Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture, Justine Picardie (2021, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

This is a very interesting and bizarre double biography. It tells the story of Christian Dior’s younger sister, Catherine, who worked in one of the important French resistance networks during the Occupation, while her rother designed for fashion houses in occupied Paris. As Christian’s star rose in a fashion house that catered to high society collaborators and the wives of German officers, Catherine was captured and tortured by the Gestapo and, refusing to tell them anything, sent to a series of concentration camps in Germany. It is hard to understand how she—or anyone—survived those experiences; when she returned after the war ended, permanently damaged in body and spirit, she was met by a loving brother but an uncomprehending society.

The war over, Christian established his own fashion house, sold to Princess Margaret, Marlene Dietrich, and the Duchess of Windsor, and produced charity fashion shows in England and Germany. He became very rich. Catherine was reunited with Hervé des Charbonneries, her lover from the Resistance, and together they ran a wholesale flower business in Paris, where Catherine had the satisfaction of testifying at a trial of some of her torturers. When Christian died, Catherine and Hervé moved to a village north of Cannes, where they grew roses and jasmine.

Because Catherine never spoke about her wartime experiences, few knew that she had won the Croix de Guerre, the Croix du Combattant Volotaire de la Resistance, and important medals from the Polish and British governments. Unlike Christian, she wrote no memoir or autobiography. Picardie, a former fashion reporter, must rely on memoirs and letters by others who shared Catherine’s experiences, and her research into the worlds of both siblings has been comprehensive. The book includes many fascinating photographs of the Dior family and their homes and gardens, of celebrities, of Nazis, of wartime Paris, of concentration camps and their commanders and guards. Of course, parts of the book are painful to read, but the story is not in the end, depressing (though jarring), because love between the siblings pervades it.

The writing is not remarkable (and I could do without Picardie’s reveries as she visited various Dior homes), but I found the story both disturbing in its adjacent worlds of luxury and horror and completely enthralling.