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

Justine Picardie’s new biography, “Miss Dior,” claims to be about Catherine Dior, the youngest sister of fashion designer Christian Dior, but she is missing from much of it. This is not because Justine Picardie, a former editor at Harper’s Bazaar and author the illustrated biography of Coco Chanel, has not done the research. Rather it’s because there are very few sources of information that give insight into Catherine Dior or tell her story. As a result, Dior remains a ghostly presence hovering just off the edge of the pages of Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture. Regardless of Picardie’s extraordinary access to the archives and her own travels in search of some kind of spiritual connection with Dior, a nuanced and complete portrait of Dior eludes her. Perhaps this is why the author attempts to flesh out Dior’s story by connecting her to her brother Christian’s well-documented career in the second half of the book.

Catherine Dior is certainly worthy of a biography. During World War II she joined the French resistance delivering information to the Allies in 1944. Arrested, tortured, and put on one of the last trains carrying political prisoners East, she survived several Nazi labor camps including the infamous women’s camp at Ravensbruck. She remained silent under torture and endured unspeakable cruelty, hardship, deprivation, and violence.

Unfortunately Dior left no written account of her experiences, nor did she speak about what she had been through to family or friends. Picardie overcomes the absence of Catherine’s first hand account of her life and experiences by recounting the stories of other women who went through the same things. Some of these women were a part of the same resistance unit as Catherine, were tortured by the same people as Catherine, and were with Catherine in the same camps at the same time. Their stories of death, endurance, hunger, and pain give a visceral sense of the dehumanizing experience of life in the camps. Through her use of these sources, Picardie is able to provide her readers with a good idea of the things that Catherine experienced. Picardie’s writing about life in the camps, which makes up the bulk of the first half of the book, is unflinching and powerful.

The second half of the book, in which Picardie attempts to connect Catherine Dior to her brother Christian’s design business, is less successful. Catherine and Christian Dior were close. She was the inspiration for the “Miss Dior'' perfume, and it is possible that her love for flowers inspired the “Miss Dior” dress, but otherwise there is little to suggest that Catherine influenced Christian’s fashion ideas or business decisions. In fact, the opposite: despite Catherine’s understandable dislike for Germany and German businesses, Christian did not hesitate to enter into contracts with German manufacturers after the war or to stage fashion shows in Germany. Picardie is passionate and knowledgeable about Christian Dior’s rise to prominence in the world of fashion, and her description of his work and its reception is excellent. But after pages describing Christian Dior’s “New Look” designs, a costume party in Venice, a chapter detailing Princess Margaret’s fashion sense, and a rehashing of the Edward VII and Wallis Simpson scandal, readers can be forgiven for asking themselves what any of it has to do with Catherine Dior.

The answer is nothing. Picardie’s determination to create a connection between Catherine’s life and her brother’s work results in a truly egregious comparison between inmate portraits (drawn, at great personal risk, by a woman at one of the camps where Catherine was held) to photos of Christian with a fashion model and one of his dresses. About them Picardie writes, “There should be a vast gulf between them. . . and yet they co-exist . . . . For they emerged out of moments of time that feel too close to be separated, connected by their makers’ urge to create beauty.” There is indeed a “vast gulf” between those two sets of images, and it demeans the experiences of the women in the camp portraits and the artist who drew them to compare them to pictures of a designer standing next to a model and a dress.

Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture contains two potentially good books. One the heroic story of Catherine Dior. The other describes the post-World War II fashion industry and Christian Dior’s emergence as one of its stars. Other than their familial relationship Catherine and Christian lived very different lives that only rarely affected one another. Justine Picardie’s attempt to stitch their stories together beyond that sibling relationship fails and in the process deprives Catherine Dior of the biography she deserves.

—Brian Bruce is an author and retired teacher who talks about books at Bookish: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrrFo3tDRDVbX7PZjWx1qYA