The life of Catherine Dior, resistance fighter who returned from the camps and sister of fashion designer Christian Dior

Stéphane Bern, edited by Alexis Patri 6:00 p.m., October 13, 2021, modified at 6:07 p.m., October 13, 2021

She lived with her brother, a fashion designer, she experienced war and its horrors.

Catherine Dior, is much more than a sister with a famous name.

We are in 1947. At the same time as his first major fashion show, Christian Dior is the first couturier to have the genius idea of ​​launching a perfume at the same time as a collection of clothes.

But what name to give it?

While Dior is racking his brains, Catherine, his little sister, enters the room.

The designer's assistant then launches "Hey, here's Miss Dior!".

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"Miss Dior! Miss Dior! This is my perfume!" Exclaims Christian Dior.

And this is how, unwittingly, the discreet Catherine Dior, sister of the great couturier, has passed into posterity.

Christian was born in 1905. Catherine Dior, she in 1917. The two children grew up in a family of prosperous industrialists, surrounded by servants.

But everything changed at the beginning of the 1930s: Madeleine, their mother, died and Maurice Dior, their father, found himself ruined "in a few days", said Christian Dior, after having launched a real estate company that the American stock market crash, by passing the 'Atlantic comes to a halt.

Engaged in the Cannes Resistance

Catherine is deprived of the education and studies that she should have followed.

Four years later, she was 18 when her older brother offered her to come and live with him in Paris.

Despite being 12 years apart, brother and sister get along wonderfully.

They share the same passion for flowers and gardens, inherited from their mother, but also for music and art.

Catherine is one of the few people to whom Christian Dior dares to confide his homosexuality.

The young woman encourages her brother's talent as a stylist, perhaps even playing the models for her first creations.

In any case, this is what certain photographs suggest.

On one of them, her brown hair pulled up in a bun, she wears a very chic black dress with long sleeves and a fancy necklace.

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When World War II breaks out, brother and sister have to go their separate ways.

Catherine Dior moved into their father's cottage, without comfort or electricity, Les Naÿssès, near Cannes.

She grows vegetables there, the only means of subsistence, and can count on the financial assistance of her brother, and probably of the two eldest siblings during all these years.

In November 1941, while buying a radio set, Catherine fell under the spell of Hervé Papillault from Charbonneries.

Love at first sight is immediate.

The radio salesman becomes a hero of the Resistance a few months later.

Catherine Dior is also committed.

Its task is to collect and transmit information about the movements of German troops and vessels, which requires long journeys by bicycle.

Tortured by the Gestapo and sent to the camps

Catherine does not content herself with delivering the reports: before a Gestapo raid, she conceals the compromising material, then transmits it to another member of the network. Cannes soon becoming too dangerous for the resistant, she fled and joined Paris, to find her brother who was ignorant of his clandestine activities. Unfortunately, on July 6, 1944, at 4.30 p.m., Catherine Dior was arrested at Place du Trocadéro by a group of four armed men. They grabbed her bicycle, her handbag, to take her to the Gestapo offices on rue de la Pompe.

A few months later, she will describe the terrible events in the tribunal charged with an investigation into war crimes, as the British biographer Justine Picardie relates for the first time: "Upon my arrival in the building, I was immediately subjected to an interrogation on my action in the Resistance, and also on the identity of the leaders under whose orders I worked. This interrogation was accompanied by brutalities: punches, kicks, claws, etc. The interrogation did not give I was not satisfied, I was taken to the bathroom. I was undressed, my hands tied, I was immersed in the water where I remained about three quarters of an hour. "

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For several days, Catherine Dior is tortured.

But she does not denounce any of her resistant companions.

On August 15, 1944, she was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, in Germany.

The journey lasts a week.

You have to imagine her, arriving at the camp, exhausted, hungry and terrified.

She is greeted by a pack of dogs with threatening fangs, soldiers in SS uniforms armed with sticks and whips howling insults. 

She spent a few terrible days there before being deported from camp to camp, forced into forced labor, in particular on behalf of the pro-Nazi firm at the time, BMW, which transferred its manufacture of parts for engines to planes in old potash mines, safe from Allied bombing, or forced to transport stones under appalling "working" conditions.

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In France, Christian Dior is consumed by the anguish of not knowing where his little sister is, or if she will return one day.

He exhausted himself, in vain, in finding his trail, but did not give up.

A clairvoyant told him that Catherine was coming back.

Christian Dior wants to believe her.

"My little daddy," he wrote to their father, "We have to be courageous and patient. How long will it take us to see our darling again?"

Finally, Catherine Dior returned to Paris after nine months of deportation.

Christian would have come to wait for her at the station.

The thinness of his sister is such that it takes him a moment to recognize her.

He brings her back to his home on rue Royale, where a lovingly prepared dinner awaits him.

But Catherine is too ill to take advantage of it.

A career in roses and jasmine

In the archives of Maison Dior, one can look with emotion at a photograph of Catherine taken after her return in May 1945. She wears the medals awarded to her in recognition of her courage, but her face is of a indescribable sadness. To the relief of her family, Catherine Dior regains her strength during the summer. In the fall, she is sufficiently recovered to undertake a trip to Paris with Hervé, her lover whom she has found. 

They have to find a job: Catherine obtains the authorization to sell flowers wholesale, and the couple begins to market the fruit of their production which they have planted in the garden of the Naÿssès house.

While her brother is on the way to becoming one of the most prominent Parisian couturiers, Catherine shies the spotlight.

Yet she is the only member of the Dior family present to witness Christian's dazzling success on the day of his first show.

Maurice Dior having died only a few weeks before.

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With each collection, her brother gives her dresses. If her famous Miss Dior perfume is a tribute to her sister, a dress also bears her name. But it is hard to imagine Catherine Dior wearing this haute couture model at the market hall, where she goes at 4 a.m. to sell her flowers, nor in the fields of roses which she takes care of every summer in the house of the Naÿssès, which her father bequeathed to him.

It is in this family home, completely renovated, with gardens filled with roses and other perfumed flowers, that she settles down with her beloved, after the sudden death of Christian Dior. Indeed, on the evening of October 24, 1957, during a trip to Italy, the couturier was found inert in his bathroom. A doctor is brought in, but too late: Christian Dior died of a heart attack. Catherine was immediately called, who arrived in time to see her brother's body lying on a bed, dressed in black, before he was repatriated to Paris by private jet.

Catherine Dior puts her brother's affairs in order before giving up the flower business to devote herself to growing roses and jasmine.

It is said that until the end of her life, in June 2008, she wore Miss Dior perfume.

On her dressing table, there was always a bottle, in the middle of the lipsticks.

Dior lipsticks, of course.