Through the looking glass

You could spend an entire weekend immersed in the splendid world of Christian Dior. First off, dive into Miss Dior, Justine Picardie’s much-admired study of the great designer’s sister that is now out in paperback. As the cover promises, it is a story of freedom and fascism, beauty and betrayal, roses and repression.

The enigmatic Catherine Dior was central to her brother’s sensibility and his vision of femininity. She was 12 years younger than him and he had doted on her in their idyllic childhood. The family was affluent, their stage a glorious home on the Normandy coast where their mother charmed visitors with her sweeping gowns and sumptuous, rose-filled gardens. Those elements — ravishing gowns and roses — would repeat throughout her son’s designs over the years and the perfume he created for Catherine, Miss Dior, is deeply floral.

But Catherine herself was not glamorous. She was a war hero, a decorated fighter in the French Resistance, who was captured, tortured, and sent to the dreadful Ravensbrück concentration camp. When she arrived back in Paris in May 1945, having survived a death march, she was so emaciated her brother didn’t recognise her.

Her safe return was the catalyst for Dior realising his dream of starting a couture house, but she was no fashion muse. Catherine kept to the wings: “Her innate modesty and quiet discretion were clad in the silence that surrounded her wartime suffering; her face still showed the sadness and pain she had endured, and her body bore the scars of her torture.” These war years are brought vividly to the small screen in the Apple TV+ series The New Look, which tells the story of how Dior and his contemporaries Coco Chanel, Cristóbal Balenciaga, and Pierre Balmain survived occupied France.

The moral choices they had to make, the thin line between complicity and compromise, and the smooth evil of the German overlords are explored. How to create beauty in such an atmosphere of ugliness? The characters and the clothes are brought beautifully to life, as are their squabbles and rivalries. Chanel said Dior had ruined French couture with his upholstered, extravagant outfits that were the opposite of her loose and comfortable clothes. She had a razor-sharp tongue on her: “Look how ridiculous these women are,” she famously declared. “[They’re] wearing clothes by a man who doesn’t know women, never had one, and dreams of being one.”

Dior never publicly retaliated; instead, the group of couturiers rubbed along as best they could. “For those of us who lived through the war, creation was survival,” said Dior.

Finally, to see where Dior design started, and how it has evolved over the decades, there is a brand-new compilation, Dior: Style Icon — The Defining Looks from a Legendary Fashion House. Written by the historian Dan Jones, it proceeds from Dior’s first designs, through his later career, and on to the designers who took over his pins and drawing board after his death, too young, in 1957. How did his successors interpret Dior’s message of hope and beauty? The illustrations move from the early, instantly recognisable Bar Suit, with its hourglass shape, through to the designs of Yves St Laurent, Marc Bohan, and John Galliano.

Jones presents various muses of the designers, such as film icons Lauren Hutton, Princess Grace, and Marlene Dietrich, right up to contemporary pop stars Rihanna and Kim Jisoo. The current creative head of the couture house is the Italian designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, who dazzled us with the silver gown worn by Celine Dion in the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. The gown took 1 000 hours to make in the Dior ateliers. Christian Dior would have approved. Catherine Dior long outlived her brother.

After the war she lived quietly, working as a flower trader, burying herself in seas of blooms in the markets. Later she grew flowers — especially roses — at her home in a Provençal village, supplied to the Dior fashion house for their scent. She helped preserve her brother’s legacy after his death and was the honorary president of the Christian Dior Museum in Paris until her own death in 2008, aged 90. She was private to the end and never spoke about her wartime experiences.