WE SALUTE YOU, MISS DIOR

When CHRISTIAN DIOR named his debut fragrance after his beloved sister, he immortalised in perfume a war heroine who lived life by her own rules, discovers

The story of the sister who Chrtisian Dior immortalised with his oicnic fargrance

Say the name Miss Dior and what comes to mind? A landmark fragrance, probably, created in 1947 yet utterly timeless – and, at least to me, something that’s ‘backbone in a bottle’: a scent that makes me sit up straighter, walk taller and bestows turbocharged confidence with its bold freshness and sophistication. But if Miss Dior is backbone, bottled, that couldn’t be more appropriate. Because the woman it was named after, its ‘face’, if you like – Christian Dior’s beloved younger sister – had it by the bucketload.

The real Miss Dior was a businesswoman in her own right: a producer of blooms for the cut-flower industry and for fragrances. She was a woman who dared to set up home with her married lover in 1940s Catholic France. And she was a heroine of the French Resistance, who survived incarceration in the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Before the Second World War, her brother Christian had worked with couturier Robert Piguet and, after leaving the army in 1942, at the fashion house of Lucien Lelong. In 1946, after getting backing for his own venture, the story goes that Christian and his long-standing muse Mitzah Bricard – a racy creature, customarily swagged with pearls and leopard print – were brainstorming a name for the perfume he planned to launch alongside his debut couture show. At that moment, into his salon walked his sister Catherine, upon which Mitzah (whose mother was English) exclaimed, ‘Look, there’s Miss Dior!’ Christian From top: the family home in Callian; Catherine during the harvest of her rose de grasse; a vintage bottle of Miss Dior; the designer at work instantly replied, ‘Miss Dior! That’s my perfume!’ The rest is fragrance history.

A few weeks later, in 1947, Catherine proudly attended her brother’s now legendary New Look show at his Parisian HQ at 30 Avenue Montaigne, which was strewn with white flowers from florist Lachaume – the very air scented with the fragrance named after her. ‘It truly was a moment of euphoria,’ she later wrote of the experience, ‘and everyone was a little bit astonished with this brilliant triumph.’

Though 12 years apart in age, Catherine and Christian – children of a bourgeois family of fertiliser manufacturers in Normandy – were very close. When Christian began his career by selling fashion drawings to magazines, Catherine moved with him to Paris, where he helped her find a job as a clerk in a glove fashion house. With the outbreak of war, Catherine retreated to the South of France, where her father was growing vegetables. In 1941, a shopping trip to Cannes changed her life for ever: while buying a radio, she fell for the shopkeeper, Hervé des Charbonneries, and the two started living together (despite him being married with children). When Hervé revealed he was working for the French Resistance, Catherine volunteered to join him.

Initially, Catherine typed up reports before sending them to French military exiles in London. On visits to Paris later in the war, she would stay with her brother – at his Rue Royale