Miss Dior

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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. Other than their familial relationship Catherine and Christian lived very different lives that only rarely affected one another. The author does not shy away from the suffering that was experienced by the women not just Catherine Dior. Dior’s “New Look” created a striking, romantic vision of femininity, luxury, and grace, making him―and his last name―famous overnight.

For further information on the processing of your personal data please consult our Privacy Statement. A soft rain is falling over the midsummer roses that are blooming in the garden of Les Rhumbs, and a sea mist is gathering, veiling the solid lines of the house. I wasn’t that keen on these passages, though, such as describing how she felt lying in the same bedroom etc. 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. 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.

DAILY TELEGRAPH Miss Dior explores the relationship between the visionary designer Christian Dior and his beloved younger sister Catherine, who inspired his most famous perfume and shaped his vision of femininity. 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. She was captured by the Nazis, tortured, and deported to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany.

A love of gardening inherited from their mother drew them together and the roses grown in the family’s small farmhouse, Les Naÿssès, would later provide Miss Dior’s foundation ingredient.I would not have heard about Catherine were it not for my favourite perfume and that can not be right. As Christian himself wrote in his memoir: ‘My early years were those of a very good, very well-brought-up little boy, watched over by vigilant fräuleins, and seemingly quite incapable of mingling in the hurly-burly of life. On a personal level, early on we are introduced to Hervé des Charbonneries, a married man with whom Catherine spent her life, although they never married, and he never divorced. It is set some distance away from the house, hidden at the end of a path, out of sight of onlookers – yet once inside, the view from the windows is unexpectedly dramatic.

Although the book is not heavy with details about Catherine’s life, it is peppered with photographs, many of which are of Catherine.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. Every single person who has experienced the loss, yearning and honourable rage of bereavement will know that this is their book. 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.

Diaries and memoirs of other French Resistance members interned at the same time provide the framework of Catherine’s incarceration: she spoke of the trauma only in brief fragments. I will not disguise the fact that the Beistegui ball is a memory that I am proud to possess,” wrote Christian Dior of a more than usually lavish party he attended in Venice in 1951. Yet the calm professionalism of this explanation is at odds with the emotional intensity that Dior reveals in his memoir, when he declares that he is “obsessed” with the clothes he creates: “They preoccupy me, they occupy me, and finally they ‘post-occupy’ me, if I can risk the word. Was she received with respect when she came to see her brother’s couture collections at Avenue Montaigne, amidst the chattering swarm of journalists, editors, celebrities, and socialites?

She remained silent under torture and endured unspeakable cruelty, hardship, deprivation, and violence. I enjoyed reading Miss Dior, though Picardie can be a bit wafty; she’s always communing with spirits. But while Christian became one of the most famous Frenchmen in the world – a celebrated name alongside Charles de Gaulle – the remarkable story of Catherine Dior has never been fully explored. Catch me if you can, whispers the imaginary child, and then her voice is gone, and I can hear only the sound of the wind murmuring in the chimney, sighing in the empty fireplace beside me. They had married in 1898, when Madeleine was a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl; Maurice Dior, at twenty-six, was already an ambitious young man, intent on expanding the fertiliser manufacturing business that his grandfather had set up in 1832.