Christian Dior
January 21, 1905 – October 24, 1957
“You will suffer poverty but women are lucky for you and through them you will achieve success. You will make a great deal of money, and you will have to travel widely”. Unknown palm reader to Christian Dior
Though he was superstitious, the then fourteen year old Christian Dior gave little credence to above prediction. Upon reporting it to his family, it was met with derision and guffaws for the family was financially secure and the boy showed no interest in girls, preferring to spend his time in the garden. Furthermore, he was a homebody and disliked leaving his home, even forshort excursions. It was completely farfetched and improbable — and it all become true.
Christian Dior died in 1957 of a heart attack while on vacation in Italy at age 52, just ten years after launching his first fashion show that took the world by storm. He was the “overnight” sensation that took 42 years to succeed! From that first show, he was established as an institution known as “Dior.” But behind that famous name was a shy individual who took a curious and circuitous route to fulfill the fortune teller’s prophesy. This is the story of that person, Christian.
He enjoyed an idyllic childhood on the Normandy coast of France, which somewhat shielded him from the horrors of WWI. He was a good student, though he exasperated his teachers by habitually sketching the outline of a woman’s leg wearing a high-heeled shoe. A family move to Paris in 1919 opened his private world to the influence of music, literature, art, design and theatre. The shy teenaged boy immersed himself in all the changes sweeping across the globe after the war. As might be expected, his conservative parents were aghast at this turn towards the Bohemian and forbid his desire to study the Fine Arts with the goal of becoming an architect, his first love and ambition.
He rather slyly circumvented their more traditional desires for his future by enrolling in Political Science courses, which gave him the time and freedom to continue to explore his own interests. Giving up his feigned studies in politics, he convinced his parents to allow him to study, of all things, music composition. These were the crazy years of youth that at the time seemed frivolous and drifting without purpose. But, it was during this time lifelong friendships and connections were made.
During his required military service in1927, he decided to follow his interest in art and become the director of an art gallery in partnership with a friend. His exasperated father agreed to fund the venture with the condition the name Dior was never to appear over the shop. It was too shameful to associate the family name with purveyorship! However, this path would eventually lead to his name above one of the most renowned shops in fashion history. But not before ruin and deep poverty, as predicted.
The American crash of 1929 reverberated around the world and the Dior family was completely ruined. The shocked Christian Dior took stock of this crisis of capitalism and in 1931 he impulsively joined a group of architects who decided to study in the U.S.S.R. The grim reality he encountered there was beyond imagining and he quickly returned to Paris where even a deteriorating gallery that did not produce enough income to support personal accommodations was a better option. He survived by staying with a rotating group of friends—“sofa surfing,” as we call it today. In the end, he fell extremely ill and was forced to leave for a more healthful environment in the mountains, funded by friends. During his recovery, he discovered he desired to create his own work, rather than represent the work of others.
His health regained, he returned to Paris and resigned himself to the repugnant reality of securing any employment to support himself and his desperate family. He was saved from this distasteful necessity by the unexpected sale of one last painting, which gave him financial relief. He further found shared living quarters with an old friend, Jean Ozenne, who was creating and selling designs to couturiers. He began schooling Dior in mixing colors and using a paint brush. Ozenne also succeeded in selling some of Diors work, which inspired Dior to embrace, at age thirty, his true “métier.”
With his path finally revealed, Dior set to work improving his fashion drawings. For two years he lived hand to mouth selling his sketches one by one. Robert Piguet bought several and offered Dior a position in 1938. But, war clouds were on the horizon and Dior was once again mobilized. He found himself posted in the south where his family was then living. Demobilized, he again found himself penniless, wearing sabots* and cultivating vegetables to sell for income!
A last miracle from his art dealership came when several paintings he had sent to America just before the war were sold, providing much needed funds.
Dior returned to Paris in 1941 where he ultimately worked at Lucien LeLong alongside Pierre Balmain and Pierre Cardin. Observing Balmain’s success setting up his own atelier, Dior followed suit in December of 1946 with funding provided by the industrialist Marcel Boussac (its own fascinating story). His first show in 1947,featuring the acclaimed “New Look,” is when his convoluted path coalesced into in a fully formed artistic philosophy about womanhood, design and the role of fashion in society, culture and even the economy. His early death in 1957 represented the passing of the individual man into the institution that is the House of Dior. The prophesy, once derided, was fulfilled.
*Sabots are a wooden clog-like shoe
