The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The mystery of Miss Dior
While Dior was designing dresses, his beloved sister was being tortured by the Gestapo. A new biography brings her elusive story out of the shadows
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The black Bakelite phone on Christian Dior’s desk at La Colle Noire, the couturier’s Provençal hideaway, had a direct line marked to his sister Catherine. You can see it for yourself, if you are among the fortunate few invited to visit, along with the view he enjoyed from his study window, toward Catherine’s own, more rudimentary home in the hilltop village of Callian, three miles to the north.
Dior bought La Colle in 1951, four years after his debut “New Look” collection made him the apple of every fashion editor’s eye – and an extremely wealthy man. He could have chosen to live anywhere by then but he settled on here, a decision I can’t help but think, on reading Justine Picardie’s memorable new biography of Catherine, was motivated by a fierce desire to keep his favourite sibling close.
Picardie is a former editor-inchief of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, a former fashion columnist for this paper and the author of an acclaimed biography of Coco Chanel. Fashion is in her bones, but while I wish I could tell you that Miss Dior is about swishing silks and mirrored salons, it isn’t. These certainly vein the book, but come to seem brittle intrusions in an otherwise eerie and distressing story.
Though 12 years his junior Catherine (1917-2008) was close to Dior in temperament and shared particularly his devotion to flowers. As children, growing up in the grand Villa les Rhumbs near Mont-SaintMichel, he and she were allowed to create flower beds in the shapes of a tiger and butterfly.
Catherine’s voice appears rarely in the book. She was, as a godson recalled, a woman of very few words, and much as Picardie has done an exceptional job of piecing her life together from contemporaneous accounts, Catherine – Miss Dior – remains the hollow at the book’s centre.
Her relationship with Dior deepened immeasurably when, in the early 1930s, the siblings bore the brunt of their family’s financial ruin. They even lived together, first at the isolated farmhouse in Callian that their widowed father retreated to, then at Dior’s apartment in Paris. Catherine wasn’t far from it when, in 1944, she was arrested by the Gestapo for her role in the Resistance. Blindfolded and bundled into a car, she was taken to their HQ on Rue de la Pompe, and tortured. Her official account is scant, but using the reminiscences of other resistants detained on the premises, Picardie builds the sort of picture that, in a film, would be shown under strobe: an infant child wandering between the naked bodies of bleeding victims; an interrogator performing Bach on the piano.
Catherine might have protected her comrades (and her brother), but her own fate was dire, being
dispatched to prison and then – 10 days before the city’s liberation – to Ravensbruck concentration camp. I hardly drew breath while reading this fretful passage, which is cleverly spliced with Dior’s frantic attempts to have her freed before the train crossed the border.
“I sometimes wonder how I managed to carry on at all,” he said of the following nine months, during which Catherine’s whereabouts remained unknown. “Work – exigent, all-absorbing work – was the only drug,” he added, because, as
we learn next, the fashion world kept blindly turning – and the chapters outlining the weird circumstances under which it did so are fascinating. Here, for instance, is Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow, sniping that the only people buying are the black market rich, a vulgar set “too dreadful to be believed… women whom you wouldn’t be seen dead with”.
There are points in this book when it feels traitorous to be considering skirt lengths in the same breath as gas chambers, antitheses that, on the whole, Picardie navigates with the intelligence and sympathy you would expect. “There should be a vast gulf between them – a chasm…” she writes, “and yet they coexist.”
Miss Dior is so much more than a biography. It’s about how necessity can drive people to either terrible deeds or acts of great courage, and how beauty can grow from the worst kinds of horror. Catherine, who was released in April 1945 and made a life for herself cultivating roses, might have chosen to remain elusive, but Picardie succeeds in convincing us that Dior’s ghostly sister is present in every fold and tuck of fabric that would fall from his elegant fingers.