Dior Down Under
While those distinctive watches, cosmetics, fragrances and accessories have been available in Australia for decades, Sydney’s luxury precinct is readying itself for the imminent arrival of the country’s first Christian Dior flagship boutique. The antipodes has nevertheless had its share of close encounters with the house’s very famous founder, as Marion Hume relates.
The Australian Financial Review | December 2012
by Marion Hume
Christian Dior was born to well-to-do parents in the north of France in 1905, but it would take considerable time before he became ‘the’ Christian Dior. After years of working for other couturiers, the designer opened the house of Dior at age 42. He would run the company for just one decade: at age 52, he dropped dead at a health farm in Italy.
But his legacy would endure. The Dior brand, launched in 1947 with a rustle of petticoats, was a bold and strategic sartorial challenge after the dark days of WWII. The ‘40s silhouette had been neat, short, tight; the combined result of fabric rationing and women making their way in the wartime workforce. Aided by a textile baron, who benefited from the demand for fabric by the yard (as it was then measured), Dior’s sweeping cocktail dresses harked back to a time when a woman’s dress was fulsome and floor-length. Across the channel, in bombed-out London there were protests in the streets and harsh words in parliament. In the US, women picketed with banners and chanted “Mr. Dior, we abhor, dresses to the floor!” There were letters to The Sydney Morning Herald, protesting at the return of “long, hampering hemlines” which were not suited to the “modern lass”. But while women’s liberation would prove unstoppable, equally, the wish for something lovely to wear was equally irresistible.
In 1948, 10 packing cases containing 50 Dior creations landed in Australia for the first full showing of original fashions by the designer outside of Paris. Two Australian girls, Diana Gregory and Judy Barraclough, joined the line-up of French mannequins who had travelled from Paris. Dior’s whimsical vision, inspired by a remembrance of things past, had taken hold. He had changed the face of fashion. The House of Dior, then and now with its flagship on Paris’s Avenue Montaigne, was central to re-establishing French fashion supremacy after the Nazi occupation of Paris. Dior was, and is, much more than a fashion label. One might say it is an icon of France.
The designer may well be remembered for a romantic silhouette an American reporter, breathless with excitement after the first show, dubbed the ‘New Look’, but the house of Dior has always been as much about business as about fancy. Its foundation set up the modern business model: talent upfront, big backer behind and money manager in the middle. At Dior, the real power lay with textile supremo Marcel Boussac, while Jacques Rouet brought day-to-day business acumen to the world of frocks.
Today, it is a behemoth, the corner stone that allowed owner Bernard Arnaul to build a diverse empire which made him Europe’s richest man. How Arnault got very rich goes like this: he was offered the chance to acquire a by-then moribund textile empire for small change, with the House of Dior as a gift with purchase. This lead to the establishment of LVMH, the world’s leading luxury group, whose stable includes the likes of Givenchy, Marc Jacobs, Fendi, Celine, Loewe, Emilio Pucci, Donna Karan and Louis Vuitton. It is in the latter’s former home in Castlereagh Street within Sydney’s luxury precinct where Dior will open its first Australian salon early in 2013. The watches, the cosmetics, the fragrance, the accessories have all been available for years. Now the fashion designs have their own home here at last. The antipodes, nevertheless, boasts some close encounters with the maestro and they include a couple of little tales worth telling.
The Man Who Said No To Dior
The acclaimed fashion illustrator and designer Alfredo Bouret Gonzalez, a dapper Mexican aged 86, lives in Sydney. These are his reminiscences of meeting Christian Dior.
“I came to Paris from Mexico in 1948. I went by air, stopped in New York, then I flew on. I lodged five floors up in a little hotel, up in the chimney-tops. There was no lift, no hot water; I caught a chill in an ice-cold bath and after that, I would wash at the hot public showers. The greatest luxury was a oeuf a cheval, hamburger with an egg on top.
Before I left Mexico, I talked to the El Excelsior, which is like The Sydney Morning Herald. I offered to file a fashion column, and they said, ‘Yes, you can send stories, but we can’t pay you.’ Still, I got my press card and with that, I could see the collections. As soon as I reached Paris, I called Dior — the house was only one year old — and when they said ‘yes’ [I could attend their collections], I couldn’t believe it.
It was the newest thing but there were no queues outside because you had to have made an appointment. The collection was shown every day — hail, rain or shine — on the same models; those girls virtually lived in the cabine [backstage]. It was discreet but the ladies who looked after you were very dangerous to anyone who wanted to draw or might take photographs.
In I went and sat on one of the gold chairs as they watched, ready to pounce. I was not going to run the risk of being expelled. What I saw was too spellbinding. An evening gown made with petals the size of Japanese fans was just magical. The show lasted more than an hour. It was a really glamorous occasion.
Outside was a different story. Paris was very gloomy. I had a pale blue suit and people would point and say ‘look!’ They were not being offensive; they were just startled. No one outside was wearing anything remotely like couture. But the taxi drivers, they knew. You’d say ‘Christian Dior’ and they’d take you straight there.
I met Monsieur Dior because I went to ask him for a job. He didn’t have a big personality or anything. He was rather shy in his white coat; shabby, but kind. But after he had offered me the job I wanted, a woman called Madame Bacon — yes, spelled like the meat, although she was a very good-looking woman, petite, white hair — said: ‘Didn’t I see you the other day at the collection?’ She was the press manager of the house.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘But how did you come in?’
‘With my press card.’
‘You can’t work here and work for a newspaper! You have to make up your mind!’
I managed to say: ‘Can I think about it overnight?’
I had also been to show [the designer Pierre] Balmain my drawings and he had also offered me a job. But I can tell you, that night, I couldn’t sleep. Dior would be fantastic but I didn’t want to lose my press card. I wanted to keep my name in the paper in Mexico. So I went back to Monsieur Balmain in the morning and said: ‘I am sending reports after a collection is shown. Is that all right with you?’ He thought Mexico was terrifically chic and said he didn’t mind, so I said yes to Balmain, no to Dior.
I only ever saw Christian Dior once more, at a party in London. But Antony Armstrong-Jones [the photographer who married Princess Margaret] was there adoring Dior so I did not get a chance to speak to him. The next thing, we heard that he had died. I do wonder what might have happened if I had said yes to the job. Of course, you know the other boy, who got it. [For the record, the other boy’s name was Yves Saint Laurent, who joined Dior several years later.]”
The Man Who Owned Dior
A summer evening in Auckland. “There’s something you have to see,” says a friend, insistently, as she swerves down a side street. There, on an ordinary wall, is a white plaster cameo, exactly like those on the façade of the Avenue Montaigne flagship of Christian Dior, except chipped and tatty.
We stand on tiptoes to peer through glass, over the top of a dirty curtain. We spy Dior chairs, just like in Paris, except weathered and stained. There’s a mannequin with a wonky head. There are items thrown around, boxes half packed. Don’t they know what this is? Are they throwing it away? “We have to stop this!” my friend wails. “Surely you know who to call?”
We are standing outside an abandoned salon called El Jay, named for the label of fashion designer Gus Fisher, a local industry leader who died in 2010 and whose life was chronicled by Doris de Point in her book Looking Terrific: The Story of El Jay. In 1954, Fisher was in Paris, being snapped shaking hands with Christian Dior himself, both men clearly delighted that a licence agreement had been signed for the other side of the globe. Back then, stores didn’t order clothes from Paris; they bought the rights to use the patterns. Dior was an expansive brand from the beginning.
By 1960, Gus Fisher was ‘the man who owned Dior’ — across the Tasman, anyway. He struck a deal with TEAL, a New Zealand airline, to create uniforms based on Dior designs. To this day, stewardesses’ handbags and jackets still turn up in thrift stores in far-flung towns like Whangarei (north of Auckland), where the few in the know go hunting.
Once Bernard Arnault acquired Dior in 1984, one of his early challenges was to buy back licensing rights and streamline the business. Was one faraway outpost forgotten? Who knows? The good news is the treasure trove is heading home. The executors of Fisher’s estate have given almost all the Dior-related archives to Christian Dior, says Mark Browne, who runs Christian Dior in this region. “An archivist is currently engaged in recording and packing these treasures to air freight to Paris,” he says. Not for the first time repositories in small, forgotten places mean rare gems survive.
The New Man At Dior
Is Raf Simons a genius? The International Herald Tribune’s Suzy Menkes, the fashion world’s most respected critic, seemed to say as much in a rapturous review of the Belgian designer’s first ready-to-wear collection for Christian Dior, shown in Paris in September. “But Suzy always loves Dior” went the whispers over café crèmes the next morning as everyone fired up their iPads to see what she’d said about the most talked-about ready-to-wear debut in years (that is, until Hedi Slimane’s at Yves Saint Laurent a few days later).
Yet it is simply not true that Menkes always likes Dior. It was she, back in 1989, who deemed the first Dior collection by the Italian Gianfranco Ferre “constipated”. Ferre was the first non-Frenchman to helm the house, having taken over from Marc Bohan in 1989.
Habitually, hyperbole and Dior go together. In February 1947, US Harper’s Bazaar said of the first Christian Dior show: “The collection knocked the entire world.” Worlds aren’t knocked by frocks these days, nor beautifully cut black trouser suits, but it is true Simons made those who live by fashion feel awfully excited for at least half an hour. Then the twittersphere ignited.
That’s mellow compared to 1958 when, the day after the Algerian-born Frenchman Yves Saint Laurent made his Dior debut at age 21, the Champs-Elysees was plastered in placards from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde trumpeting: “The Great Dior tradition will continue!” and “Saint Laurent has saved France!”.
What Simons has saved is the reputation of his boss, Bernard Arnault, for astute and left-field hiring. Hands up the fashion pundits who named Simons as John Galliano’s replacement when the rumour hill was churning after Arnault fired the British Spaniard (we won’t dwell on that here). Ah, no hands. Galliano’s British-born understudy, Bill Gaytten, stepped out from the wings for a couple of seasons and thence came Simons.
Dior’s first Belgian in the top job looks likely to help Arnault maintain his position as France’s richest person, while it is whispered that, to escape President Francois Hollande’s plan to impose a 75 per cent marginal income tax rate, the LVMH titan is, in turn, thinking of becoming a Belgian.
