Word: christiane
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Bone Is Unattractive. The relationship between Christian Dior and Seventh Avenue is based on mutual need. Ten years ago last month Dior brought out the New Look and Seventh Avenue joyfully discovered that every dress in every closet in the U.S. had been outmoded at one stroke. Every year since then, Seventh Avenue has looked to Dior to do it again. Dior duly assumed the accents proper to a dictator. "The women who are loudest for short skirts will soon be wearing the longest dresses. I know very well the women." He banished knees: "This part is never...
Dolls for Britain. Christian Dior is a product of three centuries of elegance that run back to the reign of King Louis XIV. To control the restive feudal nobles he subdued, Louis built the huge palace at Versailles, turned it into a vast gilded cage where the aristocracy, cut off from their lands, were reduced to an idle group waiting on the Sun King. In that sumptuous court, elegance became an obsession, and Louis put the obsession to use. He organized Paris' dressmakers and tailors. Two life-sized dolls, dressed in the latest fashions, were shipped monthly across...
...Christian had his palm read by a fortuneteller. She said: "You will find yourself without money, but you will make your living from women, and it is by them that you will succeed." His family laughed, moved to Paris and tried to train him to be a diplomat. Instead, Christian plunged into the arty life of Paris of the '20s. Velvet-collared, bowler-hatted and rich, Christian hobnobbed with advanced musicians like Poulenc and Satie, artists like Jean Cocteau, Christian Berard and Salvador Dali, opened an art gallery with his father's financial backing...
...within a few months his-brother was struck down by an incurable nervous disease, his mother died, his father went bankrupt, and Christian had to go south to recover from a lung ailment...
...returned to Paris in 1935 with no money but with a new interest in embroidery, which he had learned while convalescing in Majorca. A friend taught him to make fashion sketches, and, to Christian's astonishment, succeeded in selling several to a fashion house for 120 francs. "At the age of 30," says Dior, "I was about to begin my real existence." He worked successively for Robert Piguet and Lucien Lelong as a designer, a period interrupted by a year's service in the army in the south of France, where he mostly dug ditches on a railroad...