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Saturday 25 October 2014

Christian Dior

Christian Dior was born in Granville, a seaside town on the coast of Normandy, France on January 21, 1905. He was the second of the five children of Maurice Dior, a wealthy fertilizer manufacturer (the family firm was Dior Frères), and his wife, the former Isabelle Cardamone.

Dior was artistic and wished to be involved in art. To earn money, he sold his fashion sketches outside his house for about 10 cents each.

Dior started a small gallery Dior Freres with the help of his father in 1928. Located in Saint-Germain-des-Pré,  he and a friend sold art there by the likes of Pablo Picasso. Three years later, after a financial disaster in the family’s fertilizer business, during the Great Depression, that resulted in his father losing control of Dior Frères, the gallery had to be closed.

He first began to design clothes in 1935.

During the German occupation of France in World War II, Christian Dior worked for fashion house Lucien Lelong. He had to design dresses for the wives of Nazi officers and French collaborators.

Christian Dior's youngest sister,  Catherine Dior, was a true hero of the French Resistance. She risked her life to fight against the Nazis, and she paid a heavy price for her courage. She was arrested, tortured, and sent to two concentration camps, but she never gave up hope. She survived the war, and she went on to live a long and fulfilling life.  Christian Dior, was so inspired by her strength and resilience that he named his first perfume after her. Miss Dior is a floral fragrance that is both elegant and sophisticated, just like Catherine herself. It is a fitting tribute to a woman who was a true inspiration to us all.

Dior founded his own fashion house on October 8, 1946, backed by cotton-fabric magnate Marcel Boussac,


The phrase 'The New Look' was coined by Harper's Bazaar, the fashion monthly, for Dior's first fashion collection, on February 12, 1947. His long-skirted "new look" brought Dior worldwide fame and helped Paris regain its position as the capital of the fashion world as out went fashion rations and in came masses of material, designed to suit a curvy hour-glass figure.

"Bar" suit, 1947. As displayed in Moscow, 2011.By shakko -Wikipedia

Dior gave each of his dresses names, inspired by the style itself or from on-the-spot inspiration: The "Bobby" dress was named after his dog; the "Lahore" dress he designed for the Duchess of Windsor was inspired by Indian embroidery.

Christian Dior built the first international fashion empire of licensed accessories.

Rapper Kayne West created a song "Christian Dior Denim Flow" for New York Fashion Week 2010.

Sources IMDB.com, Wikipedia

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