Christian Dior Fashion Designer (1905-1957)

The most influential fashion designer of the late 1940s and 1950s, Christian Dior dominated in fashion after World War II with the hourglass silhouette of his voluptuous New Look. He also defined a new business model in the post-war fashion industry by establishing Dior as a global brand across a wide range of products.

“My mother says that when I was little my grandfather used to take me and my cousins on one side after dinner and ask us what we wanted to be when he grew up, and I’d say ‘Christian Dior’,” recalled the French fashion designer Christian Lacroix. “He was so famous in France at the time. It seemed as if he wasn’t a man, but an institution.”

When Lacroix was growing up in Arles during the 1950s, Christian Dior was indisputably the world’s most famous fashion designer. His name was known all over the world and his label accounted for half of France’s haute couture exports. The Dior client list ran from Ava Gardner and Marlene Dietrich to Princess Margaret and the Duchess of Windsor. A short, pear-shaped man, with a shiny bald pate and habitually nervous expression, he was courted by Parisian society: but so shy that he could barely bring himself to bow to his audience at the end of each couture show. Fastidious to a fault, Dior refused to receive any man who was not wearing a tie: yet was so superstitious that he consulted his clairvoyant before every major decision.

Christian Dior was born in 1905 in Granville, a lively seaside town on the Normandy coast. He was the second of the five children of Alexander Louis Maurice Dior, a wealthy fertiliser manufacturer. The family lived in a pretty grey and pink house perched high on a cliff with spectacular views over the sea. They moved to Paris in 1910 returning to Granville for holidays each summer. Dior longed to become an architect but, at his father’s insistence, he enrolled at the prestigious ‘Ecole des Sciences Politiques’ (nicknamed Sciences Po’) in Paris to take a degree in politics which, or so his parents hoped, would prepare him for a diplomatic career.

All Dior wanted was to work in the arts. In 1928, his father gave him enough money to open an art gallery on condition that the family name did not appear above the door. Galerie Jacques Bonjean soon became ‘an avant garde haunt’ with paintings by Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Max Jacob hanging on walls decorated by Christian Bérard. Disaster struck in 1931 when the death of Dior’s older brother was followed by that of his mother and the collapse of the family firm. The gallery closed. For the next few years Dior scraped a living by selling fashion sketches to haute couture houses. Finally he found a job as an assistant to the couturier, Robert Piquet.

When World War II war began in 1939, Dior served as an officer for the year until France’s surrender. He joined his father and a sister on a farm in Province until he was offered a job in Paris by the couturier Lucien Lelong, who was lobbying the Germans to revive the couture trade. Dior spent the rest of the War dressing the wives of officers and French collaborators. France emerged from World War II in ruins. Half a million buildings were destroyed. Clothes, coal and food were in short supply. Yet there were ample opportunities for new business ventures and fashion was no exception.

The first Christian Dior couture show was scheduled for 12 February 1947. Clothes were still scarce and women wore the sharp-shouldered suits with knee-length skirts. The Paris couture trade, which had dominated international fashion since the late 18th century, was in a precarious state. What it needed was excitement and Christian Dior delivered it in a collection of luxurious clothes with soft shoulders, wispy waists and full flowing skirts intended for what he called ‘flower women’.