With unparalleled access to the Dior family homes and archives, Justine Picardie’s research into Catherine’s courageous life shines a new light on Christian Dior’s legendary work, and reveals how his enchanting ‘New Look’ emerged out of the shadows of his sister’s suffering. His debut collection, shown in Paris on 12 February 1947, had been christened the New Look. But despite the name, it was as much a nostalgic reimagining of the Belle Epoque, the golden years before the Great War. This was the era of Christian’s early childhood, growing up in the secure surroundings of the Dior family home in Granville, on the coast of Normandy. His mother, Madeleine, had dressed in the romantic, sweeping gowns of the period, and it was these that inspired Dior’s creation of swishing full skirts and a rounded hourglass silhouette, achieved with a corseted waist and padded bust. 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.

Miss Dior | The Independent The incredible story of the real Miss Dior | The Independent

See Faber authors in conversation and hear readings from their work at Faber Members events, literary festivals and at book shops across the UK. 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 You don't have permission to access "http://www.dior.com/zh_tw/fashion/%E5%A5%B3%E5%A3%AB%E7%B2%BE%E5%93%81/%E6%99%82%E5%B0%9A%E6%89%8B%E8%A2%8B/%E6%89%80%E6%9C%89%E6%89%8B%E6%8F%90%E5%8C%85" on this server. Christian’s surviving writing also provides a sense of the emotional resonance and powerful influence of the landscape. The young trees that were planted, as he described them in his memoir, ‘grew up, as I did, against the wind and the tides. 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.’ Catherine outlived her brother by five decades, and died in June 2008, not far from La Colle Noire, at her home in the neighbouring village of Callian. Here she too cultivated roses, both for her own pleasure and to be distilled as an essence for Dior’s perfume manufacturers in nearby Grasse. She had been a loyal and loving sister throughout her brother’s life, and continued to be so after his death, honouring his legacy in many ways, including her consistent support for the Christian Dior museum that was eventually established in Granville.

Log in/register

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.’ You don't have permission to access "http://www.dior.com/es_sam/beauty/perfumes/perfumes-femeninos/miss-dior" on this server. There are points in this book when it feels traitorous to be considering skirt lengths in the same breath as gas chambers, antitheses that, on the whole, Picardie navigates with the intelligence and sympathy you would expect. “There should be a vast gulf between them – a chasm…” she writes, “and yet they coexist.” 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 . . .’

Watch: Justine Picardie talks about Miss Dior - Faber Watch: Justine Picardie talks about Miss Dior - Faber

One of the words most often used about Catherine Dior, by her few surviving friends and relatives, is ‘discreet’; and it is telling that even a decade after her death, several of those who knew her still request anonymity when answering my questions about her relationship with Hervé des Charbonneries.Picardie is a former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, a former fashion columnist for this paper and the author of an acclaimed biography of Coco Chanel. Fashion is in her bones, but while I wish I could tell you that Miss Dior is about swishing silks and mirrored salons, it isn’t. These certainly vein the book, but come to seem brittle intrusions in an otherwise eerie and distressing story.

Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture|Hardcover Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture|Hardcover

It wasn’t until thirty-five years later that Lili told Gitta more about the terrifying circumstances: ‘She had carried four messages, three to individuals in the morning and one to a group meeting that afternoon; eight people had been arrested that day, two in the morning and the six others that afternoon, just as Lili had turned into the streets on her bicycle. All would be executed, mostly hanged after being tortured. “A bad day,” she remembered. Were there many like that? She shrugged, “Ah oui . . .”’Her husband, Maurice Dior, had inherited the family fertiliser business, and on days when the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, the stench of his factories would drift across the town, although seldom as far as Les Rhumbs. But for all its unsavoury connotations, the guano industry paid for Madeleine’s magical creation on a barren cliff top: tender flowerbeds protected from the salt-laden storms by hardy conifer trees, and most importantly of all, the roses that were (and remain) the centrepiece of the garden. Both Jacques and Lotka were kept in solitary confinement, and repeatedly interrogated and tortured at Montluc prison in Lyons, which was run by the notorious SS officer Klaus Barbie. On 19 August – four days after the Allies had landed on the Mediterranean coast – they were executed by a firing squad, part of a group of twenty-four resistants murdered there during the final atrocities of the Occupation. A few days later, the Germans abandoned Montluc, and Lyons was liberated on 3 September 1944. Instead, like his sister Catherine, he preferred to stay at home and help their mother in the garden, away from the malodorous Dior factories. Christian went so far as to learn by heart the names and descriptions of flowers in the illustrated seed catalogues that were delivered to Les Rhumbs, while Madeleine Dior’s love of roses was inherited by her youngest child, Catherine, who made it her life’s work to grow and nurture them. If the Dior children regarded their parents as distant figures of authority – as is suggested by Christian’s biographer, Marie-France Pochna, who noted that they were raised in an era ‘when open demonstrations of affection were considered likely to weaken the character and strictness was the norm’ – it might also be possible that the way to their mother’s heart was through her cherished garden.