Christian Dior, the art dealer

Long before his New Look made him a star of couture, the Frenchman was a hip gallerist, finds Lucy Davies

If you had a few francs to spare in late Twenties Paris and fancied a painting by one of the modern artists then in vogue as just the thing for your apartment, you would have headed straight to the rue La Boétie, just off the Champs-Élysées.

At the time, the narrow street was a nerve centre for the art market. Picasso had a house and studio at number 23, next door to his dealer, Paul Rosenberg, who also stocked the works of Géricault, Ingres, Delacroix, Cézanne, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Modigliani. Nathan Wildenstein, founder of the Wildenstein artdealing dynasty and a specialist in objets d’art from the ancien régime, operated from an ornate mansion at number 57. At number 35, one could see paintings by Vuillard and van Gogh at gallery Marcel Bernheim, and opposite, notices in the press. He was Christian Dior, the Frenchman who, two decades later, in 1947, would present his New Look, with its cinched waist, soft shoulders and long skirt, to the ration-weary, Utility-clad women of the world, thereby re-establishing Paris as the glorious fashion capital it had been before the war.

Dior’s life would never be the same. In the 10 years he was at the helm of Maison Dior – he died in 1957, of a heart attack – women came in droves to his chic premises on the avenue Montaigne. His designs were worn by Rita Hayworth, Margot Fonteyn, Grace Kelly, Nancy Mitford, the Duchess of Windsor and Princess Margaret. He was, said Yves Saint Laurent, his successor at Maison Dior, “the most famous couturier of that time”.

Next month, several hundred of Dior’s original creations, and those of subsequent creative directors such as Marc Bohan and John Galliano, will go on show at the

V&A for Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams, alongside sketches and photographs. It is a reworking of last year’s sell-out exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, though its focus has been tweaked toward Dior’s ardent anglophilia. “I love English traditions, English politeness, English architecture,” he wrote in his 1956 memoir. “I even love English cooking.”

Despite the heights Dior reached, and the immense wealth he accrued, he never forgot his “vintage years”, as he termed his life before Maison

Dior. “They marked me for life.” Especially meaningful were the friends he made back then, a ragtag crew that included the artists Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard, the poet Max Jacob, the composer Henri Sauguet and the Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles.

“It was with them that he first discovered Paris,” says Dior heritage director Soizic Pfaff, when I meet her at the Dior archive. “They encouraged him. When he had difficulties, they helped him. I mean, he was Dior, of course, but we can explain almost his entire success from those relationships of his youth. They were very, very important.”

The group called themselves

The Club, wore bowler hats and divided their time between avantgarde Montparnasse and a jazz club called Le Boeuf sur le Toit in the eighth arrondissement – “Our dear Boeuf ”, as Dior called it. On any given night of the week, one could rub shoulders there with Picasso, Francis Picabia, André Gide,

André Breton or Coco Chanel. Meanwhile, at Jacob’s pied-à-terre and with the aid of lampshades and curtains, they would improvise plays and songs. “What mad evenings they were!” Dior recalled.

Occasionally, Dior would bring his bohemian friends back to his parents’ haute bourgeoisie apartment near the Trocadero. (The family fortune came from fertiliser.) There, among the damask upholstery, Boucher paintings and tapestries, “we would play modern music of a kind that sent our elders into fits of horror,” Dior said. His friends were also frequent guests at his family’s villa in Granville, Normandy, where Dior had grown up, for lazy days of croquet and lemonade.

Dior’s parents despaired of him. Having flatly refused his request to become an architect, they’d compromised on his studying political science, but he hardly ever went to school, and eventually resigned, to try his hand at musical composition. When, in 1928, Dior said he wanted to open an art gallery, they raised every objection they could think of.

In the end, he wore them down. They gave him “some hundreds