Dior, who’d worked for the couturier Lucien Lelong during the war, showed his debut collection at 30 Avenue Montaigne, Paris, on 12 February 1947 (the “new look”, as it was christened by Carmel Snow, the editor of American Harper’s Bazaar ). His sister was in the audience, breathing air that was heady with scent, as well as covetousness: his models wore the soon-to-be-launched Miss Dior, its formula inspired by the jasmine and roses Catherine adored (she was by now working as a florist). But as her biographer Justine Picardie admits, she would only ever be an “intangible presence” at the house. Later, there would be a dress, also called Miss Dior: a gown covered in hand-stitched petals. Catherine, though, was not a fancy dresser. In photographs, she is ever practical-looking. Her clothes are chosen for warmth and ease, not for drawing the eye. As for the uncertainty regarding Catherine’s relationship with the Miss Dior dress: a clue may lie in the name of the collection where the gown first appeared, which Christian himself baptized the “Trompe-l’œil” line. The literal translation of the phrase is “deceiving the eye”; what might be the visual illusion at work here? That the flowers of the Miss Dior gown were real? 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? Or is it simply as Dior described it in the program notes for the collection: “There are two principles on which the ‘Trompel’œil’ line is founded: one is to give the bust prominence and breadth, at the same time as respecting the natural curve of the shoulders; the other principle leaves the body its natural line but gives fullness and indispensable movement to the skirts.”

Miss Dior, A Story of Courage and Couture by - Booktopia Miss Dior, A Story of Courage and Couture by - Booktopia

Yet the Gestapo and their French collaborators showed no signs of retreating, and as they intensified their investigations into the Resistance, the number of arrests and executions increased. While the Allies fought to gain control of Cherbourg and Caen in northern France, the Gestapo had successfully infiltrated the F2 network in Paris, through a French female informer of the same age as Catherine. She, too, was involved in a close-knit network of agents that had been formed during the Occupation: but their aims were to support the Nazis and annihilate the Resistance. On 6 July 1944, they finally closed in on Catherine: she was arrested on the street by a group of four armed men who took her bicycle and handbag, forced her into their car, blindfolded her and drove her to their sinister headquarters in the heart of Paris. Thus began a lengthy and cruel ordeal that would lead, ultimately, to Catherine’s deportation and imprisonment in a series of German concentration camps.

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Despite his sacrifice, more arrests were to follow: on 29 March 1944, Jacques de Prévaux himself was apprehended by the Gestapo in Marseilles, along with several other members of F2. That same day, his wife Lotka was captured at their home in Nice (her parents had already been deported from Paris to Auschwitz the previous year). When the Gestapo arrived at their apartment, Lotka had just enough time to entrust the couple’s baby daughter into the care of their nanny, who safely hid her for nine months before taking her to Jacques’s brother and sister-in-law in Paris after the Liberation. Catherine’s voice appears rarely in the book. She was, as a godson recalled, a woman of very few words, and much as Picardie has done an exceptional job of piecing her life together from contemporaneous accounts, Catherine – Miss Dior – remains the hollow at the book’s centre. In a further sign of the remarkable silence that reigned for so long in France on the subject of the war, Jacques and Lotka’s baby daughter Aude – who was adopted after their death by her father’s brother and sister-in-law – was told nothing about her real parents’ identity and their heroic service in the Resistance. It was only a chance encounter, when she was twenty-three, that finally led to her discovering the truth.

Miss Dior Perfume | House of Fraser Miss Dior Perfume | House of Fraser

These, then, were the shadows of devils and the dead that were kept at bay during the gilded age of the Belle Epoque, when Les Rhumbs had not yet been touched by the threat of war or financial ruin. But what of Catherine, born when the battles of the First World War were raging? Her birth certificate gives her name as Ginette Marie Catherine Dior; family lore has it that it was her brother Bernard who first chose to call her Catherine, rather than Ginette, when she was still a baby. Pictures of her at Les Rhumbs show a solemn little girl, dressed in starched white cotton and lace; her parents are stern, somewhat remote, Christian a more gentle-looking figure standing behind them. There are many different ways of viewing the activities of Lelong and his colleagues during the Second World War. According to Dior himself, ‘the couture houses had reopened their workshops, as much to provide employment for thousands of workers as out of patriotic pride . . . Such an apparently frivolous and futile occupation risked earning the displeasure of the Germans: but somehow we managed to exist until the day of Liberation.’ I think my mother was in love with one of the Polish guys in F2. He died during the war, she was left alone, and then my parents met.’ Nicolas wondered if his father was jealous of Lili’s love affair with another member of the Resistance before they met, or whether it was simply that people of his parents’ generation avoided discussing the German Occupation of France. Nevertheless, he could see the powerful bond that existed between his mother and Catherine, which led to Catherine being chosen as his godmother. The two former resistants continued to spend much time together, for though Nicolas and his sister went to school in Paris, his parents had a holiday home in Provence, in a village close to Catherine’s home in Callian. ‘Catherine and my mother trusted each other completely,’ said Nicolas. Their attachment was based on their shared wartime experience in F2, and because Catherine’s own silence had been responsible for saving Lili’s life.While her extreme bravery during the war is not in doubt, there’s little for Picardie to go on even in that period None of the rooms in Les Rhumbs is furnished. Instead, they are lined with museum cabinets for the display of artefacts, drawings and photographs; on this occasion, relating mostly to Princess Grace’s wardrobe. Yet for all the poignancy of these objects – in particular, the image of a youthful Grace Kelly, wearing an ethereal white Dior gown at the ball celebrating her engagement to Prince Rainier in 1956, unaware that she would die before growing old – Les Rhumbs remains a monument to a more distant past. For this is the place where Maurice and Madeleine Dior moved at the beginning of the century and raised their five children. 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. By 1905, Maurice and his cousin Lucien were running the flourishing company together, and its growing success was reflected in their social ascendancy. 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. Wholehearted French support for the ‘aryanisation’ of the fashion industry was by no means uncommon, as a feature of the ‘cleansing’ activities imposed by the Third Reich and the Vichy regime. ‘France will be saved and will be rebuilt by elements that are intrinsically her own; the essentials are French blood and the French brain,’ declared the writer François Ribadeau Dumas in November 1940, the same month that the Jewish couturier Jacques Heim was forbidden to do business in Paris. ‘The moment . . . the more than questionable Jewish houses disappear, the atmosphere of the Parisian luxury trade will be purified!’

Miss Dior by Justine Picardie | Waterstones Miss Dior by Justine Picardie | Waterstones

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 . . .’ 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. 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. This substantial late-nineteenth-century villa, positioned high above the Normandy town of Granville, overlooking the English Channel, was the childhood home of Christian Dior. Hence the decision to turn it into a museum that cherishes his heritage, while the surrounding garden, created by his mother, has become a park open to the public. It is surprisingly quiet this morning in the grounds, perhaps because of the damp weather, although the museum has several dozen visitors who have come to see a new exhibition, dedicated to Princess Grace of Monaco, and displaying clothes designed for her by Christian Dior.

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When the French designer Christian Dior presented his first collection in Paris in 1947, he changed fashion forever. Dior’s “New Look” created a striking, romantic vision of femininity, luxury, and grace, making him—and his last name—famous overnight. One woman informed Dior’s vision more than any other: his sister, Catherine, a Resistance fighter, concentration camp survivor, and cultivator of rose gardens who inspired Dior’s most beloved fragrance, Miss Dior. Yet the story of Catherine’s remarkable life—so different from her famous brother’s—has never been told, until now. Just along the path, I find a maze made out of privet hedges, and remember that one of the curators in the Dior archives told me that Catherine, in old age, had described this to him as an important feature of the garden in her childhood. 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. I know my own way, comes a whisper in my head, though I cannot be sure whether it is mine, or a memory of my lost sister’s voice, when we played together in the secret gardens of our own childhood. 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. 15, 1948. DR/Collection Christian Dior Parfums + Fonds Nicolas Crespelle After the defeat of France in June 1940, Gitta became a volunteer nurse for a charity in the Loire Valley, looking after children who had lost their parents. (Such was the chaos at the time, as vast numbers of refugees fled the advancing German army, that many families were separated for months on end.) Gitta seldom came to Paris, but when she did, on one occasion in the winter of 1941, she arranged to meet Lili at a café. ‘I questioned her choice of meeting place – the Right Bank was full of Germans, the Champs-Élysées worst of all. “The safest places in Paris are those where they congregate,” she said in her light voice.’