What happens when you research a biography and discover a person who seems much more interesting than the original object of research?

Justine Picardie, former editor-in-chief of British fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar, tells in her book how she wanted to write about the French designer Christian Dior, but then stumbled across the story of his younger sister Catherine.

She was so fascinated by her that in the end she wrote a book about the life of this woman: from growing up sheltered in the villa by the sea, through youth in Paris, to the fight against the fascists in the Résistance and her stay in the concentration camp.

Maria Wiesner

Editor in the “Society & Style” department.

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Unlike her brother's life, Catherine has few reliable sources.

So the search for the practically unknown begins with what the siblings have in common: both loved flowers and dedicated themselves to growing roses.

He had his first perfume composed around this blossom and dedicated it to his sister under the name "Miss Dior".

The roses become a leitmotif in Picardie's research, which begins in the very garden that still bears the siblings' signature: "The scent of roses seemed to whisper to me the question: Was it possible that so much beauty had grown from the ashes of the Second World War? ?

This question will accompany Picardie, for example in view of a dress in the Dior archive that established the designer's fame with the so-called "New Look" at the end of the 1940s.

In a city with food rationing, the strongly waisted hourglass silhouette of the Dior dresses with wide swinging skirts and reinforced corset tops heralded the luxury of days gone by and catapulted Paris back onto the stage of the international fashion world after the war.

Haute Couture and the Horrors of War

Picardy contrasts the look of haute couture with the horrors of war.

She writes about the torture that fascists inflicted on prisoners of the Resistance in Paris and quotes from survivors' accounts of everyday life in the concentration camps, only to switch to post-war Paris in the next chapter, where the first fashion shows take place.

Thus Picardy implicitly asks how the one and the other could coexist and whether beauty and culture can be an antidote to destruction and hatred.

Since working on a biography is often a confrontation with one's own, the journey to Ravensbrück also takes the author into her family's past.

The camp was ever-present during her childhood: "For my father, born into a Jewish family in 1936, often mentioned it in his angry, oppressive monologues about the Holocaust and the continuing threat of anti-Semitism." As in many Jewish families who fought the war survived, the parents passed the trauma on to the children.

Picardie tells of nightmares and the broken relationship with the father.

And she tells of her love for her sister, who died too young.

The spirits of her family accompany her as she traces the spirit of Catherine in the concentration camps that have been turned into memorials.

She will use the ghost metaphor again and again.

What sounds esoteric can also be seen as a stylistic device, because Catherine really remains a kind of ghost for long stretches.

Your personality is often made up of fragments from other referenced biographies.

This creates an overall picture that is less the description of an individual fate than a collage of memories of several women of the same generation.

Justine Picardie: Miss Dior.

A story of courage and couture.

Translated from English by Helmut Ettinger.

Aufbau Verlag, Berlin 2022. 400 p., ill., hardcover, €26.