Rumours of LVMH's desire to get rid of John Galliano have been circulating for some time. His nervous breakdown, for that it what amounts to, has provided them with a pretext for doing so. However, it remains to be seen how damaging their indecent haste will prove to be in the context of the Dior brand, especially if John Galliano's lawyers get him off. Toledano's speech was interesting, particularly his reference to Christian Dior's sister.
So now, more than ever, we must publicly re-commit ourselves to the values of the House of Dior.
Christian Dior founded his House in 1947.
His family had been ruined in the Crash of 1929 and his own beloved sister had been deported to Buchenwald. In the aftermath of the dark years of the war, he sought to free women, to give them back their sparkle and joyfulness.
Much as I don't wish to seem as if I am nitpicking, I am going to pick a nit here. In fact, I am going to pick a couple of nits. Maison Dior was actually founded in December 1946. But I'm getting away from the subject here. I just thought that the people raving about protecting Christian Dior's legacy and history might at least get basic facts right.
I did not know Catherine Dior had been in Buchenwald. Neither did she. Black mark #2 for the Dior PR people! The truth is more interesting. Catherine Dior (1917-2008), sister of Christian Dior, whose was cited today by the Maison Dior PR machine as a survivor of Buchenwald, one of the more notorious Nazi concentration camps, was a former inmate of the even harsher women's camp at Ravensbruck. It might seem an unimportant detail but when one is dealing in the facts surrounding a case as serious as that of John Galliano's alleged anti-semitism, facts should be important. There again, when simply lynching someone, facts tend not to matter too much.
Catherine Dior was arrested by the Gestapo in June 1944 for Resistance activities and was deported on one of the last prison trains from Paris on 15.8.1944 with 2,197 other prisoners, of whom 543 were women. Just 838 of the people packed by French police into the cattle wagons making up this train returned from German captivity. The men were processed through Buchenwald, as the BU suffixes on their prison number indicate, and the women through Ravensbruck. Catherine Dior's prison number was 57183RA.
After her arrest, Christian Dior made strenuous efforts to get his little sister released but none of the German officers and French collaborators whose wives he had been dressing seems to have been able to help. A society friend intervened and persuaded the legendary Swedish consul. Raoul Nordling to intercede. Nordling had just concluded a deal with the German High Command in Paris that allowed prisoners and deportees to be placed under Swedish protection.
Catherine Dior was on what some sources refer to as "le denier convoi" or "the last transport", although others left Paris just before the insurrection got under way. Packed with 2,197 men and women delivered to the Gare de Pantin from the Paris prisons of La Santé, Fresnes and le Cherche-Midi by the French police, the train left Paris early on 15.8.1945.
Some idea of how slow progress was is indicated by the fact that the train had only covered some 100 kilometres when the Resistance attempted to halt it at Dormans on 17.8.1944. This was due to low-level strafing and bombing by Allied aircraft as well as delays to allow German resupply trains through to the front. August 1944 was one of the hottest on record and conditions in the cattle wagons were atrocious. A little further on, the French stationmaster at Revigny, supported by the International Red Cross, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the SS officer in charge of the train to stop.
That night, the train rolled into Bar-le-Duc, halfway to the German border from Paris. The IRC only managed to obtain the release of three women and a Roman Catholic priest who was ill. Even pleas from Pierre Laval, head of Pétain's collaborationist government, made no impression upon the train commander and his superiors.
According to the story, Nordling was told by his German contact in Paris, a Major Huhm, that he could have Catherine Dior if the train had not left Bar-le-Duc by 14.45 hrs on 18.8.1944. Unfortunately, it had.
Mlle Dior was subsequently transferred from Ravensbruck to an exclusively female detail producing explosives in the notorious military prison in Torgau. From Torgau, she was posted to the "Anton Kommando", another all-female detail producing explosives in a disused potassium mine in Prussia. The death rate in these kommandos was quite high. Her last recorded "job" was in an aviation factory in the suburbs of Leipzig, captured by the US Army on 19.4.1945. Catherine Dior was liberated near Dresden in April 1945.
The Dior family had had no news of Catherine until Christian Dior got a phone call late in May 1945 telling him that she was on a refugee train arriving the following morning at the Gare de l’Est. After eleven months of starvation rations, Catherine Dior was emaciated and unable to eat solids for months.
Awarded the Croix de Guerre, which was rare for a resistance member as it was usually reserved for regular armed forces, Catherine Dior also received the Valour Cross of the Resistance, the Combattants Cross and The King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom (UK), as well as other medals, and was appointed a chevalière of the Legion of Honour. In other words, a pretty impressive rack of medals, earned the hard way. In 1947, her brother named the perfume Miss Dior in her honour.
Quite what Catherine Dior thought of her niece Françoise Dior -
http://www.ina.fr/video/CAF96034711/colin-jordan-et-francoise-dior-se-marient.fr.html - and her activities, which included arson in synagogues, promoting Hitler and marrying Perfidious Albion’s leading National Socialist, one can only imagine.
As for Christian Dior "dressing the wives of Nazi officers", he may have made a couple of outfits for discerning German officers looking for something nice from Paris for their wives at home, or for their French mistresses. However, again, let's look at the
facts.
Having worked at Piguet in the late 1930s, Christian Dior was called up in 1939 and, fortunately for him, posted to a part of France which was relatively untouched by the fighting in May and June 1940. Demobbed after the armistice, he remained in the south of France until the end of the 1941, when he returned to Paris hoping to work again for his old employer. However, the job had gone so Dior was engaged by Lucien Lelong of Balmain. Lelong was the man who prevented the Germans from, in essence, stealing the entire Paris couture industry, lock, stock and barrel, and moving it to Berlin. The Germans then tried to close it down fourteen times, only to be thwarted by Lelong.
The Vichy administration helped Lelong by putting pressure on their German 'partners' but strict controls were imposed because of wartime shortages. No fashion house was allowed to feature more than seventy-five outfits and each outfit was further controlled in terms of the amount of materials permitted. The Germans actually closed Balenciaga down in 1944 because the house exceeded its quotas. Despite this, couture sales rose by 400% in 1941 and 1942, as Christian Dior was starting his job at Balmain.
So, shock, horror, how many Nazi wives did Christian Dior dress? To get into fashion shows at that time, one needed a special pass, issued by the
Couture Création group. Of 20,000 such passes in 1942, a mere two-hundred were given to the wives of German officers. These women were usually from German high society and had probably spent as much time in France before the war as their native Germany - and Austria. They would have been the sort of women on the invitation lists of the French wife of the German 'ambassador' in Paris, Otto Abetz, a committed francophile who, with other Germans posted there during the Occupation, did his best to lessen the severity of conditions for the French living under the so-called Franco-German 'alliance'. Anyway, Christian Dior is bound to have made some frocks for a few women who were married to German officers stationed in Paris. He probably made a few frocks for wives of prominent French collaborators as well. After all, he was working for Balmain.
Those of you still reading this might understand me when I say that things are never black and white. Christian Dior didn't make a point of dressing Nazis and wasn't a collaborator. But it makes for a more attention-grabbing line or two to say that he did, because some of the German society wives he might have measured up from 1942 to 1944 might have held the same sort of National Socialist views later held by the daughter of his awful, homophobic, fascist brother Raymond Dior. Catherine Dior wasn't in Buchenwald but, hey, how many of the people listening to Sydney Toledano doing the equivalent of shouting "Leper! Leper" whilst the Dior webmaster was erasing John Galliano from the house's cyber-history in best Stalinist fashion would actually know the difference? It's a good soundbyte, and even better if some of the people out there end up believing that Catherine Dior - and, by extension, Christian Dior - was Jewish, because, after all, the Second World War was all about liberating the Jews of Europe from Nazi death camps, wasn't it? At least, that's what Hollywood tries to tell us...
Catherine Dior, after whom Christian Dior named his first perfume "Miss Dior", once said of Galliano that he had destroyed Dior. It was of course more of an aesthetic, subjective judgement than a factual one, given the financial success of the brand during Galliano's time at the helm. It might be truer to observe that Dior destroyed Galliano, isolated from his real friends by a circle of corporate minders, struggling with his demons, grief-stricken by the loss of Stephen Robinson, who worked and drank himself to death trying to keep up with the increasingly penal regime governing Planet Fashion, with no time off to go into rehab even if he wanted or needed to do so. Small wonder that Galliano would 'escape' for a few drinks at night or in the early hours.
Shame that he chose
La Perle to slum it, because it is a truly ghastly place full of wannabes, never-weres and total losers. But it was close to the house and, in any case, when one drinking to ward off the demons, an asocial hellhole like
La Perle isn't such a bad place for a few Mojitos.
As for his comments, well, I've heard much worse than that from some pretty high-profile fashion glitterati and they were perfectly sober. I've known John for almost eighteen years and if he's a Jew-hater, it's news to me. As for the alleged anti-Asian remarks, same applies. As for the commentaries by various leading fashion people, I'd venture to say that Karl Lagerfeld and Patricia Field came close to the crux of the matter. However, time will tell.
PK
It's makes the complexities of this sitch all the more glaring and tangled. If they think it's only Gallino that will take all the lumps here, I believe they're sorely mistaken.
