Miss Dior

Product Information

Inventive and captivating, and shaped by Picardie’s own journey, Miss Dior examines the legacy of Christian Dior, the secrets of postwar France, and the unbreakable bond between two remarkable siblings. Yet for all the poignancy of these objects – in particular, the image of a youthful Grace Kelly, wearing an ethereal white Dior gown at the ball celebrating her engagement to Prince Rainier in 1956, unaware that she would die before growing old – Les Rhumbs remains a monument to a more distant past. As a result, Dior remains a ghostly presence hovering just off the edge of the pages of Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture. She is a woman of courage, a devoted sister, a constant gardener, and a resistance heroine who lived life on her own terms. Picardie overcomes the absence of Catherine’s first hand account of her life and experiences by recounting the stories of other women who went through the same things.

Christian Dior was so moved by his courageous younger sister that he formulated his unforgettable perfume, Miss Dior, to honor her bravery and patriotism during World War II. She remained silent under torture and endured unspeakable cruelty, hardship, deprivation, and violence. I loved this book and the characters in it have stayed with me - rather like someone's perfume does when they leave the room. She explores what it means to believe in beauty and hope, despite our knowledge of darkness and despair, and discovers the timeless solace of the natural world in the aftermath of devastation and destruction. Picardie's book is of the moment, celebrating an unsung hero at a time when female influences are earning new acclaim.Her sister would “tease me gently about my propensity for magical thinking: yet when she died, I needed to believe that the bond between us was not severed, even though I felt broken myself”. Miss Dior paints a portrait of the enigmatic woman behind the designer Christian Dior: his beloved younger sister, Catherine, who inspired his most famous perfume and shaped his vision of femininity. Other than their familial relationship Catherine and Christian lived very different lives that only rarely affected one another. Catherine was twelve years younger than Christian – he was born in 1905, the second son of a prosperous family; she was the youngest of five children, born in 1917, just before their eldest brother, Raymond, began his service in the French army during the First World War. If the ghost of Catherine is indeed here, she is not inclined to speak to me, in this, her private domain.

Picardie spends a lot of time talking about the fashion house history, its founder and everyone else who knew or were believed to have come across Catherine (a. This is no figure of speech, since the garden hung right over the sea, which could be seen through the railings, and lay exposed to all the turbulence of the weather, as if in prophecy of the troubles of my own life … the walls which encompassed the garden were not enough, any more than the precautions encompassing my childhood were enough, to shield us from storms.

For further information on the processing of your personal data please consult our Privacy Statement. For exam­ple, both loved gar­den­ing and adored the ros­es that grew in pro­fu­sion through­out the family’s farm­land.

The answer comes a few pages later: ‘The outbreak of war caught us by surprise at Granville … At first our fräulein refused to go, since she thought, as everyone did, that the cataclysm was impossible. Justine Picardie's journey takes her to Occupied Paris, where Christian honed his couture skills while Catherine dedicated herself to the French Resistance, until she was captured by the Gestapo and deported to the German concentration camp of Ravensbruck.They seized her bicycle and handbag, forced her into a car, blindfolded her and drove her to 180 Rue de la Pompe. It is set some distance away from the house, hidden at the end of a path, out of sight of onlookers – yet once inside, the view from the windows is unexpectedly dramatic. I have read and reread his autobiography many times but for some reason, it is only today that I realise he does not mention his brothers or sisters by name. Their stories of death, endurance, hunger, and pain give a visceral sense of the dehumanizing experience of life in the camps. The literal translation of the phrase is “deceiving the eye”; what might be the visual illusion at work here?