 Welcome to the Brooklyn Museum. I'm Matthew Jakobowski, senior curator of fashion and material culture. And today we are pleased to present Brooklyn Talks, Mistior with Justine Picardie and Celine Volardez. Before introducing them, I would like to first read a paragraph from Justine's book. The decorators had been working through the night and when Christian arrived at dawn, the velvet carpet was still being tacked down. As Madame Waselle de la Haye, his clairvoyant had predicted, he recalled the last bang of the last hammer was actually heard as the first visitor entered. Today, there are photographs hanging in the corridor taken on the day of Dior's debut collection. The stairwell crammed with onlookers and well-wishers, the grand salon filled with gilded chairs, a name card on each one highlighting the strict hierarchy of the first front row, in accordance with the protocol that still governs the fashion world today. Lady Diana Cooper was here at the first show, so too were Jean Cocteau, George J. Foix and Christian Berard. And in prime position seated on a golden throne, Carmel Snow. Bettina Ballard recalled in her memoir that an expectant crowd had gathered on the streets outside while inside there was a sense of electric tension that she had never felt before or experienced in her years of working at Vogue. The first woman came out, stepping fast, switching with a provocative swinging movement, swirling in the close packed room, knocking over ash trays with a strong flare of her pleated skirt and bringing everyone to the edges of their seats in a desire not to miss a thread of this momentous occasion. We were given a polished theatrical performance such as we had never been seen in a Couture house before. We were witnesses to a revolution in fashion and to a revolution in showing fashion as well. This was a scene that Justine describes that happened on Wednesday, February 12th, 1947 at 10.30 a.m. The backdrop for the presentation of Dior's fashions that would become known as the New Look and the site in which the first whiffs of the citrusy floral perfume Mistior wafted through the air. The scent named for Christian Dior's youngest sister, Catherine Dior, the subject of Justine's book, Mistior. Justine Pricarty is the author of six books, including her critically acclaimed memoir, If the Spirit Moves You, Life and Love After Death and the international bestseller, Coco Chanel, The Legend and the Life. She is the contributing editor to Harper's Bazaar UK, having previously been its editor-in-chief. She was formerly an investigative journalist for The Sunday Times, a columnist for The Telegraph, editor of The Observer magazine, and features editor of Vogue. And she will be in conversation with Staline Valardes, who is the editor-in-chief of Town and Country and the editorial director of Elle Descours. She is the author of Jeweler, Masters, Mavericks, and Visionaries of Modern Design and Jules that Made History. At Town and Country, Staline previously held the positions of jewelry and accessories director and style director. Also today, our ASL interpreters will be Jessica Ames and Andrea Aleffi. Books Around Sale is Lauren mentioned earlier, and please welcome Staline and Justine. Hello everyone to the Brooklyn Museum. I am so proud and very much looking forward to sharing this conversation with you. With my friend and my former colleague, Justine Picardi, we both share the incredible honor of being editor-in-chiefs of Town and Country. Justine, in addition to being editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar UK, was also the editor-in-chief of Town and Country UK, and we shared many sort of secret meals and club sandwiches and cocktails in Paris, commiserating and brainstorming and developing a very special friendship in an industry that requires great comradeship and support. Yes, and sisterhood, which is so much what this incredible book is about. Justine, we talked yesterday and we discussed this idea that this book, which is about so many things, is at its heart about three things. And the first is it's a story of family and a story of a brother and a sister. Exactly, exactly. So tell us about Catherine Dior and Christian Dior sister and brother first. Well, they were very close. There were 12 years between them and as the images go through on the loop, you'll see a picture of them when Catherine, the youngest of five children, there they are. So their father, Morris Dior, was a very successful industrialist and he had made his money in the fertiliser industry. So they were born and grew up in Grandville on the coast of Normandy and in a Belle Epoque villa overlooking the English Channel on a sort of, with an incredible garden around it, but the local people in the town, if the smell of the fertilizer factories swept across the town, as it sometimes did, they would say, it smells of Dior today and that was a bad smell. Which also keep that in mind as we continue with the evolution of this relationship. And what was interesting was that they imported the Dior family imported guano, which is penguin poo, which I've never smelt but I'm reliably told is a really bad smell. So their mother, Madeleine, was quite a remote figure but she loved creating this magical garden around the house and the two children, Christiane and Catherine, found their way to their mother's heart was through this shared love of gardening and that's where their closeness begins but they also, I think, survived a lot of trauma together. So into this very secure, prosperous childhood comes the darkness of the First World War and the oldest brother in the family, Raymond, joined up in 1917, just after Catherine was born at the age of 18 and was the only soldier in his entire platoon not to be killed in battle and he suffered from shell shock afterwards, never fully recovered and was quite estranged from the family. Their other brother, Bernard, developed schizophrenia and was institutionalized and never seen again. Their mother, Madeleine, died of septicemia when Catherine was just 13 so she was left motherless and their father lost all his money in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash. So Christiane really took it upon himself to be Catherine's protector in the form of her older brother and they started living together in Paris where he had taught himself to be a fashion illustrator to earn a living because he had set up a modern art gallery which had shown Dali and Picasso but in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash and in the early years of the Great Depression you could barely give away a Dali, things that would now go for sort of 250 million dollars. He was trying to sell for 250 dollars. So he starts teaching himself to be a fashion illustrator. He starts selling his drawings to magazines including Harper's Bazaar but also he starts selling them as a freelance designer to couture houses. Catherine and he lived together in Paris in the late 1930s and he gets her a job at a Maison de Mode selling accessories and she also is his first model. So again on these images you'll see pictures of the young Catherine. This is Catherine. Yes. This is Catherine. And she is wearing Christiane Dior designs in 1937 before he's famous, before he's Christiane Dior. He was freelancing for everybody at this point and they share a life of freedom and independence which they wouldn't have otherwise had I think if their father hadn't lost all his money. And this is quite relevant and both of them have to work to earn a living but also it's the freedom of Paris in the late 1930s. Christiane's gay and they come from a Catholic family but although he was very discreet he could nevertheless in Paris have a life as a gay man. They both loved art, music and she was political too. When you say she was political, how would you describe that? Well, he'd studied politics at university. So actually I think they were both political. Christiane interestingly, and you're the first person that's asked me that's the Stelene but Christiane actually went to what was then the USSR, the Soviet Union during the Great Depression after his father had lost all his money and after his art gallery closed because he was quite disillusioned by the sort of failure of capitalism. So, but what he saw in the Soviet Union didn't appeal to him either. So they clearly talked about politics together. Then war breaks out. So they're in Paris, they're living this, you know, it's this life of freedom, this life of the arts, this life of creativity and they're living together and then Paris, then it all ends. It ends. And then this idea that the book is about a brother and a sister, the book also then becomes a book about the war. Exactly. So when you think what the French had lived through, so one world war that had been fought on French soil, then the outbreak of the Second World War and I think the French really believed that their defences on the border of France and Germany were completely invulnerable. They did not believe first of all that Germany would invade and Germany did invade and France fell really fast in less than six weeks and there were millions of refugees that were coming into France from the other countries that were being occupied from the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and the whole of, you know, there are eight million people on the move and in this great wave of chaos, Catherine leaves Paris because the fashion industry closes at this point with the fall of Paris goes to Provence where their father has a small farmhouse. Christian joins up the French army but fortunately is not captured and he makes his way back also to Provence to be with Catherine and the father and the little farmhouse in Provence is part of the rose growing area. They grew roses for perfume, the perfume industry but they also started Christian and Catherine growing vegetables together, very pragmatic because of rationing, there was no food. So they grow vegetables together and then Christian, they are absolutely impoverished and Christian by this point the couture industry is beginning to work again. So he goes to Paris at the end of 1941 to work for Lucien Le Long, a couturier in Paris and at this point Catherine in Provence joins the French resistance. And do we have a sense of how in Provence in this farmhouse living with her brother and her father growing roses, how she becomes involved with the French resistance? Yeah, she undertakes her first act of resistance by going to get a radio and at this point she wanted a radio to listen to Charles de Gaulle's free French broadcasts on the BBC from London. And just by getting a radio that was undertaking an act of resistance because to get a radio and listen to the BBC and listen to de Gaulle was enough to get you arrested and imprisoned. So she goes to get a radio and when she's getting a radio she meets a man called Hervé des Charbonneries who was older than her, had studied politics... There they are. Yes, had studied politics with Christian in Paris and he was an early member of the French resistance and they fell in love and Catherine joined his resistance network which was called F2. And before I started researching the book I thought that there was just sort of one French resistance but in fact it was very fragmented and it was really unusual to be in the resistance so when Catherine joins the beginning of 42 there were no more than 100,000 active members of the French resistance in a population of 40 million. How many were women? What is the role of women in the French resistance? It's really important. So the network that Catherine was in which was originally started by two Polish army officers who'd found themselves behind enemy lines at the fall of France in France they set up this network called F2 and recruited people in French people and about 20, they ended up with about 2,500 members of whom 25% were women. So quite high and this was a time when women still didn't have the vote. Women didn't, I mean nobody had the vote in France during the occupation because Marshal Petta and the Vichy regime had abolished democracy even before the Nazis told them to and had instituted fascism and viciously anti-Semitic legislation but even before the war women didn't get the vote. So you have these very committed, often young women who join the French resistance and whose stories like Catherine's tended to be completely forgotten. So though their role in defending and liberating France is forgotten from history. And Justine, tell us a little bit about what Catherine's position was in the resistance and what her service was like in this effort. So F2 was primarily an intelligence gathering operation and they gathered intelligence from right across France. They were described as one of the most dynamic resistance intelligence gathering networks in the whole of Europe. And they were providing intelligence for the Allies by sending, by gathering intelligence on German troop movements and sending it to the Allies in London. So to British intelligence. And do we have a sense of how Catherine would have intercepted information like that? Well she did, like all these sort of young girls in the resistance, she cycled everywhere on a bicycle. There was no petrol and also on a bicycle you'd be less likely to draw attention to yourself. So she would cycle vast distances and she would just gather information from maybe people that were working at ports and harbours about the German ships that were coming in and out. And she would type up everything on a little typewriter which she kept till the end of her life and which is in the Dior archives in Paris now. It's just been found. So she would type it up. I mean, you know, this was, there weren't any operating telephones at this point. So when you think how reliant we all are on our mobiles there's no telephones, any telephones that there were were being tapped and listened to by both Vichy France and the Nazis. And then the messages would be sent via secret radios and or sometimes they were smuggled out by tiny boats from the south of France or from the Normandy coast where she was from. But by the beginning of 1944, the sort of the Gestapo and the French collaborators in their own version of the Gestapo were becoming more and more intent on infiltrating and breaking up these resistance networks including the one Catherine was in. And she went to Paris. She got a coded message to go to Paris from Provence and to start operating from Paris. And she lived again as she had done before the war with her brother, Christian, at his apartment in central Paris. And one of the images shows, you know, the Nazi flags over Paris and the Jewish girls with their yellow star. I mean, Paris was absolutely overrun both with the Gestapo but also with French collaborators. And so as a member of the French resistance going back to Paris, what is the danger level for someone like Catherine Dior? It's incredibly dangerous. I mean, to give you some idea. So because she was working with British intelligence, so there were young female, they were called SOE agents, Special Operations Executive, who had been parachuted from England into France to work with the resistance. And several of them were arrested at the same time as Catherine and deported with her to Ravensburg Concentration Camp. And like Catherine, these were young women in their early twenties and the average survival rate they had after they'd been parachuted into France was six weeks. So Catherine was running the most terrible risks and eventually in July 1944, she was betrayed by a French collaborator, arrested and taken to a Gestapo unit in Rue de la Pomp in Paris. And this Gestapo unit, although it had a German running it, there were French members of the Gestapo and they tortured 300 members of the resistance to try and get information out of them of whom Catherine was one. And one of Christian Dior's friends who was called Jean de Borde, who was a poet and writer, part of the sort of Bohemian group that Dior was in who was in the same resistance network as Catherine was actually tortured to death by them. And at that point, people, the leader of her network thought that Catherine herself had been killed by these French Gestapo. And in the salar of this building in the heart of sort of Bourgeois Paris where they were imprisoned, somebody scratched with their nails and one of Catherine's comrades, we have been tortured by the French. But Catherine who was tortured there over two days did not give away a single name. So she saves her brother, her lover, her best friend, Lillian, who was another young woman in the resistance and every other member of her group. And she was then put in prison in Paris, then moved to an internment camp and then she was deported on the last train out of Paris before the liberation of Paris in August 1944. And she was one of, there were 2000 men including American airmen and pilots who'd been captured by the Germans and should have been taken to prisoner of war camps but they were deported on this train to concentration camps and there were about 400 women including a young American woman who joined the French resistance who was on the same train as Catherine. And the women were taken to Ravensburg concentration camp which was the only concentration camp for women and which I went to, in writing this book, I went to every single place where the story takes place. So everywhere from the Dior family home in Granville to the little farmhouse in Provence, I slept in Catherine's bed there and her bedroom. And the farmhouse in Provence is now a Dior museum? No, so the farmhouse in Provence is still where Catherine's rose fields are still grown for Dior but the Dior museum is in their family home in Granville. And then I went to Ravensburg because when these women just disappeared into Germany under a decree that was called Naktun, Nabel, Night and Fogg where they literally disappeared and that was part of the punishment for the friends and family and the people that loved them that were left behind. So Catherine and these other women disappear without trace. So I went to Ravensburg to find out what had happened to her and there you'll see in the slides there are these tiny little talismans which I found in the archives that were made in secret as acts of resistance and defiance by some of the women there. So there's a tiny cherry stone that's the same size as my little finger that's carved into the shape of a handbag and a tiny little embroidered heart and there's a tiny little doll with a shaved head and there are also drawings made by other women in the French resistance that they did in secret both to record what was happening to them but also to show that they were not subhuman. So Hitler's regime was to dehumanize and what these drawings did was and these objects were to say we are still women. Well, and also, and this sort of as you walk through the exhibit sort of we'll feel this too, the persistence of beauty is itself a kind of resistance. That's you have summed it up beautifully as always. And when I went to Ravensburg, the one thing I didn't think I would find would be the persistence of beauty. And in those tiny little objects, there is beauty. In those drawings, there is beauty. And also there in Ravensburg and hardly anybody goes to Ravensburg but there is a rose garden that was planted on the site of a mass grave. These are the objects that were found at a concentration camp. Which was Ravensburg. When this heart around you to still find it in yourself. To make those things. And the rose garden, some of the survivors returned after several years later and planted roses on the mass grave in memory of their dead sisters, their mothers, their daughters, their best friends. And these survivors, one of them was a French woman who and this book, you know, Misty Orr, it's about Catherine but for me they are also Misty Orr in their spirit of resilience, of freedom. And this French woman who'd been in the resistance with Catherine developed a rose called the Resurrection Rose which is Ravensburg is 80 miles north of Berlin. So it's very, very far north. It's very cold in the winter. And this rose which she bred, she bred so that it could withstand the coldest winter. And when I went to Ravensburg and just stumbled across this rose garden growing on the site of the mass grave where the ashes had been put next to the crematorium, the roses at the end of November were blooming and there in this dark place is beauty. And that is in a sense for me the heart of what I've been trying to write about and I also think it provides an understanding of where Christian Dior's explosion of beauty comes from after the horrible, terrible ugliness of the Second World War which had affected his own sister, the woman he loves most in the world. And so let's sort of bring Christian Dior back into the story. So Catherine Dior, a French woman, is sent to a concentration camp. She is tortured. She manages to escape. There is a point where Christian Dior and the family believe that she has died. And how does Christian Dior sort of begin to believe that his sister might be alive? He goes to see a clairvoyant in Paris called Madame de la Hay. And everybody assumes that Catherine is dead. And he goes, he describes himself as tormented with anxiety and despair. And he says, can you do a tarot card reading for me? And she does. And she says, your sister is alive and she will return to Paris from Germany. And in April 1944, the first, sorry, 45, there is the first sign of Catherine since she has disappeared the previous summer. And the Buchenwald has been liberated by the Americans. And one of the Dior's friends, a woman, goes to Germany, drives there and finds Catherine's name on a list in Buchenwald. She wasn't at Buchenwald, but her name appeared on a list because she'd been working in one of the slave labor camps as part of the program called Extermination Through Labor. So, and she was still resisting as a slave laborer by sabotaging the armaments factory machinery and trying to insert flaws into the armaments she was being forced to make. Just thinking about this, one phrase that you used to describe her was that she was the captain of her soul. Yeah, she was the captain of her own soul. So that despite the dehumanization, she, her spirit could not be crushed. And so at this point, Christian sends a letter to his father and it appears in my book, the facsimile of the original letter and he says, you know, mon petit papa, we must be brave. Catherine's name has been found and we have to hope that she has found, she will find the strength to go on living and in fact, what she does. And at this point, although the allies were beginning to liberate the camps, she was part of what was called a death march where the SS were driving these female prisoners further and further away from the advancing allies and she managed to escape in Dresden and she finally made her way back to Paris at the end of May 1945 and Christian was there at the train station to meet her and he didn't recognize his own beloved sister because her head had been shaved, her hair hadn't grown back and she was so emaciated. And she begins to recover that summer, they go back to Provence together, there's a picture of them together in Provence. She begins to recover surrounded by her beloved Rose Fields and then that autumn, she returns to Paris, lives with him again at his apartment in Paris and she starts working, she is given a licensed deal in cut flowers so she becomes a flower dealer in Paris in the flower market whilst also taking on the growing of the roses in the Rose Fields around their father's farmhouse. And you also, and I think if there's a fourth theme to this book, is what gardening means to Catherine and to Christian and also to the history of Dior. Absolutely. And you mentioned once that to garden is to believe in hope. Yeah, to garden, which I do, I love gardening, is an act of hope in the future because to plant a rose, you know, you plant roses at this time of year, you plant them with their bare roots in the autumn and they look, when you plant a bare root rose as I was doing this week before I flew to America, you know, you can hardly believe they're going to bloom but they do and sometimes a rose will die and you will grieve its death but then you'll plant another one. To plant a tree is to plant for future generations and both Christian and Catherine created beautiful gardens both together and separately and when you see the exhibition, you'll see how important the garden and flowers are and what's so fascinating is that very soon after Catherine's return, Christian conceives what his first perfume will be which is Mistior. At this point, he's still working for Lucien Le Long. He hasn't got his own couture house but he begins to develop a perfume which he says is going to be called the scent of love and for any of you who have smelled Mistior, it's a very tender smell. It's not a kind of sensual, sexy perfume. It's a tender smell of love. It's the scent of a love of a brother for a sister and its primary ingredient is roses and by this point, Catherine is growing the roses that will be used for Mistior as an essential ingredient. He also, although when the new look is launched, Carmel Snow, the then editor of Harper's Bazaar, calls it the new look and that takes on, becomes the name very quickly. Christian called it lacquerole which means it's the French name for the middle of the flower and then the world of petals around it and he says this I am designing for a flower woman and people saw that as being this idealized flower woman and to a degree it is and the Mistior dress which you will see in the slides is a dress covered with a thousand hand embroidered flowers but there is the real flower woman. His sister Catherine is living at home with him in his apartment. And she continued to be the flower woman until her death. Exactly. And how old was Catherine? 90 and she carried on growing her roses until she died at the age of 90. She, when Christian dies too soon, he dies of a heart attack in 1957 at the age of 52. He leaves Catherine, he makes her, he leaves her practically everything and that included a lot of debt because he was in debt to the French government for taxes because at this point taxes were really high because France was still, had been so devastated its economy by the war but he called her his moral heir which is so powerful because she and women like her were the moral compass for France during the occupation and I think he regarded her as this sort of moral compass and admired her enormously but she kept all of his drawings, all of his illustrations and in every one of his couture collection he designed something for her and in these images you will see her. There's one picture of her when she's holding a baby and she's wearing a new look outfit and that is her best friend in the French resistance she was called Lillianne, whose life Catherine saved by not giving her name and therefore she wasn't deported. Catherine couldn't have children after her experiences both in the camps and having been tortured so when Lillianne had a baby boy who was born the same week as the new look is launched, Catherine becomes Nicola's godmother and Nicola was an important source for my book, he's now a man in his 70s but at his christening, the picture you see of Catherine holding the little baby in her arms, that is Nicola and she's wearing a Christian Dior couture dress and she kept every single one of these pieces and my research started in the Christian Dior archives and it's thanks to Catherine that so many of these pieces survived and that his drawings survived and his memoir, his autobiography, she ensured that it was published and kept in print but she was so modest she never talked about her own achievements, it was all about protecting his legacy but the other issue for Catherine and women like her when they returned from Ravensburg concentration camp was that people did not want to hear their story and I think that's because of France's particularly tricky history of collaboration when you think only 1% of the French population actively resisted, of course that doesn't mean that the other 99% actively collaborated, some people just did what it took to survive but nevertheless there were a lot of very active collaborators, I was talking to somebody this morning actually whose great grandfather had ended up in a concentration camp who was French because he'd worked for the resistance and he'd been denounced by a close neighbor and when he returned to this little village in Normandy he knew who the neighbor was that had denounced him and very few people went to prison after the war for collaboration just as very few people in Germany went to prison there were 8 million active Nazis in Germany there were a huge number of people actively involved in the Vichy regime in France and as Nazi collaborators you couldn't send everybody to prison and so what people did in the immediate aftermath of the war was they were kind of forced to reconcile with one another and what they wanted was Christianity or and beauty and this idea of French beauty and luxury and couture and perfume and he rebuilt France half of all French exports at a certain point are Christianity or exports because it's not just couture, it's stockings, it's lipstick, it's perfume. Well that is why this book is so extraordinary and it's why when you walk through the exhibit reading this book and then walking through the exhibit really sort of is a perfect pairing because the fact that Catherine, whose story was an untold story until now the impact that she had on so much of what we see which to me makes me feel like when I put on a Christian Dior jacket now I feel Catherine's strength a little bit, right? When you sort of think about the Miss Dior scent that is quite pretty but actually it's so much deeper than that. It's the scent of freedom as well as the scent of love, yeah. And what's wonderful about Maria Grazia Curie who's the first female creative director of Dior and whose work you'll see in the exhibition including her iteration of the Miss Dior dress that dress covered with a thousand flowers. So Maria Grazia is a friend of mine and when I started doing the research for the book I'd known her before she was at Dior actually when she was at Valentino but when she was at Moved to Dior in 2016 I was already researching the book and as I discovered more about Catherine I would tell her and what I love about what Maria Grazia has done I mean feminism really is at the heart of who she is as a woman and it is at the heart of her work for Dior and it is properly authentic that belief in sisterhood and the fact that feminism and fashion do not have to be mutually exclusive and her Spring Summer 2020 collection was inspired in part by my research into Catherine and I took Maria Grazia to see Catherine's rose fields that are still there in Provence and we walked amongst the rose fields together and in Catherine's garden which is still there so she has Spring Summer 2020 collection which is inspired by Catherine, you know her love of flowers and as a gardener but a strong woman, not just a sort of flower woman who's drifting around looking like a petal a strong woman who is planting roses and growing roses and then the other thing she's done as a tribute to Catherine is this bag is called the Carrow Bag and it's a very subtle tribute to Catherine because Carrow was Catherine's code name in the French Resistance so when I carry this bag I think of Catherine and because it's called a Carrow Bag and beauty still introducing itself as a form of resistance in a way, right? Exactly, look at us now. Coded messages. Yeah, you know, we've just lived through the greatest period of disruption with the COVID pandemic since the Second World War and we are gathered here today and going to look at this beautiful Dior exhibition in the museum, you know we still, beauty can be a form of resistance against darkness and I think that it's like unless you've seen and looked into the darkness you cannot cherish and celebrate the light and I think that Christiane Dior is about protecting and cherishing beauty and light I also think that the way the new look which has that padding so padded shoulders, a padded bust and a padded hip that's because women, many women looked like Catherine not just the ones that had been in camps but there'd been so much people were starving in Paris during the occupation so I think that he forms these clothes and their gentle padding as a form of protection but he also says that he saw his designs almost as a form of architecture and they're a way of I think making a safe place for both his sister and other people to find a kind of safety within them. Well and this brings up the other theme of the book that I think is so strong throughout the book and also in the exhibit which is the idea that I know we both believe in that fashion makes history but also that history makes fashion and that to understand fashion and clothing and garments and their power, you have to really understand them in a cultural context and look at the period in which they are created and what is happening around them that inspires that creation and some of the images we see from the camps also speak to a much darker power of garments. Exactly so the striped pajamas that we know famously people wore in the camps as a form of dehumanization but by the time Catherine got to Ravensbrook the camp, these camps were in chaos the sort of everything was overcrowded, there was nothing so they were forced to wear the clothes of the dead who had been killed and the image where you see the women with those sort of coats with the white X's on the back those were female prisoners at Ravensbrook and the white X on the back is another form of dehumanization so to the new look was so radical it was so revolutionary that to some people were shocked by it because it seemed shocking to be using so much fabric after a period of rationing and austerity and that's why one of the images is at a Dior fashion shoot in Paris and there's a picture of the women tearing the clothes off a Dior model it's because they were outraged by what they saw as the kind of extravagance and the weight. And the extravagance was in the fullness of the skirt. Exactly, exactly but to make a beautiful couture dress an extravagant dress so soon after the end of the war is quite a radical thing to do it's almost a subversive thing to do and it made some people very angry and when Christian Dior came to America in 1947 so he became famous around the world almost overnight. And it is the new look that makes Christian Dior, Christian Dior. Exactly. So he comes to America, he's got a great champion in the form of Carmel Snow from Harper's Bazaar. Who names the new look? Yes, although when they sit down it's presented as La Corolle collection. At the end of the collection she goes to see Christian and she says, my dear Christian, congratulations, it's such a new look and the phrase sticks. But when he arrives in America although he's immediately famous and he receives the Nieman Marcus Award in Dallas, he comes to New York, he sails over from France on a liner, he stays in New York, he does loads of interviews, he's on the television but there are also demonstrations against him. So just as that picture here where you see the angry women in Paris there are demonstrations in America and there are people holding placards saying, Christian, do you all go home? Because there is a kind of outrage and I think it shows the power of clothing as Stelene said. I mean, I love Virginia Woolf and in Orlando where you see the fluidity, the gender fluidity in this novel but also how it changes dressing like a woman or like a man in the form of Orlando but she writes, clothes change our view of the world and the world's view of us. So you see, Dior does exert very strong and powerful reactions. Yes, love and desire and allure but also in some cases rage. And the new look coming, sort of what role does it play in sort of moving French history beyond the war? Because you sort of mentioned that Catherine comes back and the French resistance and that part of French history is suppressed but fashion, French fashion is not. I think that it ties in with General De Gaulle really. So De Gaulle is there at the liberation of Paris and makes his famous speech when he says, France, the true France, the eternal France has been brutally tortured and then France, the whole of France has liberated itself. So no mention is made of collaboration and so that's very important with De Gaulle and then the next moment where France can feel good about itself and its own French identity comes with the worldwide fame of Christian Dior. He's not just the most famous couturier in the world. He's not just one of the most famous Frenchmen in the world. He becomes one of the most famous men in the world. His face is on the front cover of Time. He's on the front cover of The New York Times. Cecil Beaton writing about him said that, when he came to America, he got more headlines than Winston Churchill did. So, Christian Dior comes to represent France in a form how it wants to see itself and how the world wants to see France. Catherine is forgotten because people don't want to remember the collaboration that led to women like Catherine being tortured, deported, imprisoned, many of them dying. They couldn't, you know, they didn't want to look into that darkness anymore. And as Christian Dior, and this is our last point before we open it for questions. So please sort of anything you'd like to ask Justine do. So as Christian Dior is moving us all forward with hope, with beauty, Catherine Dior is where? What role is she playing as she sees her brother become one of the most famous men in the world? Well, she's growing her roses. So their father died in 1946 and left a farm to Catherine. So she continues to grow her roses directly for her brother. And she is, I don't like to use the word muse about her because that makes her sound just like a sort of vessel and object, but he admires her strength. And when he dies, and I think he knew that he was going to die because he kept changing his will. And although he died very suddenly of a heart attack, he had been suffering from heart problems and he kept changing his will. But finally he makes it, you know, it's about Catherine and it's he entrusts Catherine with his legacy. And it's that real act of trust that his sister will ensure that what he believed in will continue, which she did. And those roses are still part of Mistior. They're still part of Mistior. So if you still buy a bottle of Mistior today, Catherine's rose fields will still be an ingredient in Mistior. I mean that her story lives on in that and that her story is now told in this book we are all to be grateful for it. Thank you so much. But I know that justine did a talk yesterday and there were a lot of questions. So I want to make sure to give you time to ask her about this incredible woman and also her incredible journey in finding this story and researching it and telling it. It was written entirely during the pandemic. So it is a tale of this time as well. Fortunately, I've done all the research before the pandemic. So I'd been to France, to Normandy, to Germany. I'd been able to spend a lot of time in the Dior archives too. So any questions? There are two microphones just at the side of each aisle if anyone wants to ask it or you can just ask from your seat as well. Ah, really good question. Well, I started the research in 10 years ago because my previous book was a biography of Coco Chanel and when that came out Dior asked me if I would like to look at the Dior archives with the view to perhaps doing a biography of Christian Dior. And as I discovered more about Christian and began to find out about Catherine, I knew that she had to be, it had to be about her as well as him. As for the internet, there's so much that is wrong online. So often it would become actually a hindrance because there are so many mistakes online and then things appear online that are wrong and then they're repeated over and over and over again. Where it helped actually, and this is a great question, was that there was some CIA files that were declassified and that I found through searching online through I don't know how many different places I had to go through to finally find these declassified files and the German Gestapo that had been responsible for arresting and torturing Catherine and others. The man that ran it, he escaped Paris at the liberation and then there was a trial against those people in 1952 in Paris but most of them weren't there, they just vanished including this German who was called Friedrich Burger. And he disappears, he's never put on trial and then finally he pops up in the late 1950s in Munich and offers himself, and he's a Nazi, to work for the CIA agents against, the East Germans, and the CIA sort of see through him fortunately, but meet him on several occasions and describe him and then find out what he did. And so these declassified CIA documents thanks to the internet, great question, thank you. Are there any others? Yes, right here. In doing your research, what was your favorite item or document that you found? That's a great question too. That's a great question, yeah. There is always that moment of aha, right. Well, one of the great moments was when I found out that the name of the little farm where Christian and Catherine had lived together first with their father and then it had been Catherine's. And it's actually, again, the internet was useful, called Lin Nice, but it's spelt in a very different way. And I was able to get in touch with the people that live there now and explain that I was writing the book. And I asked if I could come and go there in May to see, because they're called May Roses, to see Catherine's roses, which are still there, her fields be harvested. And they said yes, I could come and they also said I could stay there. So to be able to stay in her own home was an amazing moment. The other moment, there were so many, well Ravensbrook, the Rose Garden at Ravensbrook, but finding those, first of all, I found Catherine's records in the archives at Ravensbrook so I could see the date she arrived and then her number, because everybody was numbered, and then the dates she was moved to different slave labor camps and where they were, but also who she was with. So because they were numbered in a certain order, I could see on those documents the exact name of the women that had been with her. And so by finding their diaries and some of their correspondence, I could trace an exact narrative of where this little group of women had been step by step from Paris to Ravensbrook and then through Germany. So those archives were really important. Thank you. Thank you. Next question. Hi, thank you very much for today. It was very enjoyable so far. Through what you were just sharing about what you found at Ravensbrook, do you have the name of the woman who came up with the Ravensbrook Rose? Yes, it's in my book. And it was just called Marcel and her surname was Rose, R-O-S-E-T. And I will be signing the book afterwards. Just, oh, you've already got it. Well, if you look it up, you'll see her name and there's a poem she wrote about the Resurrection Rose and the poem is so powerful. Actually finding that poem was another very important moment for me. And then to that, were any of her roses ever used in Miss Dior? No, and Dior didn't know this story because until I went to Ravensbrook, they didn't know anything about it because nobody knew what had happened to Catherine. Thank you again. Thank you. And anything else? Yes. Yes, I mean, Christian didn't have any children and Catherine didn't have any children. So there are very few. But one of Catherine's cousins, who's now dead, but his daughter is still alive and I got to know her while I was researching the book. But Dior is not owned by Dior. It was bought by Bernard Arnaud in the 1990s and is part of LVMH. And indeed, even when the Couture House was launched, it was funded by a French textile manufacturer and industrialist called Marcel Boussac. So Christian Dior never owned the whole of Dior. He had a part of it. He separately set up Christian Dior Parfa with a friend of his from childhood, from Grandville, from Normandy. But the Couture House was never his and his alone. And there were two questions here. Great. Yeah, I mean, he is in the story. I don't want anybody to think that it's not about him because it is, if you're writing about the love of siblings, you know, both of them are there. I think there wasn't an exact moment. And it's when... So in Provence, so very close to the farmhouse where they'd lived together, then Christian bought a much grander house, but it was very nearby. It was an old dilapidated chateau called La Colnoir, the Black Hill. And he restored it and planted a beautiful garden there. And it was really close to Catherine. And Dior now owns it, LVMH own it, and it's been restored and all his furniture is there because Catherine kept it all there. And I was there talking to an archivist at Dior and, you know, about Christian Dior. That's why I was there to see this incredible house which is filled with his beautiful art and furniture. And then we were just sitting in the garden and it was early June and the center of roses was everywhere from Christian's roses in the garden. And the archivist whose name is Vincent Léret and he still works with Dior in Paris. His previous job had been at the Christian Dior Museum in Grandville which Catherine, it's thanks to Catherine, it was set up in the 1990s in their family home. And Vincent said to me, you know, you can see where Catherine lived from this garden. It's very hidden, but actually, you know, it's just over there and her rose fields are still there. And he said that he'd met Catherine in the 1990s when the museum in Grandville was being set up. And he said, just almost in passing, she was in the French resistance. And I said, she was in the French resistance. And he said, yes. And I knew by then that Miss Dior had been named for her as a tribute to her. But I said, but did you ever ask her about being in the French resistance? And he said, no. And I said, did anybody ever ask her about being in the French resistance? And he said, no, we just sort of didn't like to bring the subject up. Which gave a sense to me of how much there was still a taboo in talking about it. And my books just been published in France. It was published last month in France. And it's really interesting how many of the people that came to the talks that I did there, but also the reviews in France have said it is extraordinary how this period of history has remained covered up until now. And they almost took a British writer to kind of write such a quintessentially French story. But when it was that moment, I just became determined to tell her story and to try and understand why her story and the story of women like her had been written out of history. And history is his story. It's the story of great designers, who are usually men, of presidents, of generals, of soldiers, of politicians. The story of women still is marginalized. Her story doesn't have a place in the textbooks. Why not? And I became utterly obsessed and determined to find out not only about her, but why her story was too unbearable to be told at the time. And for many decades afterwards, when you think I've been working, the research for me started 10 years ago. We're well into the 21st century and the war ended in 1945. How could that be so was my quest. So I think we have time for one more. Oh, we'll do two more, two more. So one, two, three, okay, okay. Should we start with you? Yes, I mean, they were very grounded by that love of gardening. And fashion can be a very brittle, fragile, stressful environment for all kinds of reasons. And I think that Christian became very stressed as you would do when he had 2000 people working for him by the end. And the sense the French economy was dependent on him. And I think that Catherine, being with Catherine, he used to go and help her with the rose harvest every year and the harvest of vines. And I think that she gave him a sense of being grounded in a good way of sort of stability, of continuity, of family. But I think that the kind of stress of keeping the whole business going was what contributed to his early death. And then the lady that was going to stand up. So I personally wrote a paper about the image of women from the perspective of Christian Dior. But now I'm wondering how you think Catherine influenced this image he had. Well, I hope I've answered that question a bit already. But I would say that the padding of the new look, when you think of how emaciated she was when she returned. I think because in every collection he designed something for Catherine, although I think what tends to often go on display in a museum like this is going to be the most sort of extravagant, fantastical of a ball gown. But in every collection there is a beautifully tailored jacket, a beautifully tailored dress. When she gave evidence at a trial against the Rudolab Pomp Gestapo in 1952, she would have been wearing Christian Dior and she wouldn't have been wearing a ball gown. She would have been wearing a sober somber, a dress that gave her dignity. I think that the sartorial dignity that is evident in Dior's tailoring in every one of his collections, I believe would have been inspired by Catherine. Thank you. Thank you. Sartorial dignity is a great phrase. One last question, great. Really good, much to my surprise. I wasn't even sure it would get a French publisher, but it did and the first and second edition has already sold out. It's already in its third reprinting. So it's as if there is a readiness and a lot of young people came to the talks that I did. A lot of young women who would have been the same age Catherine was when she joined the resistance. I don't think the taboo was about talking about the resistance. I think the taboo was in talking about collaboration and occupation. So the resistance myth is very strong in France, but it's as if everybody was in the resistance, as if everybody was brave. I think the taboo was in discussing how widespread collaboration was. But I think that now people are able to talk about that. Thank you. Thank you, Staline. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all for joining us at the Brooklyn Museum today. I hope you all have gotten a chance to see Christian Dior designer dreams or if you haven't that this talk inspires you to reserve your tickets for sometime in the future. Thank you, Justine, for discovering this story and telling it so beautifully. And thank you, Catherine Dior. Thank you, Catherine. For bravery.