Miss Dior

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The dead princess walks through her palace in Monaco on the video screens, beckoning towards her lost life, as if in an uncanny fairytale. 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.

Upon her repatriation to France, she lived a quiet life but did testify at one of the many war crimes tribunals held in France.Until 1949, after all, he’d had been living with a phantom of sorts, in the form of his younger sister, Catherine. 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. Their lives diverged even more sharply when she was cap­tured by the Gestapo and impris­oned in Ravens­bruck and then a series of labor camps and final­ly forced to endure one of the infa­mous death march­es of 1945.

But Christian declared himself horrified on his few visits to the family’s foul-smelling factories – ‘they have left appalling memories,’ he declared in his memoir, establishing in him a ‘horror of machines’ and a ‘firm resolve’ never to work in such an unpleasant environment. JBC’s print lit­er­ary jour­nal Paper Brigade pro­vides a 200-page snap­shot of the Jew­ish lit­er­ary land­scape in Amer­i­ca and abroad. 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.In Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture, Justine Picardie – the author of the bestselling 2010 biography Coco Chanel – introduces the woman who inspired the floral perfume as “sitting quietly in the audience”. The siblings’ stories are profoundly in Occupied France, as Christian honed his couture skills, Catherine dedicated herself to the Resistance, ultimately being captured by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbruck, the only Nazi camp solely for women. 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. Although a clear pic­ture of Cather­ine remains shad­owy through­out the book, we do get a sharp sense of her courage and her strong spir­it, plus her deep belief in the work of the Resis­tance, and we find ample evi­dence in the text that she was noth­ing short of a woman of steel. Long after Christian discovered the delights of the capital city, he remained devoted to the family home in Granville, and to the grounds in which he had spent so much time as a small boy.

Like a dress by some wilfully edgy label – think JW Anderson, or the wilder shores of Cos – its constituent parts seem not to go together.Christian’s belief in clairvoyance, and the bonds between siblings draw a parallel with Picardie’s own experience of losing her sister, Ruth, to breast cancer in 1997. 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. It’s about how necessity can drive people to either terrible deeds or acts of great courage, and how beauty can grow from the worst kinds of horror. Every single person who has experienced the loss, yearning and honourable rage of bereavement will know that this is their book. The lack of depth relative to Catherine Dior’s life can simply be chalked up to a lack of available detail.