The situation changed slightly, as the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were both captivated by the New Look even though, of course, they were forbidden to flout the regulations. But that autumn, when Dior was in London, the Queen Mother asked for a private show. From then on, British designers found ways of adapting old coats or inserting black velvet bands to give the illusion of extra fabric. The novelist Nancy Mitford, now living on the Left Bank in Paris, wrote to her sister Diana Mosley after seeing the collection, saying that with ‘one stroke’ Dior’s New Look made ‘all one’s clothes unwearable’. But as Mitford, who had moved to Paris in 1946 in order to be close to her faithless lover, Gaston Palewski, was to discover, wearing such expensive extravagant outfits came with risks, even in Paris. ‘People shout ordures at you from vans,’ she wrote to Eddy Sackville West, ‘because for some reason it creates class feeling in a way no sables could.’ And when, one month later, Maison Dior decided to hold a photoshoot in the streets of Montmartre, the models found themselves attacked by a group of angry women stallholders who tried to beat one model, pull her hair and tear her clothes off, shouting insults all the while at such conspicuous and excessive profligacy which failed to reflect the hardships they had suffered in recent years or the ongoing shortages of food.
There was another launch at the Avenue Montaigne that momentous day in February. Many of the audience were aware of an exotic perfume, liberally sprayed throughout the premises, to accompany the show. It was called Miss Dior, named after the designer’s youngest sister, Catherine Dior. Quite possibly, however, no one at the show was aware of who she was nor of the dangerous resistance work she had been engaged in for three years from 1941 until her capture. Her story has only recently become known, making headline news following the arrest in 2011 of Dior’s then creative director, John Galliano, for alleged anti-Semitic remarks recorded in a phone video. At that point the company decided it was time to remind people of ‘the values of the House of Dior’ by talking of Catherine.
Catherine died in 2008, aged ninety-one, having rarely spoken of her wartime activities. She had been an agent in the Massif Central unit of a resistance network whose main aim was gathering information about German troop and rail movements, production and weaponry, vital knowledge for those involved in active sabotage. According to Gitta Sereny, the Austrian-born writer who worked as a nurse in Paris in 1940 and knew members of ‘this elite organisation of more than 2,000 agents – which suffered enormous losses’, the group ‘was later credited as one of the most dynamic intelligence movements in Europe. By the end of 1942 most of its leaders had been killed by the Gestapo.’ Catherine joined the network at the end of 1941, aged twenty-five, persuaded by fellow résistant Hervé Papillaut des Charbonneries, whom she met and fell in love with when she went into a shop to buy a radio. A founding member of the network, Hervé was already married with three young children, so the romance was discreet. Another close friend and fellow resister in the same network was Liliane (Lili) Dietlin, ‘the epitome of the Parisienne, small, slim, finely boned with that very special elegance of speech, behaviour and, of course, dress that none of us adoptive Parisians could ever emulate’. Lili and Catherine worked as couriers, carrying huge amounts of information, sometimes in their heads if they could memorize it, between sections. When she came to Paris, Catherine would stay at 10 Rue Royale, the apartment used by her brother and his friends. However, in July 1944 she was trapped into a meeting with Gestapo officers, arrested, tortured and deported on the final train from Paris on 15 August to Ravensbrück, where she worked in German munitions factories in notoriously atrocious conditions.
Probably Christian knew of his sister’s resistance activities, because immediately after her arrest he used whatever contacts he could to try and get her released. Working at the house of Lelong, he counted among his clients a handful of German officers’ wives and he approached them for help. But he was unsuccessful and she was not released until April 1945. When Catherine returned to Paris a month later she was emaciated and ill after eleven months of starvation rations and harsh treatment. But she was one of the lucky ones who recovered relatively swiftly. From now on she lived and worked with Hervé des Charbonneries, building up a business as a mandataire en fleurs coupées, a dealer in the exotic cut flowers of southern France and the French colonies. She and Hervé, who never divorced his wife, would leave at four in the morning to go to Les Halles to buy supplies of fresh flowers to send all over the world. It was a job and a way of life she loved, but perhaps living with a married man was an additional reason for the reticence about her resistance activities.
Two years after her release, her brother named his first scent after her. Catherine was awarded a rare Croix de guerre (normally this was reserved for those in the regular armed forces); she also received the Croix du combattant volontaire de la Résistance, the Croix du combattant and the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom (the latter, courtesy of Britain), and she was named a Chevalière of the Légion d’honneur. Not many women were so highly decorated so soon after the end of the war.