Born: Granville, France, 1905
Died: Montecatini, Italy, 1957
Christian Dior was responsible for the pivotal point in twentieth-century fashion. His New Look shook the world, brought women back to life and became fashion's most powerful political statement. Dior studied political science at École des Sciences Politiques in Paris from 1920-25. He served in the French army and worked as an art dealer, illustrator and designer at Piguet and Lelong before launching his curvaceous controversy on an unsuspecting world in December 1946. Heralded an overnight sensation, Dior was, in fact, 41 years old.
Dior's New Look was equal parts fashion and social revolution. It was a female seducer with explosive elements: excessive fabric in a period of austerity; a return to femininity after wartime suppression; a taste of glamour after years of drab. Although sketches smuggled out of Paris during the war were predicting a return to undulation, it was Dior who delivered. `The prime need of fashion is to please and attract,' he mused in his memoirs, Dior by Dior (1957). `Uniformity is the mother of boredom.'
Dior - whose preferred places for sketching were the bed or bath - dominated Vogue's collection reports for a decade. `His ideas were fresh and put over with great authority,' wrote Vogue in 1947. `His clothes were beautifully made, essentially Parisian, deeply feminine .' Like Balenciaga, Dior's prime concern was silhouette and form, and he admitted that he could happily produce all of his collections in black or white. `Colour cannot transform a failure of a dress into a success,' he said. `It merely plays a supporting role in a cast where the cut is the star performer.'
Dior's preoccupation was the formulation of new lines: the Oblique line of 1950, the Oval line in spring 1951, the Envol in autumn, the Princess line, the Profile line in 1952, the H line in 1954, the A line followed by the Y line in 1955. Although the collections generated valuable publicity, and spawned countless imitations, it was the lucrative contracts with licensees that culminated in sales of over £700 million. In one season alone, 2,500 customers passed through the Christian Dior salons.
The house which Dior built continued after his death. The legend was intact. Yves Saint Laurent, who had joined Dior as design assistant in 1955 - the only person to be given this unique position - was appointed chief designer at the tender age of 21. His first collection, the Trapeze line in 1958, was a radical departure. Two years later, when Saint Laurent was conscripted into the French army and suffered a nervous breakdown, he passed the baton to Marc Bohan, who remained there for 28 years.
A major retrospective celebrating the house of Dior was held at the Musée des Arts de la Mode, Paris, in 1987. In 1989 Italian Gianfranco Ferre succeeded Marc Bohan and, finally, John Galliano - the first British designer to head an established Parisian house - moved from Givenchy and replaced Ferre in 1996, declaring Dior `the punk of his time'.
