Voila, Miss Dior!
Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture
Justine Picardie (Faber, £25)
IN 1946, so the story goes, Christian Dior was puzzling over what to name his fashion house’s first perfume: an elegant floral with notes of rose and jasmine. He and his pattern cutter Mitzah Bricard were wrestling with the question when Dior’s sister Catherine walked in. Bricard exclaimed: ‘Voila “Miss Dior”!’ —and the rest is history.
‘For a perfume to “hold”, it must first be held for a long time in the hearts of those who created it,’ Dior once said. He adored Catherine and the two went through hell together, as Justine Picardie shows in this atmospheric and unusual biography. Billed as ‘a story of freedom and fascism, beauty and betrayal’, it takes in Occupied Paris, the French Resistance and the concentration camps, as
