Christian Dior: The man who made women's fashion dreams come true

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CLASSIC: Princess Margaret in Cecil Beaton’s famous photograph from 1951 (Image: Victoria & Albert Museum, London)

ON A summer’s afternoon in August 1947, a small group of people stood together in London’s Claridge’s Hotel hovering around a smartly-dressed middle-aged man holding a trilby hat. The celebrated couturier Christian Dior, who just six months earlier had revolutionised fashion with his first “New Look” collection, was being ambushed by the press. In front of him was Anne Edwards, fashion editor of the Daily Express. 

She had received a call from a source at the hotel to inform her that Dior had checked in for a brief stay, en route to America.

Gathering a photographer and the newspaper’s in-house fashion illustrator, Andrew Robb, Edwards dashed to the hotel where the trio set about grilling the 42-year-old Parisian who had set up his fashion house the previous year.

Just how could he justify his audacious new fashions in a world short of fabric after the second war in a generation?

Dior replied with effusive Gallic charm: “I am giving the women the dresses they want. They’re fed up with war restrictions. My full skirts are a release.”

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Princess Margaret with Christian Dior (Image: Popperfoto/Getty Images)

As Robb sketched the outline of a New Look dress, Dior, looking over his shoulder, urged him to lengthen the skirt, then pointed to his own leg, just above the ankle, as the Daily Express photographer captured the shot.

“Next year they will be longer still, 10 inches from the ground, you just watch, it will all happen as I say,” he declared.

Dior loved London and viewed all his visits here with what he called “a sensation of happiness and great personal freedom”, so it is fitting that the V&A is about to hold a major retrospective to celebrate 60 years of Dior.

The exhibition, Christian Dior: Designer Of Dreams, brings together more than 200 rare haute couture garments alongside accessories, film, fashion photography and vintage perfume as well as many of Dior’s personal possessions.

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The designer with Mary Spencer-Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Image: Popperfoto/Getty Images)

It traces the history and impact of the House of Dior over seven decades, from the founding of his couture house in 1946 at the relatively ripe age of 41 and beyond his untimely death at the age of 52.

This was 61 years before Oscarwinning actress Jennifer Lawrence became the face of the fashion house and declared vampishly: “Every monumental moment with my career has been in a Dior dress”.

“Dior had a very romantic view of English society,” says Oriole Cullen, curator of the exhibition, which contains a major section charting the story of Dior in Britain.

“He was particularly enamoured with the English aristocracy and this would play an important role in how he sought to position his label here,” she adds. 

Situating the sophisticated Parisian design house among the great and the good of the Establishment seemed a natural fit and when, in August 1951, Cecil Beaton photographed 21-year-old Princess Margaret wearing the now iconic gown Dior had designed for her official coming-of-age portrait, he knew he had reached the summit.

The day after Dior’s first UK fashion show in April 1950, a secret event codenamed Operation Révérence took place at the French Embassy for the then Queen and Princess Margaret, Princess Marina the Duchess of Kent, and her sister Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark.

Says Cullen: “A number of aristocratic British clients chose to patronise Dior’s house. But for Dior there could be no better client than a member of the royal family.”

The designer had first met the princess in the spring of 1949 when Margaret visited various Parisian fashion houses as part of her first European holiday.

Dior, whose legacy since his death has been cemented by six subsequent creative directors at the fashion house including Yves Saint Laurent and British designer John Galliano, raved about the Queen’s impish younger sister, describing her as “a real fairy princess, delicate, graceful, exquisite”.

On her return to London, Margaret followed up her enthusiasm by ordering her first Dior dress – a daringly strapless, white tulle dress with a large bow at the back.

In 1954, Princess Margaret was guest-of-honour at a charity fashion show at Blenheim Palace, arranged by Mary Spencer-Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough, who had travelled to Paris to invite Dior who, finding her very chic, agreed.

“At the show, held in November, 13 Dior models showed the couturier’s new H line collection of autumn-winter 1954 to an audience of 1,500 people,” says Cullen.

A version of one of the ensembles modelled there, Peron, is now in the V&A collection and is said to have taken 600 hours to create.

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Christian Dior with model Sylvie, 1948 (Image: Christian Dior)

The 1954 show was such a success it set the tone for numerous Dior shows that were then staged around the country, in aid of causes such as the Royal College of Nursing and the Red Cross.

Each was slavishly attended by high-profile British patrons such as Nancy Mitford, the celebrated author and Paris resident, who was delighted with the New Look and ordered the Daisy suit from the first collection.

Twenty-one private clients ordered one, including Margot Fonteyn, Britain’s prima ballerina.

“Fonteyn also ordered matching hats to go with each outfit that she purchased,” says Cullen. And, in 1955, when the ballerina was stitched into a silk Dress for her wedding to Panamanian nian lawyer Robert Arias, it was by Dior.

It was hard to believe that the Second World War had ended just a decade earlier.

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MODERN: The Hollywood actress Jennifer Lawrence as the new face of Dior (Image: Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

Fashion commentator Karen Kay says: “What Dior did, during a time of Europewide gloom, was inject a breath of femininity into fashion again.

During rationing people had been frugal with fabric and forced to dress with severe austerity. But Dior said you can be feminine again and indulged that with swathes of tulle after the pencil skirt era.”

He was also a champion of British creativity. “He was involved at every point of the process,” says Kay.

“When he came to London he visited factories, worked with glove makers in Somerset, corsetieres in Leicestershire. He took the art of haute couture from Paris into the heart of Britain.”

In 1961, four years after Dior’s death, the London business moved to a Georgian building in Conduit Street with an interior closely recalling that of Dior’s original Paris salon.

There was a massive staircase, chandeliers and, at the entrance, a photograph of Christian Dior on the wall.

source: express.co.uk