By Justine Picardie
Published by Faber
he cover of Justine Picardie’s biography Miss Dior depicts a swan-necked model in a ruffled gown, a publicity shot for the perfume that Christian Dior named after his younger sister in 1947. On page 100 a very different image of the original Miss Dior emerges. Catherine Dior, who joined the French Resistance in 1941, describes being tortured in 1944 by her fellow countrymen at the behest of the Nazis. “They undressed me, bound my hands and plunged me into the water.” Although it was July, the bathwater was freezing — her interrogators ensured they had sufficient ice for both summer cocktails and inflicting pain.
The torturers’ rooms at 180 Rue de la Pompe in Paris are later described as a “museum of horrors”, yet Christian Dior’s sister refused to betray her comrades. Her silence ensured that she was shipped off in a cattle truck on the last train out of Paris in August 1944. Her distraught brother pleaded with his diplomatic contacts — but Catherine had already crossed the border en route to Ravensbruck, the Nazi’s women-only concentration camp. This extraordinary biography is billed as one of “courage and couture”, but the two story strands appear to be mutually exclusive. Catherine’s is the tale of a girl who falls in love with Hervé des Charbonneries, a married father of three, and courageously joins him in fighting the Germans. (Less than 1 per cent of the French did this.) Christian’s story is of the brother who remained in occupied Paris working for the designer Lucien LeLong, and who went on to establish one of the world’s most influential couture houses.Picardie, who wrote a weighty biography of Coco Chanel in 2010 and is a former editor of Harper’s Bazaar, had initially planned to write about just Christian. But the “ghost” of his much loved sister bewitched her. “It was as if the hermetic world of haute couture had no concern for a woman such as Catherine Dior, or for the suffering that she had endured,” she writes. The story is not completely unknown. In 2011 Dior’s chief executive alerted a bemused fashion press to Catherine’s wartime deportation in a speech to “publicly recommit ourselves to the values of the House of Dior”, when the company dismissed John Galliano, its creative director, after he made antisemitic remarks. Earlier this year the novel Sisters of the Resistance by Christine Wells fictionalised Catherine’s life in Paris, and her story was also included in Anne Sebba’s 2016 book Les Parisiennes, about women in Paris during the occupation. The latter is cited among a lengthy bibliography of titles at the end of Miss Dior.
Picardie leans heavily on these for material because Catherine turns out to be every biographer’s nightmare — discretion personified. Although she returned to her married Resistance lover after the war and would live until the age of 90, even des Charbonneries’s grandson Laurent admits to Picardie: “The dictionary of Catherine Dior would not have many words in it.” Instead Picardie uses her investigative reporting skills to comb for what she can through the Dior archives and thousands of other wartime documents.
The result is Netflix-worthy and the pace page-turning as Picardie presents a woman who appeals beyond the boundaries of Planet Fashion. She visits Catherine’s privileged childhood home in Normandy, the Paris apartment shared with her brother while working under the code name “Caro”, and returns to Ravensbruck twice to write a chilling chapter. By the time Catherine arrived there, 40,000 female prisoners were crammed into rat-infested accommodation designed for 3,000. She was shaved and tattooed with her number, 57183RA, given watery soup and made to shovel wet sand from dawn. Yet her self-respect never wavered. Catherine’s godson, Nicolas Crespelle, one of five family members and friends whom Picardie interviews, said: “She would never fall to the ground to pick up a piece of food that an SS guard had thrown there. She said that if you did that, then your life was over.”
After surviving three further slave camps, and the “death marches” at the end of the war, Catherine arrived back in Paris with “agonising injuries to her hips, back and feet”. She was so emaciated that Christian, waiting on the station platform, failed to recognise her.
Sadly for the reader she soon disappears to the south of France to farm flowers with the mysterious M des Charbonneries, while Picardie turns her attention to her brother and his rise to “fashion royalty”. From here the cadence slows and the tone becomes more florid. Christian was “the prince of light” who gave the world the New Look. What exactly he did while Catherine was shovelling sand is less clear. Picardie denies he was “supplying wives of German dignitaries” with dresses, although his boss LeLong was to be tried and acquitted of collaboration after the war. Christian died of a heart attack in 1957 at the age of 52, his appetite for luxury leaving a tax bill of 40 million francs. In his will Catherine was named the “moral heir”, responsible for the “artistic heritage” of his brand.
More than 60 years later the Christian Dior name lives on and is worth $12 billion. Yet in this book it is Catherine’s story that shines — the quiet Dior who preferred flowers to fashion, the unsung heroine who survived the abuse of the Third Reich to help liberate France.