’m hoping to discover an earlier era, when Catherine was a child. 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’. So it seems appropriate that I should be wearing the same scent on my trip to Granville. The original formula is classed, in the specialist terminology of perfumery, as a ‘green chypre’, blending complex notes of galbanum (a distinctive-smelling plant resin), bergamot, patchouli and oakmoss, with the warmth of jasmine and rose at its floral heart. And just for a moment, standing in Catherine’s former bedroom, I become aware of this unmistakable scent; not on my own skin, but emanating from some other, unseen source … perhaps the huge flagon of perfume presented to Princess Grace by Christian Dior, on show in a nearby gallery? 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!’ Picardie . . . has nearly unassailable fashion knowledge. She reconstructs with ease and confidence how fashion restored luxury to its French perch after the war." —Ruth Peltason, Air Mail 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. 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 . . .’

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Catherine’s voice appears rarely in the book. She was, as a godson recalled, a woman of very few words, and much as Picardie has done an exceptional job of piecing her life together from contemporaneous accounts, Catherine – Miss Dior – remains the hollow at the book’s centre. Inventive and captivating, and shaped by Picardie’s own journey, Miss Dior examines the legacy of Christian Dior, the secrets of postwar France, and the unbreakable bond between two remarkable siblings. Most important, it shines overdue recognition on a previously overlooked life, one that epitomized courage and also embodied the astonishing capacity of the human spirit to remain undimmed, even in the darkest circumstances. The first Frenchman to join F2 was a former racing driver, Gilbert Foury, who swiftly expanded its operations into the port cities of Le Havre, Brest and Bordeaux, to spy on German submarines. He was subsequently joined by a senior French naval officer, Jacques Trolley de Prévaux, and his Polish-Jewish wife Lotka. In the autumn of 1940, F2 established itself in Toulon and developed a network along the Mediterranean coastline, in Cannes and Nice. Hervé des Charbonneries was a notably courageous agent in this section, and he in turn recruited Catherine Dior. 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!”’