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Christian
Dior (21 January 1905 – 24 October 1957) was a French fashion designer, best
known as the founder of one of the world's top fashion houses, also called
Christian Dior, which is now owned by Groupe Arnault. His fashion houses are
now all around the world.
Christian Dior was born in Granville, a seaside town on the coast of Normandy, France. He was the second of five children born to Maurice Dior, a wealthy fertilizer manufacturer (the family firm was Dior Frères), and his wife, formerly Madeleine Martin. He had four siblings: Raymond (father of Françoise Dior), Jacqueline, Bernard, and Catherine Dior.[2] When Christian was about five years old, the family moved to Paris, but still returned to the Normandy coast for summer holidays.
Dior's family had hoped he would become a diplomat, but Dior was artistic and wished to be involved in art.[3] To make money, he sold his fashion sketches outside his house for about 10 cents each. In 1928, Dior left school and received money from his father to finance a small art gallery, where he and a friend sold art by the likes of Pablo Picasso. Three years later, after the death of Dior's mother and brother and a financial disaster in the family’s fertilizer business, during the Great Depression, that resulted in his father losing control of Dior Frères, the gallery had to be closed.
Christian Dior from “Dior And His Decorators: Victor Grandpierre, Georges Geffroy, and the New Look”
Christian Dior (1905-57)
Fashion designer
Paris, c. February 1947
Modern print
Vogue, The Condé Nast Publications Ltd
From 1937, Dior was employed by the fashion designer Robert Piguet, who gave him the opportunity to design for three Piguet collections.[4][5] Dior would later say that 'Robert Piguet taught me the virtues of simplicity through which true elegance must come.'[6][7] One of his original designs for Piguet, a day dress with a short, full skirt called "Cafe Anglais", was particularly well received.[4][5] Whilst at Piguet, Dior worked alongside Pierre Balmain, and was succeeded as house designer by Marc Bohan – who would, in 1960, become head of design for Christian Dior Paris.[5] Dior left Piguet when he was called up for military service.
In 1942, when Dior left the army, he joined the fashion house of Lucien Lelong, where he and Balmain were the primary designers. For the duration of World War II, Dior, as an employee of Lelong — who labored to preserve the French fashion industry during wartime for economic and artistic reasons — designed dresses for the wives of Nazi officers and French collaborators, as did other fashion houses that remained in business during the war, including Jean Patou, Jeanne Lanvin, and Nina Ricci.[8][9] His sister, Catherine (1917–2008), served as a member of the French Resistance, was captured by the Gestapo, and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was incarcerated until her liberation in May 1945.[10]
In 1946 Marcel Boussac, a successful entrepreneur known as the richest man in France, invited Dior to design for Philippe et Gaston, a Paris fashion house launched in 1925.[11] Dior refused, wishing to make a fresh start under his own name rather than reviving an old brand.[12] On 8 December 1946, with Boussac's backing, Dior founded his fashion house. The actual name of the line of his first collection, presented on 12 February 1947,[13] was Corolle (literally the botanical term corolla or circlet of flower petals in English), but the phrase New Look was coined for it by Carmel Snow, the editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar. Dior's designs were more voluptuous than the boxy, fabric-conserving shapes of the recent World War II styles, influenced by the rations on fabric.[14] He was a master at creating shapes and silhouettes; Dior is quoted as saying "I have designed flower women." His look employed fabrics lined predominantly with percale, boned, bustier-style bodices, hip padding, wasp-waisted corsets and petticoats that made his dresses flare out from the waist, giving his models a very curvaceous form.
Initially, women protested because his designs covered up their legs, which they had been unused to because of the previous limitations on fabric. There was also some backlash to Dior's designs due to the amount of fabrics used in a single dress or suit. During one photo shoot in a Paris market, the models were attacked by female vendors over this profligacy, but opposition ceased as the wartime shortages ended. The "New Look" revolutionized women's dress and reestablished Paris as the centre of the fashion world after World War II.[15]
Christian Dior died while on holiday in Montecatini, Italy, on 24 October 1957.[16] Some reports say that he died of a heart attack after choking on a fish bone.[17] Time's obituary stated that he died of a heart attack after playing a game of cards.[18] However, one of Dior's acquaintances, the Paris socialite Alexis von Rosenberg, Baron de Redé, wrote in his memoirs that contemporary rumor was that the heart attack had been caused by a strenuous sexual encounter.[19] As of 2018, the exact circumstances of Dior's death remain undisclosed.
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