The Designer(108)
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 of 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 Théatre 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 C?te 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.