Certain people in high positions were going to have a collective heart attack. It was unlikely that the established designers would be very pleased at the bursting of this new rival upon the scene. There might even be legal repercussions from the powers that be; after all, Dior was breaking every tenet of Utility, which was still in force. Copper had a dizzy vision of Tian being marched off by fashion police and locked in some grey dungeon to repent his crimes of extravagance. But that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered beside the outpouring of colour, shape and sheer invention that he had unleashed on the world.
But Tian was missing his triumph. Copper slipped away through the crowd and made her way to the cabine. It was congested with buyers commanding, demanding, imploring. Tempers were flaring.
‘Where’s Soirée? I had it in my hands a moment ago, and now someone’s stolen it!’
‘I need Corolle! I have to have Corolle!’
‘What do you mean, delivery in three months? I need four dozen now!’
She saw two smartly dressed women actually having a tug of war with a dress, the pleated silk in imminent danger of tearing as they dragged on each end.
‘We can’t keep up,’ one of the vendeuses told Copper breathlessly. ‘They’ve gone insane.’
Copper retreated and climbed up the crowded stairs to Dior’s cubbyhole. She knocked on the door, but there was no answer. She opened it and peered in. Dior was hunched over on his chair with his eyes tight shut and his fingers stuffed in his ears like a frightened child.
She laid her hand gently on his shoulder. He looked up at her in alarm.
‘Listen, Tian.’ She gestured for him to remove his hands. Shakily, he pulled his fingers out of his ears.
‘They’re booing me,’ he said in a tremulous voice, his eyes full of tears.
‘No, Tian. Listen.’
From the salon downstairs came the sound of clapping and cheering. It died down as they listened, and in a short while, broke out again as the next model went in. ‘They’re cheering you. They’re saying it’s the most important collection since before the war,’ she told him. ‘Perhaps the most important collection ever. They’re saying that you’ve changed everything, that you’ve created a new look, that nothing will ever be the same again. You don’t need to block your ears anymore, my dear. You’ve done it. You’ve arrived.’
‘What are you talking about?’ he stammered, seeming dazed.
‘You can come out of the closet now.’
She led him out on to the landing. They peered down at the excited crowd below and heard the applause. He squeezed her hand, his cheeks wet.
‘Is it real?’ he whispered.
‘It’s a triumph, Tian.’
Someone down below looked up and shouted, ‘There’s Dior!’ A sea of faces turned his way. He tried to dart back out of sight, but Copper coaxed him into the light again. He looked down, dazed, at the crowd that was applauding him with bravos and blown kisses. A hot wave of cheering and love billowed up the staircase, redolent of cigarette smoke, Miss Dior and the scent of silk.
‘My God. What have I done?’ he asked.
‘Can’t you tell?’ she replied. ‘You’ve conquered the world.’
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A world may be conquered, but worlds come to an end. And a world – Dior’s world – was already fading away.
A few days after that tumultuous first show, a photo shoot of Dior outfits was arranged by Marcel Boussac’s newspaper L’Aurore to show off the New Look designs that everyone was clamouring to see. Ironically, the scarcity of fabric and the newness of the Dior collection meant that the outfits that had been shown were still the only ones in existence. They had already led a very exciting life – travelling incognito to smart hotels by night to be photographed by fashion editors or inspected by American store buyers, and then rushed back to avenue Montaigne early in the morning to the vendeuses, who needed them in the salon. This was the first occasion the outfits had been seen in the light of day, outside of Maison Dior.
The clothes were to be shown against the backdrop of the rue Lepic street market in Montmartre. The colourful, not to say somewhat squalid, background of the market, with its streets strewn with bruised cabbage leaves, was going to provide an interesting contrast to Monsieur Dior’s exquisite (and very expensive) creations.
The outfits arrived in a large wooden crate on the back of a camionette. They, and the young models who were to wear them, were discreetly ferried into a bar at the end of the street. The market was bustling. Jugs of cheap wine from Beaujolais had arrived and were proving popular with the crowd. After the privations of the war years, food was still a subject of intense interest. This was Montmartre, where for four years people had picked up those trodden cabbage leaves to eat, while the Nazis took the rest.
The first model emerged and strutted past the stalls for the benefit of L’Aurore’s photographers. People stopped shouting and haggling to stare. A silence fell. Then a scream of insults came from a woman in the doorway of the tripe butcher. She was shaking her fist, her face furious. The model paused, her smile fading.
Another woman ran across the street with a basin of dirty water. She hurled it all over the model. Shocked, the wretched girl scuttled into the shelter of a shop doorway, trying to brush the muck off her outfit. But two more women were waiting for her there. Shrieking abuse, one grabbed a handful of her hair, while the other set about stripping the clothes off her back.
Other women – mostly middle-aged and shabby – had entered the fray. A burly matron with a towering zazou hairdo ripped the bodice out of the yellow gown, leaving the poor model clutching her skimpily clad breasts as she fled. Vile epithets cascaded on her.
The second model, who had unwisely tried to come to the aid of her colleague, was suffering the same fate. The women of the market had hard fists, and they were using them to belabour the envoys from the 7th arrondissement.
‘Salaude! Putain!’
‘Get out of here, whores!’
‘Look at this bitch. She pays forty thousand francs for a dress, and my kids go without milk!’
The men were laughing, but the women meant business. They chased the girls, tearing at their hair and clothes, throwing tomatoes, right up to the door of the bar, where a large, white-aproned waiter fended them off. The models, tattered and spattered with filth, disappeared inside. The doors were locked in the face of the howling pursuers.
‘And don’t come back,’ one screamed, throwing her missile, a rotten potato, at the door of the bar. ‘Next time it will be Molotov cocktails.’
The battle between Left and Right was to mark France for several more decades. Names like Dior’s, though they were synonymous with French culture, were also symbols of excess, and became targets of class hatred.
A success as swift and great as Dior’s could hardly be free of controversy. Hostility had arisen in all sorts of quarters, far from the streets of Montmartre. The couturiers who had struggled – and failed – to win back a share of the United States’ market were especially bitter about Dior’s overnight conquest of the American buyers. Their animosity was expressed in sharp accusations that Dior’s designs were wasteful of precious fabrics, were out of the reach of ordinary women, and were horribly retrograde at a time when women’s fashions needed to move forward. Dior had cheated. He had seduced everybody using the unfair advantage of Boussac’s money. He had broken the rules and was being richly rewarded for it.
On the other side of the Atlantic, there were also American detractors, chagrined to find that French fashion, despite all predictions, was not after all dead. To the disappointment of domestic couturiers, who had hoped that the capital of fashion had moved to New York, it was evident that American women were still eager for Parisian style, and that US dollars were pouring into the pockets of a man who fitted every preconception of what a Frenchman was like: smirking, devious, unmanly.
(Despite all that, copies of ‘the New Look’ had already been rushed into the windows o
f every main-street shop, costing a fraction of real Dior, made with inferior materials, cutting every corner, but aping the extravagant lines of the avenue Montaigne, and spreading the gospel of a return to luxurious femininity.)
These jealousies and rivalries had little effect on the Dior juggernaut, which was rolling on regardless. The part that couture was to play in the revival of the French economy was starkly evident. A bottle of perfume brought in more foreign revenue than a barrel of petroleum. A Paris frock was worth more than ten tons of coal. These very equations were evidence, in the eyes of some people, of the indefensible extravagance of haute couture.
Dior alone accounted for three-quarters of all fashion exports in 1947. He was a phenomenon. He might not have won the Croix de guerre or the Légion d’honneur, but he was a saviour of France nonetheless. More – he was a saviour of fashion itself, because he had single-handedly made being fashionable fashionable again. Ironically, he was already abandoning the extravagant designs that had brought him overnight fame in favour of more restrained and modern lines.
It seems easy to understand how and why Dior achieved this amazing success; and yet the reasons are elusive. There will always be an element of mystery. In a life that had been largely filled with sorrow and failure, the clouds had parted for a while, and some golden god had smiled down on him.
His lucky star had truly risen. The self-effacing back-room dweller was gone. In his place was Christian Dior, couturier: a man whose face was never out of the newspapers, whose name was spoken with awe, whose words took on the weight of law, and whose genius had become abundantly clear to his friends and detractors alike.
As with many of my novels, this one contains characters who were historical figures. I have tried, with careful research, to draw portraits of them. But this is a work of fiction, not a biography, and even the ‘real’ people in it are as much a product of my imagination as the ones I made up. The thoughts, words and actions of all the characters in this book were invented by the author.
As sharp-eyed readers will spot, I have taken some liberties with the historical sequence of events; some of the happenings of 1944–1947 have been conflated and condensed in the timeline of the book to make them easier to follow. I beg the indulgence of true historians and repeat that this is entertainment, not history.
The opening of Le Théâtre de la Mode took place on 28 March 1945. The exhibition subsequently travelled to several countries, ending up in San Francisco, where the dolls, in poor condition, were abandoned. They and the original costumes have been restored, and are now exhibited at the Maryhill Museum of Art in Washington State.
Christian Bérard died in 1949 at the age of forty-seven, killed by drugs, alcohol, overwork and obesity.
After her ban, Suzy Solidor opened another club, far from Paris, in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur, where she continued to perform for many years. She made a partial return to grace in later life, appearing on television, and was hailed by a new generation as a gay icon. She died in 1983 at the age of eighty-two.
Catherine Dior received many awards for her bravery, including the Légion d’honneur. Hervé des Charbonneries was similarly decorated. He never divorced his wife, but lived and worked with Catherine until his death in 1989 at the age of eighty-four. She died in 2008 at the age of ninety-one. They are buried together in Callian.
Marcel Boussac made an immense fortune from the Dior fashion house. However, his grip on his businesses weakened, and he began to lose money. He was declared bankrupt shortly before his death in 1980. Maison Dior passed into new hands.
Carmel Snow was pushed out of Harper’s Bazaar in 1958, and went into semi-retirement. She was succeeded by her charismatic protégée, Diana Vreeland.
Christian Dior was to enjoy his phenomenal success for only ten years. He had his first heart attack just weeks after his debut show.
He continued to consult Madame Delahaye regularly, and to this day, his lucky charms are part of the Dior mystique. The shy man who wanted an exclusive shop in a quiet street became one of the giants of the fashion industry. He enjoyed his wealth, buying a fifteenth-century mill near Fontainebleau and then a chateau in Grasse, and lavishly restoring both.
But travel, work and overeating took their toll on his constitution. He had another heart attack a few years later, and then a third, which killed him in 1957 at the age of fifty-two. He died at the card table at the Grand Hotel in the glamorous spa town of Montecatini Terme in Tuscany, in the company of a handsome young man whom he had described to friends as the love of his life. It was a death he might have designed for himself.
His funeral in Paris was attended by multitudes, and his coffin was covered with 30,000 bunches of lilies, his favourite flower. He was succeeded by his young protégé, Yves Saint Laurent. Along with Chanel and Fath, Dior is regarded as one of the most important influences on modern fashion.
Readers who would like some insights into the personality of Christian Dior can do no better than look for copies of his own books: The Little Dictionary of Fashion (1954), Talking About Fashion (1954) and Christian Dior and I (1957).
My heartfelt thanks go to the many people who made this novel possible, especially to Sammia Hamer; also to Emilie Marneur and Sana Chebaro, who were so inspirational from the outset, and to Mike Jones, Gillian Holmes and Gemma Wain, who worked so hard on the manuscript.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2015 Marius Gabriel
Marius Gabriel has been accused by Cosmopolitan magazine of ‘keeping you reading while your dinner burns’. He served his author apprenticeship as a student at Newcastle University, where, to finance his postgraduate research, he wrote thirty-three steamy romances under a pseudonym. Gabriel is the author of several historical novels, including the bestsellers The Seventh Moon, The Original Sin and the Redcliffe Sisters series, Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye and Take Me To Your Heart Again. Born in South Africa, he has lived and worked in many countries, and now divides his time between London and Cairo. He has three grown-up children.
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