Ginette Dior, born in France, in the administrative region of Normandy, was arrested by the Gestapo and tortured. She later became known as Catherine and, when her brother Cristian Dior no longer had hopes of finding her, she arrived disfigured near him. She is reborn, becomes a producer of flowers and is honored with the Miss Dior fragrance. This is a story that united the country scents with the glamorous fabrics that made Maison Dior an international symbol.
An almost forgotten story that has been reborn
Maison Dior’s creative director has made Catherine live again. This incredible and unlikely life story couldn’t be trapped in the pages of a book. Perhaps because of this, the identity of the French brand has changed, maintaining its usual elegance. For Maria Grazia Chiuri, Dior means femininity and not activism, as she revealed in the T-shirts with the phrase “We Should All Be Feminists” in her first show, in 2017. And, if in her visit to Lisbon, for the Condé Nast event, Maria Grazia said that the Dior woman can be feminine in a powerful way, in 2019, she unveils a collection inspired by an elegant woman who was a figure of the French Resistance, a gardener and the sister of the man who highlighted feminine elegance. For these brothers, gardens and flowers may have been a way to recover from the tragedy of World War II. And, in the most recent show, in the Tuileries Garden, in Paris, where Joana Vasconcelos installed her immense Valkyrie Miss Dior, there was a clear tribute to Catherine Dior.
The childhood that elapsed through the fields
She was born on August 2, 1917, in Granville, in a kind of pink palace, the majestic Villa Les Rhumbs, installed on top of a rock, surrounded by gardens from which you could see and feel the sea. Catherine was the youngest of five children born to Madeleine and Maurice Dior. While the father made a fortune with a fertilizer industry, the mother dedicated herself to the gardens that surrounded the house. And Catherine ran through the fields of roses, geraniums, jasmine, and the little pine grove. The delicious aroma that the flowers released was joined by the smell of the sea air, creating a fragrance that would be remembered forever. With a childhood surrounded by innocence, she was prepared to be an aristocratic girl, she took classes with private teachers of Literature, History and Social Etiquette. She was also instructed to play relevant roles in society; this would have been the only important detail that would have taken life away. Catherine was to play a major role in her brother Christian Dior’s life. With the premature death of her mother, the beginning of her adolescence is interrupted and, at the age of 14, she is left without one of her biggest references, her father, who is often absent, and a governess who assume the continuation of her education. The closeness of his brother, despite the twelve years of difference, helped to pass these moments and it is said that at that time Christian was already designing dresses for Catherine and she loved trying on the models he sewed.
An unlikely heroine
The crash of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929 was felt in France and with-it Maurice Dior’s fertilizer business collapsed, and the family had to move to Callian, a small village 800 kilometers from Paris. Catherine accompanied her father, and Christian stayed in the capital because he was studying painting and was already earning some money, which he sent back to the family. But one day, in a market near Cannes, where she was going to sell the fruits and vegetables that she grew in Callian, she met Hervé des Charbonneries, the founding member of La Résistance, a secret organization that fought against the Nazi occupation of France, and she fell in love or, as the French say, it was un coup de foudre. From that day on, it was frequent to see Catherine riding her bicycle while delivering pamphlets and maps to the resistance fighters. Later, she moved to Paris and started to live with Christian, but her activities as a messenger – she carried secret documents to other Resistance cells – continued and, in 1944, she was arrested by the Gestapo. She was interrogated and tortured, but she always refused to divulge information about the Resistance. She was sentenced to death and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, 90 kilometers from Berlin, where she spent the last months of the war, having been released in April 1945. Catherine’s family and friends did not know if she was alive since they had not had any news of her since her arrest; her brother was heartbroken, and he thought she was dead. Christian Dior’s fascination with tarot may have started here, as these cards of fate, read by Madame Delahaye, gave him hope. In May, Catherine Dior and hundreds of other prisoners arrive in Paris by train. Christian Dior was at the station, full of hope, but he couldn’t see it, until a wounded, disfigured, dirty and poorly dressed woman approaches him. The emotion was tremendous. Her sister looked like she aged a hundred years, but she was alive. Catherine Dior has received several medals of honor, including the Croix de Guerre, the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom and the Legion of Honor. In 1952, she testified in a trial against fourteen people responsible for the Gestapo office in Paris and lived with Hervé des Charbonneries until 1989 without ever getting married.
Miss Dior
After the trauma, Catherine Dior returns, in 1945, to the place where she spent her childhood, starts to produce flowers, creates her business, and becomes a notable producer of roses, jasmine and lilies. Her garden, in Les Naÿssès, is a hymn to beauty after so much darkness. Catherine was one of the first women in the history of France to be authorized to sell flowers at the Les Halles market. In 1947, Christian Dior launched his first collection, known as the New Look, which featured elegant and sensual female silhouettes, complemented with an exclusive perfume, Miss Dior, which according to him “smelt of love”. All in honor of Catherine, such as the famous flower-laden dress. But if we look closely at the result of these models, we can see that Christian Dior tried to protect women from post-war thinness with padding around the shoulders, hips and bust, while revealing the wide skirt and defined waist that we see in the bar jacket. In 1952, Christian Dior unexpectedly died of a heart attack, aged 52. For the funeral procession, an immense carpet full of flowers was created in front of the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris. Catherine Dior is named “moral heir” and responsible for safeguarding her brother’s artistic legacy, which she has meticulously done by even guarding her tarot deck. Catherine never wrote memoirs, preferring to let her actions speak for themselves. To a veteran who asked her about her war experiences, she replied simply “Love life”. Catherine Dior died, aged 91, on June 17, 2008, at her home in Callian, before and after the death of Cristian Dior, she lived at the Château de La Colle Noire, in Montauroux, in the Grasse region, where the flowers to make Miss Dior still come from, and is also the Dior Museum. The particularity is that the garden here designed by Christian Dior reflects his best childhood memories in Normandy.
