4 days ago
How Christian Dior's passion for flowers inspired his fashion
A century after the couturier Christian Dior spent his childhood in a house set high on the cliffs overlooking the Normandy seaside resort of Granville, the influence of these formative years remains deeply ingrained in the decorative spirit of the fashion house he founded.
'Thankfully, there are flowers,' Dior once enthused, a sentiment imbued throughout a new exhibition, Dior, Enchanting Gardens (with an accompanying book, published by Rizzoli). The exhibition is on show at the Museé Christian Dior, located on the site of his former seaside home Les Rhumbs (so named for the nautical measurement of lines extending from a compass rose, seen depicted as a mosaic in the villa's hallway).
Dior caused a sensation 1947 with his New Look, a couture collection entitled Corolle (the French for corolla, the ring of petals on a flower) featuring dresses cut to suggest upturned flowers in full bloom, but with lifted busts, softly sloped shoulders and cinched-in waists. The museum's curator Brigitte Richart firmly believes that Dior threaded Granville through every stitch and seam of his designs.
From a duo of 1952 haute couture summer dresses intricately embellished with daisies and buttercups which Dior named 'Vilmorin' and 'Andrieux' — after the French seed catalogues from which he took great delight in the names and descriptions of flowers — to contemporary creations by former Dior creative directors including John Galliano, Marc Bohan and Maria Grazia Chiuri, the exhibition not only explores the brand's associations with flora and foliage, but reveals the impact the Granville house and garden had on Dior and those following after him.
The Dior family moved into Les Rhumbs in 1906, at a time when it sat isolated high on cliffs overlooking the Chausey archipelago, surrounded by very little planting. 'There was almost nothing here — no trees, no flowers,' says Richart. Dior's mother, Madeleine, immediately set out to create 'an oasis of greenery', creating lush areas of lawn lined with flowerbeds, as well as a kitchen garden and a shielding windbreak of cypresses, pines, oaks and hornbeams — by 1921, the pines and conifers had grown to their full majestic height. She also added a winter garden room onto the front to the house, its vast bay window allowing for panoramic views of the garden rather than the nearby sea.
In his twenties, the young Dior designed a 'suite of outdoor rooms' — featuring a terrace, fishpond, pergola and garden furniture — 'inspired by the modernist spirit of the creations he discovered in Paris, in art galleries and at world's fairs', says Richart. It also became home to a vibrant scented rose garden which still exists today, adorned by an ornamental blue-and-white mosaic tiled fountain which the designer found on the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré in Paris in 1946. 'A passion for flowers inherited from my mother meant that I was at my happiest among plants and flowerbeds,' he confided in his memoir.
The exhibition illuminates these links between Dior's garden and his fashion house through pieces old and new, such as a belle époque-inspired choker necklace designed by John Galliano featuring oval frames of pressed flowers; and the gilded bronze lid, handcrafted by Maison Charles as a bouquet of flowers, topping a Baccarat crystal bottle of Diorissimo, first created in 1956. A compass rose motif adorns plates hung on a wall, designed by Cordelia de Castellane, the creative director of Dior Maison since 2017, paying homage to the name of the house; a 1970s Miss Dior jacket embroidered with green clover leaves by Marc Bohan riffs on one of Monsieur Dior's lucky charms. There are Manolo Blahnik mules, elaborately embroidered with flower heads and petals by Maison Lemarié during Galliano's tenure at the house; floral hats and headpieces by the British milliner Stephen Jones (who has worked with the brand since 1996); and swimsuits which Dior designed for Cole of California in 1956. The design of these certainly harks back to the post-First World War days when the young Dior spent summer afternoons with friends such as Serge Heftler-Louiche (who went on to become the first president of Parfums Christian Dior) and Suzanne Luling (who managed his first haute couture salons) at the beach below Les Rhumbs, swimming at high tide.
'Many of Dior's artistic directors have visited the museum since it opened in 1997 because they really want to understand and feel these first sources of inspiration that Monsieur Dior brought to each collection during the ten years he was at the head of the company,' says Richart. As a result, the wrought-iron work framing the conservatory's bay window became a monochromatic print transposed onto jackets and capes for Chiuri's 2023 cruise collection; as a catwalk backdrop for Kim Jones's summer menswear show in 2023; and in the perfume creation director Francis Kurkdjian's reimagining of Gris Dior, a rose-imbued chypre scent, dedicated to Granville's signature shade of gravel grey.
Today, as Richart herself spends time in the house and garden at Granville, she says, 'I can imagine I am seeing and smelling all the same colours and different scents, depending on different moments in the day and in different seasons, as Monsieur Dior. I can imagine how he might have heard the wind blowing in the leaves of the trees, sometimes it blows in off the sea below furiously. I can imagine the colours of the foliage he saw change over the seasons, the flowers and sea air he smelt, and birdsong he heard.'
Richart can even feel how the very physicality of the house inspired the sense of structure in his collections. 'For example, you have this house, this building, it is very robust. The pond he later designed is very simple, very well built. And if you read Monsieur Dior's memoirs, you know he valued feeling protected inside this garden with its high walls of trees. But at the same time, he was drawn to the fragility of flowers,' she explains. 'I think this house, this garden perfectly captures Dior's ethos, with his emphasis on meticulous construction with the sweetness and femininity of flowers.'
Dior, Enchanting Gardens is open until November 5, 2025;
