By the time Paris fell to Nazi occupation and France signed the Armistice of 22 June 1940 with Germany, Christian and Catherine had once again found themselves in Provence, selling vegetables at a market in Cannes twice a week. This brief period of carefreeness came to a “shuddering standstill” when Britain and France declared war with Germany on 3 September 1939. Separated by 12 years in age, they remained “the closest of the Dior siblings”, Picardie writes. Christian found work as a fashion designer, while Catherine sold hats and gloves at a boutique. In 1936, Catherine and her brother Christian rejoined Paris together. © Provided by The IndependentĬatherine Dior in 1945 at her return from deportation (Collection Christian Dior Parfums, Paris) The young Catherine, Picardie writes, “had no choice but to accompany her father on his downward spiral”, moving, unhappily so, from her grand childhood home in Normandy to a smaller farmhouse in Provence. Her father, Maurice Dior, lost the family’s fortune in the Wall Street crash of 1929. Born on 2 August 1917, Catherine lost her mother, Madeleine Dior (to septicemia following an operation), at the age of 14. Raymond, having served in World War One, never shook the trauma of combat, while Bernard struggled with symptoms of mental illness for years until he was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1932. In the beginning, there were five Dior siblings: Christian, Catherine, Bernard, Raymond, and Jacqueline. I felt that in order to write about Christian, I needed to write about his relationship with Catherine.” “But when I’d found out the minimal information that there was about Catherine, I became really intrigued and fascinated by her story. “I started looking at the archives, and there really wasn’t anything about Catherine in them at that point,” Picardie tells The Independent. Picardie, whose previous books include a biography of Coco Chanel, was invited by Dior to look at their archive, “perhaps with a view of doing a biography of Christian Dior”. Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture, newly published at Faber & Faber in the UK and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US, tells the story of Catherine’s life, caught between the atrocities of wartime and the glittery heritage of her brother’s fashion house. As Christian’s sister, she became the inspiration behind his famed fragrance Miss Dior, a heady, floral scent that remains a classic to this day. Her story, as British novelist and biographer Justine Picardie writes in a new book, is that of “a true heroine who exemplified the best and bravest spirit of French resistance during the war”. The two fell in love, and by the end of the year, Catherine Dior – the sister of the illustrious fashion designer Christian Dior – had joined him in a Resistance network.Ĭatherine Dior would become a crucial figure of the French Resistance, arrested and tortured by the Gestapo in 1944 and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp before her escape near Dresden in 1945. In that radio shop, Catherine met Hervé des Charbonneries, an early member of the Resistance. Owning a radio meant being able to listen to his addresses – and more generally to Radio Londres, a station operated from the BBC by members of the Resistance to their supporters in occupied France. General Charles de Gaulle, a leader of the Resistance and future French president, was known to broadcast speeches from London, where he lived in exile. The purchase was consequential: two years into World War II, France had fallen under German occupation. One day in November 1941, Catherine Dior went to buy a radio in Cannes.
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