Miss Dior

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The pictures that I have seen of Catherine in her post-war life show her at ease in linen trousers and shirts in Provence, or discreetly attired for work in Paris. Roses continue to bloom everywhere at La Colle Noire, too: tumbling over pergolas and climbing up the outside walls, their tendrils gently tapping at the windows; luxuriant even on the patterned floral wallpaper and chintz furnishings within.

Picardie found so much rich mate­r­i­al that the book reads like a col­or­ful nov­el, mov­ing from the macabre to the ethe­re­al and pre­sent­ing us with a steep wall of con­trasts between Cather­ine and Chris­t­ian, a wall that we can’t fail to enjoy climb­ing as we try to under­stand each of them indi­vid­u­al­ly and gain a firm grasp on their relationship. When the French designer Christian Dior presented his first collection in Paris in 1947, he changed fashion forever. The siblings’ stories are profoundly in Occupied France, as Christian honed his couture skills, Catherine dedicated herself to the Resistance, ultimately being captured by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbruck, the only Nazi camp solely for women. Lucien Dior would become a politician, and remained in parliament until his death in 1932, while a rivalry developed between his wife Charlotte and Madeleine, apparently arising from their competitive aspirations to be the most fashionably dressed chatelaines of the wealthiest households. One thinks of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, in which Daniel Day-Lewis plays a couturier and Lesley Manville his devoted sister.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. 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. Her sister would “tease me gently about my propensity for magical thinking: yet when she died, I needed to believe that the bond between us was not severed, even though I felt broken myself”. That the original Miss Dior was untouched by the horrors of war, remaining safely in the past, an innocent young girl in the rose garden of Granville? The lack of depth relative to Catherine Dior’s life can simply be chalked up to a lack of available detail.

Lots of information about Christian Dior (he wrote an autobiography and has been much written about), and the latter part of the book diverts off to talk about his New Look and the British Royal family at length! 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. on July 6, 1944, a young Frenchwoman, a member of the Resistance, was arrested by four armed Gestapo officers on the Place du Trocadéro in Paris. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.Their stories of death, endurance, hunger, and pain give a visceral sense of the dehumanizing experience of life in the camps. Yet equally important to Dior’s conception of ‘flower-like women’ that emerged in his couture salon in Paris was his mother’s love of gardening. Christian’s belief in clairvoyance, and the bonds between siblings draw a parallel with Picardie’s own experience of losing her sister, Ruth, to breast cancer in 1997. The other describes the post-World War II fashion industry and Christian Dior’s emergence as one of its stars. They were very traumatic - not just in the German concentration camps but prior to that at the hands of fellow Parisians who worked with the Nazis.

Other than their familial relationship Catherine and Christian lived very different lives that only rarely affected one another. The juxtaposition of the terrible shadows and dazzling light is one of the great strengths of this book . 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.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. But as her biographer Justine Picardie admits, she would only ever be an “intangible presence” at the house. Christian Dior was so moved by his courageous younger sister that he formulated his unforgettable perfume, Miss Dior, to honor her bravery and patriotism during World War II.