HOUSE RULES
The French maison of Dior unveils its most ambitious rework: its new 30 Avenue Montaigne flagship in Paris – the city immortalised in Moulin Rouge! – and a fashion utopia redefining retail. By Alice Cavanagh.
In 1948, one year after he revealed his landmark debut collection – definitively praised as ‘The New Look’ – in the salons of the thennew Dior maison on 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris, Christian Dior was asked what he was most proud of. He responded, without pause, “The House of Dior: I have put my whole heart into it.”
The couturier would be thrilled to walk back into 30 Avenue Montaigne today – a newly expanded and reinvented retail paradise worthy of the prose of French novelist Émile Zola. The latest evolution of the site, now open after a two-year renovation, comprises 2,000 square metres of boutique, complete with three luscious landscaped gardens, a lively restaurant and a tempting cafe-cum-patisserie. The reimagined space is flooded with natural light and sparkles with luxury, an endless array of colourful accessories popping against the accents of Monsieur Dior’s beloved Trianon grey, a hue with enduring appeal, and laméshot silk dresses that dazzle on even the dreariest of Parisian days.
The layout is such that spacious salons flow one into one another while smaller, more intimate antechambers in the women’s ready-to-wear, for example, are furnished like opulent refuges with inviting deep-set sofas that make you want to sit for a while and soak it all in. This is much more than a shopping experience; it’s a full immersion into a Dior dreamscape. There is even a private suite, Dior’s first foray into hotels, for invited guests to rest their weary shopping legs at night.
This historic hôtel particulier, which dates back to 1865, has been the beating heart of the house since founder Christian Dior moved in at the end of 1946. At first, there were just three ateliers: a tiny studio, an haute couture salon, and a modest-sized boutique purveying various trinkets and accessories. During the course of his 10-year tenure, up until his sudden and shocking death in 1957, Dior expanded the site to encompass six buildings, including the coveted corner locale. For the past 70 years, Dior collections have been realised here by its founder and his six successors, all legends in their own right – Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, the Italian couturier Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons and now, the first female in the role of artistic director, Maria Grazia Chiuri. If only these walls could talk.
To illuminate the unique history of this site, the founder’s life and stylistic legacy, and its reinvention and reintepretation by such prodigious talents, Dior has also unveiled an impressive new exhibition space adjacent to the store on rue François 1er. The 10,000-square-metre La Galerie Dior is the largest permanent fashion museum in Paris. “Here, visitors can discover the richness of the house of Dior through both the garments which have been conserved and the historic spaces where they have been designed,” says Olivier Flaviano, director of the museum. “This is the first time a couture house can tell its story within its historic premises.”
The gallery is set across 13 salons, with a keen sense of place and history explored via its incredible scenography. As well as key elements from Monsieur Dior’s design epoch, there are winks to his former career as an art gallerist, when he exhibited the work of Alberto Giacometti, Picasso, Man Ray and Joan Miró, plus a restoration of his original office, furnished with his chair and desk. From here, visitors arrive in a glass-floored space that provides a glimpse into the original historic changing cabine below, where models preened and primped themselves before each presentation. The fully restored cabine offers a captivating still life from another era: old-timey brassières draped over the back of chairs, vintage pumps from Roger Vivier’s tenure as the shoe designer, left askew as though the model had quickly kicked them
“More than a shopping experience, it’s an immersion into a Dior dreamscape”
off. All this within the thrum of a contemporary fashion house where you can sense the activities of the current-day ateliers that occupy the floors above.
Monsieur Dior had his heart set on this locale, with its imposing neoclassical facade, well before it was the well-heeled shopping quartier it is today. He astutely recognised that the proximity to the Hôtel Plaza Athénée, at No. 25, and the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, at No. 15, would attract the right clientele.
“In the beginning, there was a small restaurant, a pharmacy, a boulangerie – these don’t exist anymore – and Kodak was opposite before Nina Ricci arrived,” says Soizic Pfaff, who presides over the Dior archive and is something of a human encyclopaedia when it comes to the house. Pfaff arrived at the house 48 years ago, then a graduate in her early 20s, to work in the licensing department. She stepped into her archival role in 1996, just three weeks after the arrival of a young John Galliano, who held the post of artistic director of the house until 2011.
“I learned everything about the archives with Galliano,” says Pfaff. “He already knew the house’s history quite well, but he wanted to see everything, so we began with the first collection, spring/summer 1947, and we looked at every single document, the fabric swatches, and each garment.”
Today, Pfaff works just a few paces from the boutique and gallery on rue de Marignan – the headquarters of the 12-person-strong heritage team since 2016. A small selection of the archives lives here, meticulously organised in temperature-controlled vaults and rooms and stored in custom-made boxes. In all, there are hundreds of thousands of heritage objects, including sketches, clippings, paraphernalia, as well as garments, 90 per cent of which are kept outside the city. Up to three times a week, select items are retrieved at the request of the creative studios, under Maria Grazia Chiuri and Kim Jones (the current artistic director of menswear), or the celebrity department.
Pfaff is in her element in the library room of the heritage department, darting about excitedly to produce various paraphernalia and printed matter for us to examine. She dons a pair of white gloves to delicately extract a small catalogue from a box. It is dated December 1951 and is likely the first catalogue produced for the boutique 30 Avenue Montaigne, a modest-sized space then called La Boutique Colifichets. “It came from a man who worked in advertising or marketing for years, and he called me up when he found it while he was packing up his office,” she says.
This original boutique sat to the left of the grand staircase at a time before the couturier had acquired the stately corner position, which was then occupied by a typical local corner bar called the François Ier. Success came quickly to the couturier and his business expanded at a cracking pace. “Dior started with 85 employees in 1946,” says Flaviano. “Seven years later, in 1953, there were more than a thousand working within five buildings, including 28 workshops. From 1950, the house of Dior alone was responsible for almost 50 per cent of French haute couture exports.”
Pfaff sees Dior’s successes as being in step with his pursuit of absolute quality. “He always wanted the best: fabrics, embroideries and, of course, the best team,” she says. Indeed, Dior stopped at nothing and even recruited Raymonde Zehnacker from his former employer Lucien Lelong to be head of his studio. Zehnacker, in turn, brought with her a team of 30 people. “Lelong was not too pleased,” concedes Pfaff.
A big part of Pfaff’s role is acquisitions, a charge the house has proactively pursued in the past 30 years to build the archives it has
today. Every month, her team compiles a newsletter of the latest finds. She produces one that highlights more than 30 new inclusions, including costume jewellery by Monsieur Dior, a strapless dress from 1958 that is pure Yves Saint Laurent, and a selection of tableware and shoes. There’s also a neat grey skirt suit by Marc Bohan from 1964 that would not look out of place on the streets of Paris today.
“Marc Bohan modernised the Dior wardrobe and actually, we have noticed that Maria Grazia is particularly interested in Marc Bohan,” Pfaff says, “Kim Jones is, too.”
As visitors make their way through La Galerie Dior, the continual dialogue between Dior’s fundamental style and the subsequent artistic directors is impossible to miss, although they also capture a moment from their own time. Ferré, says Pfaff, “was very Italian, Baroque even with volume and big bows, but then he was the first to use the Dior codes like the houndstooth fabric”. Of Galliano’s fantastical, now almost cosplay-esque couture creations, she says: “Even when they were provocative, they were still very Dior.”
Pfaff’s most prized looks from the archives are here. Among them, Dior’s famous Junon ball gown from his autumn/winter 1949-50 collection, a strapless dress featuring voluminous, petal-like tiered skirts adorned with lustrous embroidery by the renowned embroiderer René Bégué. It sits next to the newer iteration of the identically titled Junon dress by Maria Grazia Chiuri from her debut autumn/winter ’17/’18 haute couture collection. Her rendition has all the romance of the original, with soft pastel hues and a full skirt of tiered sunray pleats, but it offers an infinitely more modern vision of femininity. And yet, it captures what Dior’s work never failed to embody, in his own words, “a moment of elegance that has earned them a sort of eternity”.