September 4, 2011 |
For the first 42 years of his life, Christian Dior could be seen as the classic underachiever and dilettante who appeared to drift through life without any apparent ambition to do anything very radical. And yet, as the creator of the New Look in 1947, he not only changed fashion but, more importantly, changed how it was to be perceived by ordinary men and women in the second half of the 20th century, up to, and including, our attitudes even today.
Plump, apparently timorous and shy, softly spoken Dior appeared to fit none of the stereotypes of the revolutionary. In fact, he was described by Cecil Beaton, without any malice, as “like a country doctor…modest as a sugar violet”, although he also noted that Dior was “a bourgeois with his feet well planted in the soil of reality”. Not surprising, considering that he was from Normandy stock and his father was a rich man whose fortune was based on the manufacture of chemicals and fertilisers.
And it was to be expected that Dior would lead the life of a rich man’s son, which he did when he was young. There was little talk of work for him until the crash of 1929 and the subsequent loss of everything the family owned over just a few days. Up to that point, Dior’s life had been charmed. He moved between the family home and the Dior house in Paris, enjoying drifting through life as a young man with a little money could comfortably do before the collapse of Wall Street, although always in the back of his mind was the prediction by a fortune-teller as far back as 1919, when he was only 14, that women were lucky for him and through them he would achieve great success…
Dior studied in Paris after the First World War, but his great interests were music, literature and painting. Surprisingly, perhaps, his taste was for the avant-garde and the revolutionary, and he was part of a trendy group of privileged young people who considered themselves anarchists and pacifists, but in fact spent more time dressing up, enjoying charades and staging impromptu parties where drink was liberally consumed, rather than marching for a political cause. Bizarrely, considering his early life, Dior went through a phase of hating capitalism and even went on an architectural study trip to the Soviet Union, from which he returned feeling very disillusioned when he saw how the dream of communist freedom for all actually worked in reality.
On his return, he went through a difficult period. With virtually no money, and little chance of receiving any from his equally impoverished family, he frequently found himself without food or a roof over his head and having to bunk down in friends’ houses. Even the small gallery he had opened mainly to sell art produced by his friends had to be closed. It is no surprise that he contracted TB and, his friends clubbing together to pay, had to be admitted to a clinic. When he returned to Paris he made some decisions, the most important one being that he would get himself a proper job.
It was a turning point in his life. He had many friends in all levels of fashion and he had also taught himself to draw during his convalescence, so he began to submit sketches to magazines and newspapers, which were bought for 20 francs each and printed as suggestions for the thousands of milliners and dress designers who needed inspiration. Interestingly, it was Dior’s sketches of hats that were the most popular and he sold many more of those than he did drawings of clothes. By the late 1930s, he was not only making a reasonable living, he had also become a well-known and well-loved figure on the Paris fashion circuit.
But then the Second World War loomed and Dior was mobilised for the war effort as a farm worker. He joined his family, who had moved to the south of France and were running a market garden. As the Germans took over Paris, fashion production briefly stopped but soon sprang up again. And, with so many young designers in military service, designers were in short supply. Dior was offered a job by Robert Piguet, in those days a couturier of note, but he dithered so long about taking it that when he finally arrived in Paris, he was too late. But Lucien Lelong, a very much more important designer, gave him a job – his first real one in fashion. That was in 1941 and proved another turning point in his career because his fellow designer there was Pierre Balmain, who was much more thrusting and extrovert than the timorous and cautious Dior.
But, it was his decision, after the war, to start his own fashion house that gave Dior’s latent ambition a kick-start when he left to start his own business – that, and the fact that one of Dior’s old school friends told him that the powerful cotton magnate Marcel Boussac was looking for a designer to revive a pre-war fashion house called Gaston. After a couple of refusals and several consultations with his favourite fortune-teller, Dior plucked up the courage to tell Boussac that he “was not meant by nature to revive the dead” but that he would be interested if Monsieur would fund his own Christian Dior fashion house.
And that’s what happened. On December 15, 1947, at 10.30am Dior’s first collection of 90 models was shown in his brand-new fashion house at 30 Avenue Montaigne, their monumentality and drama bearing out Dior’s statement: “I wanted my dresses to be constructed like buildings”, although their tightness and femininity was reflected in their romantic names, such as Love, Happiness and Dauphine. The show was an immediate success and Dior’s name flew around the globe alongside the pictures of clothes the like of which had never previously been seen.
And Dior, just as much a canny businessman as his father, controlled and orchestrated everything, helped by the generosity of Boussac and of Dior’s friends who, long before the show, started a whispering campaign that had all of fashionable Paris twittering with excited anticipation… So much so that Dior appointed a young American, Harrison Elliott, as his PR person – not to whip up enthusiasm, but actually to dampen it down. Quite apart from how he was used, for a first-time designer to employ such a person, have his own models, a perfume simultaneously launched with the show and an influential sales force of “society women who wished to work” is enough to bring tears of despair to the cash-strapped young London designers trying to get a fashion foothold today.
The rest of the story is well known. As far as mass sales were concerned, Dior effortlessly took the lead through his huge success in America, which had him opening a special sub-business, Christian Dior–New York, before his couture business was even a year old. As far as the world was concerned, he was the French fashion designer, a man whose name had global recognition, but not always total approval. For example, he met with opposition from men who objected to the fact that the New Look almost entirely covered a woman’s legs, but placards denouncing him did nothing but good for his name and his sales.
And so it went on for 10 years, until, taking a health cure in Italy, Dior suffered a fatal heart attack and the House of Dior was handed to his protégé, Yves Saint Laurent, aged only 21. Definitely not a late developer…
by Colin McDowell
