The Designer(101)

‘Heavenly. I don’t know how to explain it.’

‘Well, I’ll never know, will I?’ she said dryly. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

‘Don’t go,’ Copper said as Pearl rose to her feet.

‘I don’t belong here,’ she replied, straightening her dress with fingers that sparkled with diamonds.

‘Yes, you do.’

Pearl shook her head. ‘I’m not a fit person to be around babies. I spend most of my time getting rid of them.’ She gave Copper a bittersweet smile. ‘Speaking of which, I have to go and look after my girls. Ta-ra, Copper Pot.’

Henry arrived a few minutes later and sat on the bed to watch, his dark eyes gleaming. ‘The entire corridor is full of flowers. It looks like a jungle by Rousseau. Every couturier in Paris has sent a bouquet!’



The days after Pierre Henri’s birth passed in an ever-faster whirl. Far from reclining on pillows and reading an amusing book, Copper had never been so busy in her life. Dior’s call was followed by visits from Balenciaga and Pierre Balmain, and then by several others. Within two or three days, almost every couturier in Paris had called on her, or sent flowers or gifts. She was deeply touched. She hadn’t realised how connected she was to this strange world she had decided to enter.

An even more welcome visit came from her family – or part of it. Her brother Mike and her sister Rosie flew from America for the christening. They were her favourite siblings. She hadn’t seen either of them for three years, and it was a reunion that lasted over Christmas and New Year.

She was back at her typewriter early in 1947, much to the horror and dismay of many people who urged her to consider her baby and herself.

‘I don’t think it’s going to hurt my baby if I keep writing articles,’ she replied. ‘And it certainly won’t hurt me.’

What was harder, however, was going out and leaving baby Pierre in the care of a nurse. The first time she tried it, she rushed back home again after twenty minutes in a complete panic. But in the same way that she wanted a marriage and a profession, she was determined that motherhood would not be the end of her career. She did not see why she should not structure her working life around being a wife and mother. After all, she was not tied to locations or schedules; she did not work in an office or a factory. She disciplined herself to make trips out of the house and resumed her work as much as possible.

Her first port of call was avenue Montaigne.





Eighteen

She was admitted by a doorman and entered a world of organised chaos. Workmen were still everywhere, hammering and painting. Dior himself was not hard to find; he was sitting on a step halfway up the staircase, rivers of silk tumbling around him like a multicoloured waterfall, cursing volubly.

‘Tian,’ she called, ‘what on earth are you doing?’

‘This place is too damned small!’ he shouted back. ‘I’m going to have to build another wing. I need another three floors, at least.’

Copper climbed up to him, carefully avoiding the tumbling bolts of fabric. ‘Will Boussac’s six million stretch to that?’

‘Six million?’ He stared, hollow-eyed. ‘The six million was spent long ago. We are nearly at the end of the second six million.’

Copper was shocked. Money had flowed through Dior’s hands like water. This was a huge gamble, even for France’s richest man. She went up the stairs to the bel étage, which was still unfinished. A dozen workmen were on their hands and knees, blue-serge bottoms upraised as they laid a pale-grey carpet. She carried on up.

The third floor was a war zone of rattling sewing machines and elbowing seamstresses. The heat up there was intense, the air heavy with the smell of twenty girls who were working (as one of the premières complained to Copper) eighteen hours a day, and didn’t even have time to eat, let alone wash.

This was something few followers of fashion ever saw – the long hours of hard, highly skilled labour that went into the production of each item of haute couture. Beauty came at the cost of tired eyes, aching shoulders and worn fingers.

‘Our manager has had a nervous breakdown,’ one of the girls told Copper. ‘The pressure drove her out of her wits.’

The others chimed in with a chorus of grievances.

‘Monsieur Dior used to be so gentle.’

‘Not anymore!’

‘Nobody can keep up with his demands. He flies into a rage at the slightest thing.’

The premières were all agreed. Christian Dior, turned from shy little man into Napoleonic tyrant, was giving his troops orders they sometimes barely understood because he was resurrecting long-forgotten techniques of dressmaking not seen since the eighteenth century, and demanding levels of perfection that exceeded anything known in this modern era.

Copper made her way back down, jostled by workmen, premières and models. Dior’s office had been planned originally as a commodious space where he could work on a large Empire desk. This room had long since been invaded by the cutters, who had pushed the desk into a corner to make room for the long table where they pieced out the patterns with battle-scarred scissors. Dior himself had taken up his quarters in a tiny, windowless closet known as ‘the cubbyhole’. There was barely room for the piles of sketches he was feverishly producing, drawing and redrawing designs dozens of times, sometimes only to discard the entire project. She found him here in the darkness, wrestling to replace the bulb that had gone out in his desk lamp. ‘Merde. There’s something wrong with this lamp.’