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Christian Dior: a very British affair
As a sweeping exhibition of his work comes to the V&A, Lisa Armstrong examines the designer’s legacy, and his enduring love of all things English
He adored all things English and dressed princesses and movie stars in his shamelessly romantic creations. Now a major exhibition explores the life and impact of the man behind the greatest fashion house of the past century. By Lisa Armstrong
The Dior exhibition in Paris last year was – this isn’t too grandiose a word – a sensation. It spanned seven decades, beginning with a giddily feminine 1947 riposte to post-war austerity and culminating in Dior’s latest reinvention of itself under its current creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri, as a purveyor of dreamy but often practical clothes that have somehow managed to align themselves with a feminist message. This sweeping history of the past century viewed through a prism of exquisite fashion was mounted with unprecedented imagination thanks to set designer Nathalie Crinière.
Now Christian Dior: Designer of Dream sis transferring to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum – the largest Dior retrospective ever staged in the UK. Culturally, this will be one of 2019’s big talking points. ‘Dior is arguably the greatest fashion house of the past century,’ says Oriole Cullen, the V&A’S fashion and textile curator, who has been charged with reshaping the exhibition for the UK. Greater than Chanel or Balenciaga? ‘If you look at it across 70 years and all the designers who worked there, including Saint Laurent and Galliano… then, yes.’
Thanks to some impressive detective work on Cullen’s part, 60 per cent of the 500 objects in the V&A version (including make-up, photographs and accessories) were not in the Paris exhibition. All of the clothes featured are haute couture.
Fortunately for the V&A, Christian Dior, that quintessentially French designer, was an incurable Anglophile, smitten from the get-go (his first trip to London was in 1926, at the age of 21). Escaping from his loving, sometimes smothering family, Dior saw England as a beacon of freedom. ‘There is no other country in the world, besides my own, whose way of life I like so much,’ he wrote. ‘I love English traditions, English politeness, English architecture…’ He even claimed to enjoy the food.
Growing up in the 1900s in a comfortable villa overlooking the Channel in Granville, Dior acquired a vision of England that was heavily rosetinted. Pearls, tweeds (particularly houndstooth), Savile Row tailoring, extravagantly proportioned taffeta ballgowns, and, yes, roses (his mother, Madeleine, who dedicated herself to spending the ample profits from her husband Maurice’s fertiliser business, was devoted to her rose garden), all became what are now referred to as codes of the house. ‘When an English woman is pretty, she is prettier than a woman of any nationality. I adore the English, dressed not only in the tweeds, which suit them so well, but also in those flowing dresses, in subtle colours, which they have worn inimitably since the days of Gainsborough.’
Dior absorbed multifarious British influences into his work, using British wools and silks, collaborating with Ascher Ltd to design prints (Rose Pompom was a particular hit). His first scent, launched in 1947, was, lest we forget, called Miss, not Mademoiselle Dior, named for his sister
Catherine who fought with the French Resistance during the Second World War, was imprisoned in Ravensbrück concentration camp and subsequently worked with him in the house of Dior.
British women returned the love. I’ve often wondered whether accounts of riots in the streets over the introduction of Dior’s New Look weren’t wildly exaggerated: could a trend really provoke such depth of feeling, even if it did require yards and yards of precious fabric when draconian rationing was still the dreary order of the day? As Cullen says, ‘There are photographs of women being attacked in the streets of Paris for wearing it, but they look slightly staged.’
Fake news or not, Sir Stafford Cripps who – first as president of the Board of Trade and then, in 1947, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was responsible for a good deal of Britain’s post-war economic strategy – was sufficiently rattled by the New Look’s perceived menace to call a meeting with Britain’s leading fashion editors to tell them not to report on Dior’s profligacy. The editors compromised: they wrote about it, but their tone was one of sardonic amusement. British women, they implied, would be far too sensible to fritter a year’s clothing coupons on one Dior item.
British women, however, fell hook, press stud and button for the romantic nostalgia of Dior’s wasp waists and full skirts. The majority didn’t have a hope of getting to Dior’s atelier on Paris’s Avenue Montaigne, but they could still adapt their skimpy, knee-length utility skirts by adding extra bands of fabric. ‘The impact of the New Look was phenomenal,’ says Cullen. ‘And it lasted for 10 years, until he died in 1957. People think of Christian Dior as a classicist, a nostalgic and a romantic, but he could also be an avant-garde dynamo.’ He had, after all, previously run an art gallery that championed – unsuccessfully – boundary-pushing artists.
The New Look was an abrupt awakening for British and American designers, who were keen to scoop up Paris’s battered fashion crown. Quite how Paris couture survived during the war remains a murky topic. France was starving. Couture – not just a national emblem of pride but an employer of thousands of skilled craftspeople – was under threat. The Nazis wanted to move it to Berlin. Dior, who was drafted into the army in 1939, made his way back to Paris in 1942, eventually finding work with Lucien Lelong, which like most of the couture houses that remained open for business in Paris, survived to an (unspoken) degree by dressing Nazi wives and French courtesans, or poules de luxe, who engaged in collaboration horizontale.
This ignominy, coupled with the economic
‘When an English woman is pretty, she is prettier than a woman of any nationality’
importance of Paris’s couture industry explains why the success of Dior’s new house in 1947 was so key to French pride, post-war. Those upstarts in London, New York and even Italy, which were beginning to consolidate their fashion power, couldn’t compete with the genius of a Dior. Sir Hardy Amies, one of London’s pre-eminent designers of the era, later recalled how difficult it was for the eye to adapt to the narrow, soft shoulders of the New Look’s Bar jacket after the would-be jauntily assertive wartime line. ‘Initially, British versions all had a boxy shoulder line,’ says Cullen.
Those who could, went for the authentic Dior version. Novelist Nancy Mitford, declaring that it was time for her to settle on one style, decided that Dior’s New Look would be it. Margot Fonteyn, prima ballerina with what was then Sadler’s Wells Ballet, was also enraptured. Both women opted for the Daisy outfit from the New Look collection (which Dior himself had named Corolle, meaning the cup of a flower; it was Carmel Snow, the formidable editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, who pronounced it ‘such a New Look’). The Daisy was a bestseller.
Fonteyn’s Daisy will stand in the British room of the V&A’S display (an addition to the Paris exhibition). Alongside it will be the suit Vivien Leigh wore onstage in Duel of Angels in 1958, and an impeccably stark, black-and-white suit that was modelled in the original show in Dior’s Paris salon, by Jean Dawnay, who through marriage would assume the far grander name of Princess George Galitzine. Another star of the V&A’S British section is the wedding dress of one Jane Stoddart, a 19-year-old who married in 1953, as well as a 1947 Bar suit with a 19-inch waist. There’s also a defiantly scarlet, strapless silk-organza gown that the author Emma Tennant wore for her coming out presentation at Buckingham Palace in 1953, and Princess Margaret’s fairy-tale tulle gown, which debuted at her 21st birthday in 1951.
Last November, I was fortunate enough to find myself in the bowels of The Museum of London, alongside Princess Margaret’s hand-sewn gown, which was undergoing a meticulous restoration. It’s actually two pieces, a skirt and a corset with a tiny handspan waist. The gauzy white cloud that billowed across a red sofa in Cecil Beaton’s birthday portrait of the Princess is now decidedly greige, although still lovely – a victim, say the Museum of London’s restorers, into whose custody the Princess bequeathed it, of the plumes of cigarette smoke that swathed all social gatherings. There are feathery tan perspiration stains seeping across the tulle-lined bodice, puddling in a delicate marbled pattern. This is a party frock that has clearly been put to good use. The gossamer skirt can’t be suspended from a hanger in case the weight of those layers detaches from the waistband. It is ostensibly light and modern but tethered to traditional construction. Women, circa 1950, didn’t demand comfort from their clothing, but glamour and an almost Victorian display of femininity.
British women (apart from the Queen, who was duty-bound to patronise British designers) were as mad for Dior’s vision as he was for theirs. In 1950, he staged his first fashion show at the Savoy Hotel – as well as a secret one at the French Embassy for fashion-mad Princess Margaret, her equally enthusiastic mother, and the then-princess Elizabeth. ‘Three shows a day at the Savoy, each a sell-out, 1,600 guests in total, despite the hefty entrance fee of five guineas,’ says Cullen. The profits from ticket sales went to what would become Bath’s Museum of Fashion (which has lent a number of looks to the exhibition). Two years later Dior launched CD Models in Mayfair.
This line was a very early version of ready-towear. Instead of watching powerless as British designers paid ‘homage’ to his designs, Dior copied himself, producing off-the-peg clothes made to exacting standards in Dior’s own atelier in Mayfair. While these cost a fraction of the price of the couture that was hand-sewn in Paris (tens of guineas rather than hundreds), they were still the preserve of the wealthy – produced under the vigilant eye of Marc Bohan, a protégé of Dior who moved to London to oversee the rapidly expanding British division. Within a few years, CD Models (or Christian Dior London as it later became known) was available in the country’s best department stores: Kendal Milne in Manchester and Marshall & Snelgrove in Birmingham. Dior himself would embark on nationwide tours that took him to Newcastle and Scotland, where he staged a fashion show for
Greige with tan perspiration stains, the Princess’s party frock has been put to good use