Christian Dior vs. Christian Dior

Christian Dior’s debut New Look collection catapulted him to fashion stardom in 1947. He died just ten years later, but not before publishing his memoirs, known in English as Dior by Dior but more revealing in French as Christian Dior and me [Christian Dior and me]. Through the construction of “two Christian Diors”, the iconic designer conveyed the tension between “public celebrity and intimate personality”, a situation perhaps unique to the artist’s life in a field with a curious relationship with time.

Scholars Ilya Parkins and Lara Haworth suggest that Dior’s impulse to convey two selves stemmed from a desire to “maintain his public image as a true artist” in response to suspicion of the art world in which fashion designers worked. and the lion. Dior wanted to “ensure the right distance between his private self and his public persona”.

His conception of his dual self was built around the complex relationship of his profession to time and place. As a designer who drew on the past to revitalize the present, Dior, like his fellow designers, was already a “borderline figure” trafficking in “dissolving the boundaries between past and present, between temporary categories that are intended to remain discreet.”

Born in 1905, in the middle of the Belle Époque, he spent his early childhood in Granville, Normandy, to which he returned in the summer after his family moved to Paris. Paris was responsible for the creation of Christian Dior, the couturier; the Norman side made him want privacy. Throughout his memoirs, Dior uses the third person to describe the contemporary Parisian designer, the first person describing the Norman who somehow continued to live in the past. With his love of Louis XVI interiors – which he chose in Normandy – and his “New Look” evoking pre-World War II opulence, Dior emerges as a “nostalgic subject” but not a reactionary. In fact, as he writes, “[w]we live it in the time we live; and nothing is more foolish than to turn your back on them”.

Dior’s nostalgia is “an act of imagination associated with a sense of place…” write Parks and Haworth,

[The] The concept of the imaginative dimension of nostalgia allows us to see the reconstructive and indeed creative work involved in bringing together the past and the present. […] By bringing a sense of the places of his Belle Époque childhood into contact with the spaces – public and private – of his life as a celebrity in the 1950s, which are constituted by the mobility and transience of the fashion industry, Dior engages in an integration imaginative that refutes and transforms the stasis supposedly represented by the past.

Dior implies that his “divided subjectivity” is responsible for his success, his retreats out of the public eye in Normandy creating the spark of inspiration for his designs.

By showing how the spaces of his childhood influenced the commercial spaces of adulthood, Dior inadvertently demonstrated the impossibility of separating his private and public spheres. When his memoirs were published without much initial fanfare, the lack of distance between the public and the private was further emphasized with the book being seen as “too tied to the demands of the audience, published to talk and capitalize on the love of the market massive for Dior. .”

Dior’s memoir – his intentions for it and its reception – not only demonstrates the tension between the public and the fashion world, which the former accuses of superficiality and falsity. It also turns a spotlight on the “neglected terrain of designer memoirs” as different from the more conventional autobiographies of other business people working in artistic fields.

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