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Christian Dior shaped modern fashion through his structured silhouettes and precise tailoring.
Born in 1905 in the coastal town of Granville, France, he built a fashion empire that merged technical skill with bold design choices.
In 1925, Christian Dior sketched women's dresses on sheets of thin paper, selling each drawing for two francs.
The sketches showed simple day dresses with clean lines and fitted waists, a stark contrast to the intricate ball gowns he would design two decades later when leading his own fashion house.
Each morning, he positioned himself near the building's entrance, displaying his work on a small folding table as fashionable Parisians walked past.
This street-corner enterprise was the beginning of Dior's fashion career.
Christian Dior consulted his astrologer, Madame Delahaye, before launching new clothing collections or opening boutiques.
In his right jacket pocket, he carried three metal crosses and a piece of wood from his childhood home in Granville.
He touched these objects before each fashion show, convinced they would protect his work.
Before making business decisions, he scheduled meetings only on auspicious dates determined by star charts.
When his astrologer warned against specific days, Dior would postpone major events, including delaying his first New York show by two weeks based on her advice.
This reliance on specific rituals and objects shaped his daily routine.
From 1940 to 1944, Christian Dior designed dresses at the Lucien Lelong fashion house in Nazi-occupied Paris.
Each day, he cut and draped fabric for clients that included Nazi officers' wives and French citizens who aided the German regime.
He worked at his design table on rue Matignon while German soldiers patrolled the streets outside.
Dior wasn't alone in this choice.
The wooden mannequins in the workrooms of Jean Patou, Jeanne Lanvin, and Nina Ricci also displayed gowns made for Nazi customers.
These fashion houses by serving the occupying forces.
During World War II, Christian Dior’s sister Catherine carried messages for the French Resistance.
She cycled through checkpoints with documents hidden in her bicycle basket, passing intelligence to Allied forces.
The Gestapo arrested Catherine in July 1944.
They found Resistance papers in her apartment and interrogated her at 84 Avenue Foch, the Paris headquarters where they tortured suspected agents.
She revealed nothing.
The Nazis loaded her into a cattle car bound for Ravensbrück concentration camp.
At Ravensbrück, Catherine slept on wooden planks and subsisted on turnip soup.
She hauled rocks in freezing rain.
Her body shrank to skeletal thinness, but she survived until Soviet troops reached the camp in April 1945.
Christian Dior died at age 52 while vacationing in Montecatini Terme, Italy in 1957.
Official records list a heart attack as the cause, but later accounts suggested he choked on a fishbone during a card game with friends.
In 1957, Jacques Benita, a 24-year-old singer from Algeria, shared Dior's Paris apartment during the final months of the designer's life.
Like his previous relationships with men, Dior kept this companionship away from the press and public eye—they never appeared together at social events or fashion shows.
When Dior died that October, Benita stood quietly at the back of the funeral service at the Church of Saint-Honoré d'Eylau, joining the hundreds of mourners who had come to bid farewell.
In 1955, Yves Saint Laurent walked into the House of Dior's atelier at 30 Avenue Montaigne, Paris.
At 19, he carried a portfolio of sketches that would earn him a position as Christian Dior's design assistant.
In 1957, during a private dinner at the Saint Laurent family home, Dior leaned across the table and told Saint Laurent's mother: "I have chosen your son as my successor."
The statement startled her—Dior stood at the peak of his career at 52, his fashion house generating annual sales of $20 million.
Ten weeks later, on October 24, 1957, Dior collapsed on the marble floor of a hotel in Italy.
Within hours of his death, the House of Dior's board of directors appointed Saint Laurent as head designer.
At 21, he moved into Dior's former office, now tasked with creating the next collection for the world's most prestigious fashion house.
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