“We live in the times we do, and nothing is sillier than to turn one’s back on them.” Those are the insightful words of one of the most famous couturiers who ever lived, and his words seem more relevant now than ever. He was speaking at the time of his disdain for change and how it is always more comfortable to stay where you are, but that you must in fact embrace those changes, see how you can build on them, and make the times your own.
There are few fashion houses as well known and lusted after as Maison Christian Dior. Today it is one of the world’s largest luxury brands, with perfume collections, cosmetics, ready-to-wear lines, couture collections, celebrity ambassadors, eyewear, handbags, fine jewellery ranges and even infant wear. But this behemoth of an organisation came to life only six decades ago as a bold and daring new house under the direction of a shy and sensitive man who hadn’t even studied fashion. But what Dior did possess was a strong artistic streak and a powerful conviction of how women ought to dress.
When Christian Dior first began toying with the idea of setting up a fashion house, times were very different from the ones we know today. Fresh from the horrors of war, Europe was dusting itself off from wreckage, chaos and devastating loss. Every conceivable commodity was rationed, if it was available at all. “Fashion” scarcely seemed to exist, at least not to the discerning eyes of the young Dior.
Parisian women had taken to wearing the most outrageous and flamboyant items they could find, in silent protest, Dior presumed, against the German occupation of their beloved city. And while he admired their patriotic spirit, he abhorred the “zazou” style and the lack of elegance that had evolved. “Hats were far too large, skirts far too short, jackets far too long, shoes far too heavy… and worst of all, there were those dreadful mops of hair raised high above the forehead in front and rippling like a mane down the backs of the French women on their bicycles.”
Couture itself was also in a state of flux. Up until a few decades earlier, couture houses had operated under the age old tradition of hiring gravures – freelance designers who would go from house to house designing new shapes and styles. But the obvious pitfall of this was that many houses could produce dresses which looked very similar, so in an effort to differentiate the dresses – because after all, it would not do for Madame Y to attend a ball wearing the same dress as Madame X – the houses added a profusion of excess trims, frills, feathers and any other manner of embellishment to identify the dress as their own.
The result was, in the eyes of Dior, a terrible cacophony. This tradition was only just beginning to die out as Dior entered the world of fashion, and he had fallen into it quite accidentally as a sort of gravure himself by speculatively selling his sketches of “models” (dresses or outfits) to couture houses, more out of desperate need for an income than as a desire to be a couturier. He had originally set up a contemporary art gallery with a friend in 1928, which had initially proved very popular, but their timing was ill-fated and as the world depression hit in 1930 and asset values plummeted, Parisians were left struggling to feed themselves, let alone indulge in the luxury of art.
Things had only just started to improve before the impending World War II loomed on the horizon. Dior later recalled of this period that despite their relative poverty, “We flitted from ball to ball, under the surrealist presidency of Mme Schiaparelli. Fearing the inevitable cataclysm, we were determined to go down in a burst of splendour.” In 1939, Dior was enlisted and mobilised to the South of France.
But by 1946 the war was over, and the youth of Europe were filled with optimism as a new age of freedom awaited them. There was also a shift in the world of fashion, and Dior felt that he was witnessing the time of the “great couturiers”, an age where the maison would be dominated by a single figure, the Artistic Director.
It was women who had led this charge, and Dior hailed the achievements of Madeleine Vionnet and Jeanne Lanvin who finally were the ones to transform the profession by creating collections with “their own hands and scissors”. He was also a huge admirer of Mademoiselle Chanel. “In her personality as well as in her taste, she had style, elegance and authority. From quite different points of view, she and Madeleine Vionnet can claim to be the creators of modern fashion.”
Dior was hugely excited by the new, peaceful era that the world was entering and relished the thought of the delightful times that were to come. His sister, who had been deported by the Nazis during the war, was allowed to return home, and he wrote, “An unhappy chapter of my life had ended. On the fresh, still unblemished page before me, I hoped to record nothing but happiness.”
It was at about this time Dior was asked to become head designer for a respectable brand which had suffered from years of poor direction. He was invited to meet with the financer of the company, to whom he had already intended to politely decline the offer, but he nevertheless feared the meeting as he imagined all businessmen to be fearsome and uncompromising creatures. However, he was surprised to find that he got on rather well with the elegantly dressed financer and suddenly found himself describing in great detail a vision he had for a new fashion house, with a new elegance, in a new address – the boundaries of the old couture world were strictly bound to certain “prestigious” addresses – and with a completely new approach. In short, a house of Dior.
To Dior’s amazement the financer was interested. A series of meetings and a lengthy exchange of telegrams followed as well as many sleepless nights for Dior, whose humble nature made him anxious about the fate of his maison and the grandiosity of his vision. But a string of events proved that fate was in his favour; he visited fortune tellers – still a common practice in those days – who all predicted fantastic things for him and great success; also a modest building on Avenue Montaigne, which Dior had walked past several years earlier and commented to a friend, “If I ever opened a maison, I would not do it anywhere other than this spot,” suddenly became available. And two of his most trusted premières (the head dressmakers who oversee the transformation from designer’s sketch to physical article of clothing) both agreed to join him in his venture – both also with the approval of a psychic.
With the maison in place, a team of dressmakers assembled and vendeuses (sales ladies) hired, Dior needed to find his mannequins (models).
Although he admired the great beauty of the professional models of the day, he wanted muses who wholly embodied his vision of elegance. He placed an advertisement in a local paper, and whilst it attracted a bevy of undesirable ladies – a renowned brothel had recently closed and its employees thought a discreet and unknown fashion house would be the perfect place to carry on their work – Dior did find several Parisian mademoiselles embodying the grace he desired.
Thus established, he set about creating his first collection. He left Paris for a country retreat in order to sketch out his ideas – he found himself at his most creative in the countryside and this would go on to become his lifelong habit for designing his collections. After just two weeks his first collection was complete and the foundations for what would later be christened “the New Look” were set.
At a time when material was a luxury, Dior’s enormous voluminous skirts caused controversy simply by the sheer yardage of material that was required to make them. Some accused him initially of deliberately trying to boost the business of his financer, who owned a textile factory. But his designs were simply an automatic reaction against the “death of imagination” and utilitarianism that had crept into womenswear during the war.
He strongly defended his vision, saying, “I design clothes for flower-like women, with rounded shoulders, full feminine busts and hand-span waists above enormous spreading skirts.”
Dior, in the process, revived many long-forgotten techniques of couture, such as lining each of his dresses with taffeta to give them more “presence”. Many of his staff had had no experience of the old methods and when presented with a sketch would be forced to work out for themselves how to set about creating such a dress in actuality. Dior delighted in the ingenuity of his team and was thrilled with each new “invention” that he saw around him.
Dior had never been a fan of publicity and as the date of his first presentation approached he simply entrusted a few well-placed friends to spread the word and arouse some interest in the new house. What was actually created was something more like a delirious fervour, and journalists clamoured to be invited. Dior recoiled in horror, concerned that with such high hopes being pinned on him, he couldn’t possibly live up to them.
The show would take place within the new maison, which was only just completed in time and the last bang of the last hammer was heard as the first guest entered. At 10.30 am the salons were full to bursting and the show commenced. The first mannequin, a young secretary whom Dior had picked for her delicate features, stepped onto the catwalk “half dead with fright”, stumbled, burst into tears and was from then on incapable of showing a dress.
After this, however, the show went smoothly and each dress was welcomed with a burst of applause. Dior “stuffed his ears” so as not to feel too confident too soon, but the warm reception continued and after the last dress was shown Dior and his two right hand women, the premières, stood and stared silently at one another, unable to speak. It was only when a member of the team, crying with joy, came rushing in that they were propelled to go out to greet their adulating audience. Dior later recalled, “As long as I live, whatever triumphs I may win, nothing will ever exceed my feelings at that supreme moment.”
But this was, of course, only the beginning of a long and eventful journey. Dior’s next big venture would be to open “Christian Dior New York” – largely due to the extortionate import taxes which put his French dresses out of the reach of the American customer. But it was not as simple as opening a new shop; it was essentially the opening of an entirely new maison. Unlike today, dresses were not simply mass produced and then shipped around the world; collections were defined by where they were made. The Paris collection was different from the New York collection, and most items were made to order with the exception of a few off the peg models.
It was in New York that Dior became acquainted with the customs of the American people. He was deeply impressed by their comparative wealth and the democracy of their social system and remarked on how even the most ordinary of people were able to afford great luxury. But he was shocked by their apparent love of waste and how people seemed to be encouraged to throw away old items only to buy new ones.
He was also somewhat bemused by the obsession for changing one’s entire wardrobe each season and how cars which would seem brash in Paris for their sheer expensiveness were commonly driven by all manner of people in the US. He also found American women to be very attractive and elegant. He was taken in on his first trip by a group of high society ladies who lunched only in one of five “approved hotels” or three “approved restaurants” and lived only in “approved parts of town”, such were the strict codes of this elite set. Dior delighted in their genteel company but noticed that these women of significant wealth seemed to be the last of a dying breed, and perhaps he foresaw that along with their demise, couture would surely follow.
He went on to open Christian Dior Caracas, then Christian Dior London, and attracted clients from as far afield as Japan, Cuba, Chile, Canada and Sydney. By 1949 Dior fashions accounted for 75 per cent of Paris’s fashion exports and 5 per cent of France’s total export revenue. Early on, Dior became the first house to produce everything from gloves and bags to stockings and perfumes. He was very much concerned with having an entire cohesive outfit, or “toilette” as he called it, and not just providing the dress. His early Parisian boutique even sold small items of furniture and various trinkets. He wanted a woman to be able to walk out of the shop “dressed from head to toe in Dior and even carrying in her hand a gift for her husband”. Dior was also the first to license the name of his house and put it on the labels of his garments, a trend which has now been copied by every other brand in existence.
The rest, as they say, is history. The name of Christian Dior became a global metaphor for elegance, exquisite design and the ultimate in luxury. Dior loved each of his dresses as characters in their own right and recalled that the joy of seeing a woman in one of them at a party was like bumping into an old acquaintance. He was always very careful not to compliment a woman wearing his dresses, though, lest she might feel he was taking credit for her ravishing appearance and not giving her natural beauty its due.
As the world entered the modern age, the demand lessened for highly specialised haute couture (made-to-order) gowns, which required teams of unparalleled technical ability to make, and fashion houses were obliged to concentrate on their prêt-à-porter (ready to wear) collections, as they offered a greater return on investments.
As early as 1925, Dior had noticed the demise of artistic freedoms due to the increasing pressure of the open market economy that everything should be profitable. “One could see the virus of speculation penetrating even into those social strata which were traditionally best defended against the hideous lust for lucre. Everything had to make money; business and art as much as finance.”
The house of Dior was innovative, though, and easily adapted itself into a house whose prêt-à-porter collections held as much significance as their couture. They also remain one of the few houses to have been able to retain their couture division as house after house has had to close its atelier (couture studio) due to the rising disparity between cost of operations and money generated.
Unfortunately Dior only lived to see his beloved house flourish for ten years before his untimely death from a heart attack in 1957, aged 52. His death threw the company completely into disarray. The company’s business managers contemplated closing, but this was not well received by the French fashion industry or the Dior licensees. And so a 21-year-old Yves Saint Laurent, hand-picked by Dior himself to be head assistant, was handed the reins and designed for six seasons before being called up to the army. The house was then under the successful direction of designer Marc Bohan from 1960 until 1984, when the business was purchased by Bernard Arnault of the Louis Vuitton-Moët Hennessy group.
Arnault innovatively restructured the entire business side of the company, ensuring its survival, and in 1989 installed Italian designer Gianfranco Ferré at the helm of the collections until 1996, when Ferré was replaced by the promising young British designer John Galliano. Galliano enjoyed a successful and long tenure but parted company with the house in 2010 amidst a flurry of personal controversy. The house was then left without a figurehead and a 13-month period of speculation and rumour ensued over who would claim one of the most coveted positions in the fashion industry; artistic director of Dior. (Following the death of Christian Dior himself, the house only ever referred to itself thereafter as simply Dior, though out of respect for their founder each piece continues to bear Christian Dior’s name).
Finally, in April 2012, Belgian designer Raf Simons was announced as the new Artistic Director of Dior. Simons seemed to be the perfect match. Famed for his minimalist designs and a highly successful tenure at the modernist Italian house Jil Sander as well as having established his own eponymous labels, Simons’ effortless approach, quiet nature and fascination with modern art resembled in many ways the personality of Dior’s founder. Whether he could also inject that same sense of glamour and timeless elegance remained to be seen but his first collection for the house, winter 2012 couture, was a masterpiece and represented to its very core the essence of what Christian Dior had tried to create all those years before.
Simons later explained to Glass, “I was almost challenged by going back to what Mr Dior liked – it was about going back to whole different eras altogether. To organically let it flow. It was more connected to certain things we have in common – like a real interest in art. The connection to a certain period; it is more the principle than the actual thing. It is the connection that is important, not what that connection is made to.
“He was always interested in the Belle Époque, it was always his obsession whether he used it or not. The same way that Mid-Century Modernism obsesses me, art is always in the system. This was a serious interest that we both share. Before the house, Christian Dior had a gallery; he was representing Giacometti and Dalí early on in their careers when they were young. It seems he exhibited perhaps Dalí’s most famous painting ‘The Persistence of Memory’.”
Memory was a huge starting point for Simons’s Autumn/Winter 13 collection, which was inspired by the earliest of Dior’s dresses, with each model being reinvented for the modern era in either fabric or cut. For some models Simons told us, “I reinterpreted garments in black leather. For me it is always such a modern material and it really does show the two worlds coming together very clearly.” There were also masterpieces such as Mr Dior’s 1948 Arizona coat which received a stunning 21st century makeover. “The language we were looking for in these dresses was something quieter and fragile, symbolic and surrealist.
“There was also an idea of going back to something quiet, to nature, contrasted with the screaming loudness of the whole situation in fashion,” said Simons, exemplifying another similarity between the two men – a love of the country, something Dior insisted he couldn’t be creative without.
As the house of Dior enters its 67th year, its importance in the world of fashion cannot be underestimated. Created at a time when the world was in a frenzy of growth and change, it brought a sense of order and dignity to the way in which one presented oneself to the world. Even for those who could not afford a piece of Dior, the impact of the New Look and subsequent designs sent shock waves around the world and changed for ever the way we dress, or wish to dress.
Dior himself best expressed the phenomenon of the influence of fashion: “I believe that the answer lies in this very miraculous quality which fashion surely possesses; in the world today haute couture is one of the last repositories of the marvellous, and couturiers the last possessors of the wand of Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother.
The need for display, which is dormant in all of us, can express itself nowadays in fashion and nowhere else; that is why magazines devote yards of space to discussing fashion and why couturiers are still able to present a sumptuous new collection each season. The dresses of this collection may be worn by only a few of the thousands of women who read and dream about them, but high fashion need not be directly accessible to everyone: it is only necessary that it should exist in the world for its influence to be felt.”
by Nicola Kavanagh
Taken from the Glass Archive – Issue 15 – Ambition
The Dior exhibition runs at MOCA Shanghai until November 10