User:Thiste/Christian Dior

Christian Dior (January 21, 1905 in Granville, Manche, Normandy, France - October 23, 1957 in Montecatini, Tuscany, Pistoia, Italy) was a french fashion designer. He is considered as one of the most influential designers in the history of fashion. He revolutionized fashion in the 1950s with his New Look style, and his brand Dior is one of the top luxury brands in the world to this day.

Early life
Second of the five children of Alexandre Louis Maurice Dior, a successful chemicals manufacturer, Christian Dior lived a peaceful, belle époque childhood on the hills of Granville, Normandy. As soon as 1910, the household decides to move to Paris, only returning to the family house for holidays every summer. Growing up, the young Christian is soon interested in music, drawing and creating costumes. After the first World War, he evolves in the artistic circles in Paris and befriends some of them such as Max Jacob and Jean Cocteau. Dior wishes to become an architect but in 1923 his parents decide to prepare him for a career as a diplomat and push him to enter the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. However, he will drop from the school before graduating, in 1926.

In 1928, his father gives him money to open an Art gallery on the condition that the Dior name doesn't figure on the front. The Galerie Jacques Bonjean displays works from avant-garde artists such as George Braque, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali and Dior's friends Max Jacob and Jean Cocteau, on walls decorated by Christian Bérard. In 1931 however, Dior's life takes a unexpected turn as the death of his brother soon followed by that of his mother only hastens the fall of the family business caused by the Great Depression of 1929 and the Grandville house is sold. At the same time, Dior is striked by tuberculosis and the gallery is forced to close doors too.

During the next few years, Dior lives on the generosity of his friends and the selling of a few paintings. It's at his return of military service, in 1935, that he sells his first hats and dresses sketches and is hired as an illustrator at Le Figaro Illustré. He also returns to one of his childhood hobbies, costume design for cinema and theatre. He succeeds in selling some sketches to Haute Couture brands such as Nina Ricci, Balenciaga & Elsa Schiaparelli.

He finally gets a job as an assistant at the fashion house of swiss designer Robert Piguet in 1938 and starts to make himself noticed when World War II is declared. After a year as an officer in the military, he decides to join his father and younger sister in a farm in Provence until he is offered a job back in Paris in the much bigger fashion house of Lucien Lelong.

After the war, France is in ruins and most everything is in very short supply, textile and clothes included. Which also means lots of opportunities in Dior's mind. He is invited by a childhood friend to revive an old clothing company, Philippe et Gaston, owned by Marcel Boussac the self proclaimed "King of Cotton", a rich magnate owner of textile companies, newspapers and racing stables. At their first encounter, Boussac is enthusiastic about Dior's idea that the public is ready for a complete new style of bold and luxurious dresses with lots of layers and extravagant fabrics, to break with the austerity of the recent years of War. Boussac promptly invests an unprecedented 60 million francs and launches the new Christian Dior couture house, with eighty-five employees and a mansion at 30, avenue Montaigne in Paris.

The Dior years
Dior's first collection Corolle Line premieres on February 12, 1947. Fabrics are still scarce at the time and Paris' long time dominance as the capital of international fashion & style is only the shadow of itself. Dior's look is refreshing and much more voluptuous than the boxy shapes of the recent World War II styles. He uses fabrics lined predominantly with percale, boned, bustier-style bodices, hip padding, wasp-waisted corsets and petticoats that make his dresses flare out from the waist giving his models a very curvaceous form. The hem of the skirt is very flattering on the calves and ankles, giving a beautiful silhouette to what he calls his "flower women".

Dior's designs represent consistent classic elegance, stressing the feminine look. The collection is received as a breath of fresh air in this post-war world. "It's quite a revelation dear Christian,” says Carmel Snow, editor of Harper’s Bazaar. “Your dresses have such a new look.”

The New Look is born, revolutionizing women's style and rapidly reestablishing Paris at the center of the fashion world.

Criticism
At first, there was some backlash to Dior's genius form because of the amount of fabrics used in a single dress or suit, but as soon as the War Time Shortages came to an end, opposition ceased.

He established his main fashion house in 1949; Christian Dior New York, Inc.

The Dior years
The New Look was absolutely appropriate for the post-war era. Dior was correct in assuming that people wanted something new after years of war, brutality and hardship. His new look was reminiscent of the Belle Epoque ideal of long skirts, tiny waists and beautiful fabrics that his mother had worn in the early 1900s. Such a traditional concept of femininity also suited the political agenda. Women had been mobilised during the war to work on farms and in factories while the men were away fighting. In peacetime, those women were expected to return to passive roles as housewives and mothers, leaving their jobs free for the returning soldiers. The official paradigm of post-war womanhood was a capable, caring housewife who created a happy home for her husband and children. Dior’s flower women fit the bill perfectly.

His couture house was inundated with orders. Rita Hayworth picked out an evening gown for the première of her new movie, Gilda. The ballerina Margot Fonteyn bought a suit. Dior put Paris back on the fashion map. The US couture clients came back in force for the autumn 1947 collections, and Dior was invited to stage a private presentation of that season’s show for the British royal family in London, although King George VI forbade the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret from wearing the New Look lest it set a bad example at a time when rationing was still in force for the general public.

Behind the scenes, Jacques Rouët built up the Dior business. The old Paris couture houses were small operations making bespoke clothes for private clients. Some couturiers had diversified into other products, notably Chanel and Jean Patou into perfume, and Elsa Schiaparelli into hosiery. Rouët realised that the future lay in diversifying further afield into more products and international markets. Eager to capitalise on the publicity generated by the New Look, he opened a fur subsidiary and a ready-to-wear boutique on New York’s Fifth Avenue as well as launching a Dior perfume, named Miss Dior with the US market in mind.

Christian Dior too had sound commercial instincts. When a US hosiery company offered Rouët the then-enormous fee of $10,000 for the rights to manufacture Dior stockings, the couturier proposed waiving the fee in favour of a percentage of the product’s sales, thereby introducing the royalty payment system to fashion. Dior’s approach to design was equally pragmatic. Resisting the temptation to experiment, he adhered to his luxurious look with the structured silhouette of padding, starch and corsets, which was so flattering to his middle-aged clients. So conservative were those clients that when Dior called a suit the “Jean-Paul Sartre” in honour of the radical philosopher, no one bought it, and he stuck to ‘safer’ names in future. He even adhered to the same commercial formula for each collection: one third new, one third adaptations of familiar styles and one third proven classics.

The newly wealthy Dior bought an old mill near Fontainebleau outside Paris and a flower farm at Montauroux in the heart of Provence, where he could potter around with Bobby, his dog, and indulge his love of art, antiques and gardening. Still shy, he left socialising to Suzanne Luling, his vivacious sales director, and he grew even more superstitious with age. Every collection included a coat called the “Granville”, named after his birthplace. At least one model wore a bunch of his favourite flower, lily of the valley, and Dior never began a couture show without having consulted his tarot card reader.

Throughout the 1950s, Christian Dior was the biggest and best-run haute couture house in Paris. The closest rivals were Pierre Balmain, and the enigmatic Spanish designer, Cristobál Balenciaga. Yet neither had the same support structure as Dior who, as well as Jacques Rouët and Suzanne Luling, had the “three muses” who worked with him on the collections: Raymonde Zehnmacker who ran the studio; Marguerite Carré, head of the workrooms; and Mitza Bricard, the glamorous hat designer and chief stylist.

The house was run along rigidly hierarchical lines. Each of the vendeuses, or sales assistants, had her own clients with whom she was expected to nurture friendly relationships. The ateliers, or workrooms, were staffed by seamstresses, many of whom had worked there since leaving school. During the twice-yearly haute couture shows in late January and early August, some 2,500 people filed in and out of the Dior salons to see the new collections. Each show included up to two hundred outfits and lasted as long as two and a half hours. The models, or mannequins as they were called, came from the same privileged backgrounds as the clients and were hired in different shapes and sizes to show how the clothes would look on different women.

The biggest clients were North American: Hollywood stars, New York socialites and department store buyers who bought the exclusive rights to individual designs to be made up by their own seamstresses. Marshall Fields, the Chicago store, had nine couture workshops and a marble-lined salon, “The 28 Shop”. Discount clothing chains, like Ohrbach’s, were allowed to attend the shows on condition that they bought a minimum number of outfits, which they were then allowed to copy stitch for stitch into “knock-off” lines.

As the most prestigious Paris couture house, Dior attracted the most talented assistants. One was Pierre Cardin, an Italian-born tailor who was Dior’s star assistant in the late 1940s before leaving to begin his own business. Another was Yves Saint Laurent, a gifted young Algeria-born designer who joined in 1955 as the star graduate of the Chambre Syndicale fashion school. As timid as Dior himself, the young Saint Laurent flourished in the feminine atmosphere of the couture house and contributed thirty-five outfits for the autumn 1957 collection. When all the fittings for the collection were finished, Dior took off for a rest cure at his favourite spa town of Montecatini in northern Italy hoping to lose weight in order to impress a young lover.

Ten days later Dior died of a heart attack after choking on a fishbone at dinner. The French newspaper Le Monde hailed him as a man who was “identified with good taste, the art of living and refined culture that epitomises Paris to the outside world”. Marcel Boussac sent his private plane to Montecatini to bring Dior’s body back to Paris. Some 2,500 people attended his funeral including all his staff and famous clients led by the Duchess of Windsor.

Dior without Christian Dior: A fortnight after the burial of Dior, Jacques Rouët called a press conference to announce the new structure of the house of Christian Dior. “The studio will run madame Zecameker couture workshops by Madame Marguerite Carré,” he announced. “Mitza Bricard will continue to exercise her good taste over the collections. All the sketches will be the responsibility of Yves Mathieu-Saint-Laurent.”

The first Christian Dior collection after Dior’s death was a sensation. Designed in just nine weeks by the 21 year-old Yves Saint Laurent, as he was called after dropping the ‘Mathieu’, the clothes were as meticulously made and perfectly proportioned as Dior’s in the same exquisite fabrics, but their young designer made them softer, lighter and easier to wear. Saint Laurent was hailed as a national hero. Emboldened by his success, his designs became more daring, culminating in the 1960 Beat Look inspired by the existentialists in the Saint-Germain des Près cafés and jazz clubs. Marcel Boussac was furious, and, in spring 1960, when Saint Laurent was called up to join the French army, the Dior management raised no objection.

Saint Laurent was conscripted in the army and, after demobilisation, opened his own couture house. He was replaced at Dior by Marc Bohan, who instilled his conservative style on the collections until1988 when Italian Gianfranco Ferre took over as head designer until 1995. In 1996, John Galliano, was appointed chief designer of Christian Dior by the company’s new owner, the LVMH luxury goods group.

Dior Boutiques: Dior has opened numerous boutiques across the United States more then most upscale boutiques which includes their New York flagship store as well as locations in Bal Harbour, Boston, Beverly Hills, Houston, Honolulu, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.