On the occasion of the new exhibition Dior: Enchanting Gardens, which will open this spring at the Christian Dior Museum in Granville, Normandy, the House presents a book of the same name that celebrates the unconditional passion for nature cultivated by Monsieur Dior and his successors. Tancrède Bonora sheds light on a garden of inspiration.
“The winter collection is developed in the time of lilacs and cherries, the summer collection at the time of falling leaves or the first snowflakes,” Christian Dior noted in his memoirs, offering a declaration of love for flowers and the cycle of the seasons that so inspired him as he conceived his collections.
He had spent his childhood at the villa Les Rhumbs, in Granville, Normandy, amid a luxuriance of irises and roses. A formative place where his gardener’s spirit took root long before he blossomed into the couturier-perfumer who, later, would bring to life the essential Muguet and Tulipe lines. Or the Vilmorin and Andrieux afternoon dresses, allusions to the catalogues published by a famous seed merchant, which he perused as a young man, reciting the name of each floral species, his future muses.
In 1947, for his first show, the iconic New Look, Dior created the Corolle line, whose dresses were cut to suggest the petals of an inverted flower. That poetic thread continued to flourish one creation after the next, giving life to marvellous femmes-fleurs. Embroidered wool violets punctuated the Fleurette summer dress, while the perfume Diorissimo was adorned with a bouquet-shaped stopper in gold leaf, and an afternoon ensemble in chiffon took the evocatively bucolic name of Trèfle à Quatre Feuilles (four-leaf clover). And always, invariably, the lily-of-the-valley – a lucky charm he wore in his boutonnière – appeared in every one of his collections.
Beyond Christian Dior’s taste for botany and landscaping, the book Dior: Enchanting Gardens*– published by Rizzoli – reveals how the House’s various Creative Directors have embraced that essential influence, a touchstone. An invitation to (re)discover Dior silhouettes from 1947 to the present day through countless fascinating anecdotes, enhanced by archival photos, advertising campaigns and precious sketches.
Establishing a dialogue between the past and the present, the Miss Dior silhouette, created by Monsieur Dior for spring-summer 1949, became a rich source of inspiration for his successors. While its name evokes the first fragrance by Parfums Christian Dior, whose scent the founding couturier loved spraying in the salons at 30 Avenue Montaigne, it also echoes several exceptional designs by Maria Grazia Chiuri. An eternal tribute to Christian Dior, for whom couture was like a flowering, a celebration of the prodigious capacity of nature and fashion to regenerate and be perpetually reborn: “It [creating fashion] is comparable to the first raspberry or the first lily-of-the-valley. It is ahead of its time and completely original. And it’s what, tomorrow, through the way it is worn, will make the fashion of Paris, the fashion of the world.” A work published in the heart of spring, in April 2025.
*By Philippe Deliau, Barbara Jeauffroy-Mairet, Amy de la Haye, Vincent Leret, Brigitte Richart and Coline Zellal.
