WeeklySA_AdminPASSION: New book on the legendary French designer Christian Dior celebrates his indelible stamp on the world of fashion in seven decades…
By Jacob Mawela
‘Pierre Cardin fainted,’ wrote fashion critic Tim Blanks in the New York Times Magazine about what occurred at the funeral of fellow fashion designer Christian Dior on October 29 1957.
The demise – at the height of his fame – of the French stylist unexpectedly at the age of 52, from a heart attack, had shaken the fashion world at the time.
‘The Arc de Triomphe was afloat in a sea of blossom,’ observed Blanks, adding that the man himself would have been suitably impressed by the grand floral tribute, given that flowers were almost the equal of fashion and food in the pantheon of his passions.
Such tribute – also dubbed ‘river of flowers’ – in the great couturier’s honour was as a consequence of the City of Paris granting the House of Dior permission to lay them out in public.
Before the endless bouquets even commenced to wilt, the house was thrown into a major crisis precipitated by the beloved dream-maker’s demise: a successor had to be found as a matter of urgency. One in the person of a young friend of the deceased and upon whom mourners (who included the Duchess of Windsor) at the funeral now cast their gazes – Yves Saint Laurent.
That’s how great a loss the creator of the much-vaunted ‘New Look’ was, not only to France, but to the fashion world at large too!
But, way before the sad farewell attended by a star-studded gathering of 2000 inside the church and a throng of 5000 overflowing outside, a star was born when a young Dior found a tiny metal star on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris in 1946 while en route to meeting the cotton king of France, Marcel Boussac, who had factories remaining idle in the aftermath of World War II.
A devotee of fortune-telling (a fortune[1]teller had once informed him that ‘women would make his success’) and omens, Dior interpreted the discovery as signifying that he was on the right path, prompting him to solicit an agreement from the millionaire that he create a new fashion house in his own name – resulting in the founding of the House of Dior!
The period from the advent of the New Look (an approach which revolutionised women’s dress, re-established Paris as the centre of the fashion world post-World War II and made Dior a virtual arbiter of fashion for much of the following decade) in 1947 to his death in 1957 constituted a decade in which Dior was at the forefront of the art form of French haute couture.
He became the epitome of its expensive, fashionable clothes produced by leading fashion houses, thus cementing the legacy of a fashion house which gained prominence ‘on five continents in only a decade’.
From his childhood growing up in his family’s home, Villa Les Rhumbs on a cliff in Granville on the Normandy coast, to his teenage years in Paris, Dior would be ‘amused for hours by anything that was sparkling, elaborate, flowery, or frivolous,’. He alluded as much in his 1956 autobiography, Dior by Dior –that he could see beauty in everything.
The second of five children – the youngest sibling, Catherine, a member of the French Resistance against the occupying Germans who was captured by the Gestapo and condemned to women’s concentration camp and, upon her liberation, was honoured by being named a Chevaliére of the Légion d’honneur. Her heroics would later make her the muse and inspiration behind Dior’s first fragrance, Miss Dior, which made its debut at his seminal first show in 1947.
Dior had initially been sent to study political science in Paris, but immediately swapped that for operating a little gallery which sold Pablo Picasso’s artworks before shutting down after the Great Depression rendered his family bankrupt.
What followed for the then free spirit in his mid-20s, who hanged out with the creative and intellectual in-crowd (who included Picasso and Jean Cocteau) was loss of lodgings; contracting tuberculosis due to a poor diet; having to fend for his family through selling of his sketches to milliners and couturiers such as Balenciaga and Schiaparelli; working as an illustrator for Le Figaro newspaper; working for Swiss couturier Robert Piguet before.
After serving military service, he proceeded to the fashion house of Lucien Lelong where, along with Pierre Balmain, he became the primary designer of dresses for the wives of Nazi officers and French collaborators for the duration of World War II.
Although Piguet and Lelong acted as mentors of sorts to Dior, he would surpass them over time.
Now, with the House of Dior contemplating its eighth decade and having being kept in existence by six successors (who included Yves Saint Laurent whom Dior had appointed his design assistant in 1955 as a 19-year-old – and later in 1957 informing Saint Laurent’s mother that he’d chosen him as his successor), British writer and editor Dan Jones has produced Dior: Style Icon, an aptly aesthetically appealing tome, which celebrates the Légion d’honneur (France’s loftiest civilian distinction) recipient, complimented by the fantasy-esque illustrations of Barcelona-based fashion and beauty illustrator, Sandra Suy.
With a cover graced by Rihanna, it heaves seduction, elegance and grace. Thanks to the depiction of the Barbadian singer majestically enrobed in a white, strapless, trumpet-shaped bustier gown complemented by a matching coat with louche rolled-up sleeves and a train which draped along the ground which paparazzi snapped her in at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.
Undoubtedly, Jones has curated a sumptuous text-and-tableau content bustling with delightfully dreamy narratives transporting the reader from 1947 of Dior’s debut with the then ground-breaking ‘New Look’ to the present epoch as stewarded by the great designer’s current successor, Maria Grazia Chiuri. The incumbent is an Italian fashion designer appointed by the House of Dior’s creative director in 2016, and who, like Dior, was also awarded the Légion d’honneur, albeit almost 70 years later.
Featuring household names at exotic locations, the artistically bound memento contains memories of the House of Dior’s association with heavy-hitters of the glitz and glamour from, German singer and actress Marlene Dietrich (alleged to had demanded, ‘No Dior, no Dietrich!’ whenever negotiating her contracts); Princess Grace of Monaco, model and actress Kelly LeBrock of 1984 movie The Woman in Red, Somali model Iman; to Diana, Princess of Wales, once gifted a Lady Dior bag by France’s First Lady, Bernadette Chirac for jointly opening a Cézanne exhibition at the Grand Palais in 1995 propelled the item to iconic status.
Aside from celebrities, the contributions of Dior’s successors over the decades also assume prominence.
Names such as John Galliano, the designer remembered for his 2004 haute couture spring/summer collection dominated by queens and pharaohs – and whom supermodel and friend Naomi Campbell assisted in checking into a rehab centre after he’d fallen foul of alcohol addiction.
They, along with creations such as 1985’s Poison, a fragrance described as ‘a sultry elixir and the ultimate fragrant weapon by Dior for heightened seduction’ and the white slogan T-shirt emblazoned with novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s quote, ‘We should all be feminists’, from Maria Grazia Chiuri’s 2016 debut collection – encapsulate the House of Dior’s mysterious embroidered language in which it communicates.
* DIOR: Style Icon is published by Hardie Grant Books and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers. Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R395.
