Soon after the success of his ground-breaking New Look, Dior recalled, ‘ Miss Dior was born. Overnight, Christian Dior‘s ‘New Look’ – with its full, swirling skirts, wasp-waisted jackets and bold use of colour – became, as Vogue puts it, ‘catnip to a luxury-starved populace eager to return to the rituals of grooming and dressing up’.īut women didn’t just want to look good. And on 12th February 1947, Christian Dior turned the austere post-wartime world on its head, creating the most headline-grabbing collection ever known. ‘Accept! You must create the house of Christian Dior.’ A great believer in omens and fortune-tellers – Dior had once been told ‘You will be penniless, but women will be good to you and it is thanks to them you will succeed’ – he turned to his favourite psychic, Madame Delahaye, for advice when offered two proposals to open his own couture house. ![]() The paper Le Figaro gave Dior‘s vibrant sketches a weekly page – and his hat designs did well, too.ĭuring the Second World War, Dior worked as a designer beneath couturier Lucien Lelong, then in 1945 got the opportunity to head up the house of Gaston. A friend suggested he take up fashion illustration he dedicated himself to the task, studying the great designers – Molyneux, Schiaparelli, Lanvin – and his dress designers were sought out by couturier Robert Piguet. On his return, post-recovery, an impoverished Dior looked for work. ![]() With funding from Dior’s father, it went on to showcase works by Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miro and Raoul Dufy, among many others, But sadly, the Wall Street crash of 1929 made for few buyers – and badly dented the Dior family fortunes – and this adventure ended when tuberculosis forced Christian Dior to leave Paris, in 1934. And another arty friend asked Christian Dior – who really longed to be an artist himself – if he’d be interested in becoming a partner in his new gallery. He kept his parents quiet, initially, by enrolling for Paris’s Institute of Political Sciences – but little did his parents realise that this was also a door to Paris’s exotic night-life.ĭior drifted happily into the company of artists and writers who later went on to become among the greatest of their time: painter Christian Bérard, Jean Cocteau, poet Max Jacob and actor Marcel Herrand all became friends. His parents – who lived in a grand villa on the Normandy coast – refused to let him attend a school of fine arts, telling him that it wouldn’t help him find a real job. 1905) one of the greatest-ever couturiers – and a man whose name is also synonymous, all over the world, with the glorious art of perfume.Īs design careers go, Christian Dior‘s didn’t start well. ![]() ‘A woman’s perfume tells me more about her than her handwriting.’ So said Christian Dior (b.
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