Christian Dior

Pink walls and grey gravel at Granville

He was born on 21 January 1905 at Granville, a port on the Normandy coast, a son of Alexandre Louis Maurice Dior and Marie-Madeleine Dior. The family money came from fertiliser and chemicals, a business running since 1832, and in 1906 they moved into Les Rhumbs, a clifftop villa above the sea. Dior later traced his entire colour sense to it: 'My childhood home was rendered in a very soft pink, combined with gray gravel, and these two shades have remained my favorite colors in couture.' The family moved to Paris, to the 16th arrondissement, in 1910; the villa is now the Musée Christian Dior, which opened in 1997 and carries the French state's 'Museum of France' label, and its garden still looks out at the Channel.

His parents wanted a diplomat and sent him to the École des Sciences Politiques, the Paris school of political science; what he actually joined was a circle of young artists. He described it later without any grandeur — a simple gathering of painters, writers, musicians and designers under the wing of the poet and playwright Jean Cocteau and of Max Jacob, the poet and painter who was one of the great connectors of Paris between the wars.

The galleries: rue La Boétie and rue Cambacérès

In 1928, on family money, he opened a gallery at 34 rue La Boétie with Jacques Bonjean — a street in the 8th arrondissement that was then the centre of the Paris art trade. The programme, in Dior's own account, ran to shows 'centred on the masters we admired most: Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and Dufy, and the painters we knew personally and already held in high esteem: Christian Bérard, Salvador Dalí, Max Jacob, the Berman brothers'. He was, in other words, Dalí's dealer and friend nearly twenty years before he was a couturier.

The run ended fast. His mother died in 1931 and his father's business collapsed in the same period, taking the family fortune with it; the gallery could not survive without it. He started again in 1932 with Pierre Colle at 29 rue Cambacérès, near the Élysée Palace — the French president's residence — and in 1933 the two of them mounted an exhibition there of Surrealism — the movement of dream imagery and chance that André Breton had launched in Paris in 1924. That gallery closed as well, and by 1935 Dior was selling his drawings to milliners and couture houses and working as an illustrator for the newspaper Le Figaro and the magazine Jardin des Modes.

Learning the trade at Piguet and Lelong

Drawing dresses got him into the workrooms. In 1938 he joined the house of Robert Piguet, where, he said, he came to 'get to know the mysterious means by which an idea is transformed into a dress' — the part of couture that happens between a sketch and a body. From 1941 to 1946, through the German occupation of Paris and the first year after it, he designed for Lucien Lelong, one of the largest houses in the city, and said afterwards that he learned a tremendous amount more about his new profession there. He was forty in 1945 and had never had a house of his own.

16 December 1946: 30 avenue Montaigne

The money came from Marcel Boussac, a cotton magnate who wanted a couture house and expected Dior to revive an existing one; Dior insisted on his own name and address. The house opened on 16 December 1946 at 30 avenue Montaigne, a townhouse off the Champs-Élysées, with three ateliers — the workrooms where a couture house cuts and sews — and a staff of eighty-five.

The first collection, spring–summer 1947, was shown in the salons of the house on 12 February 1947. Dior called its two lines Corolle and En 8 — the flower's ring of petals, and the figure eight — and both meant the same thing in cloth: rounded shoulders, a narrow waist, and long full skirts that used yards of fabric in a city where clothing had been rationed until the year before. Carmel Snow of Harper's Bazaar said, 'My dear Christian, your dresses have such a New Look!' and the phrase became the name of the silhouette. Its emblem is the Bar suit — a jacket of cream shantung silk, nipped and flared over the hips, above a black pleated wool skirt — which the house still treats as its founding object. Not everyone applauded: as Marie-France Pochna's biography records, the yardage drew attacks from politicians and press in austerity-era Europe and America, and in some cities women protested against the long skirts in the street.

Ten years, and a nineteen-year-old from Oran

The house grew at a speed no couture business had managed before: Christian Dior-New York in 1948, a staff of nine hundred by 1951, Christian Dior London in 1952, a boutique on the corner of the avenue Montaigne in 1955 selling accessories to people who could not buy the clothes. The first perfume, Miss Dior, was launched in December 1947. On 4 March 1957 Dior appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

In June 1955 Michel de Brunhoff, editor of French Vogue, sent him a nineteen-year-old from Oran in French Algeria with a folder of about fifty sketches. Dior hired Yves Saint Laurent into the studio on the spot and, two years later, told an interviewer that the young man was 'an immense talent' and that he considered him the father of thirty-four of the 180 designs in his last collection. Dior died of a heart attack at Montecatini in Italy during the night of 24 October 1957, at fifty-two; by his own wish, Saint Laurent — then twenty-one — took over the house. The address is still 30 avenue Montaigne, and the building now also holds La Galerie Dior, the house's own museum of its history.