Christian Dior’s debut collection, New Look, catapulted him to fashion stardom in 1947.Although he died only ten years after him, in English Dior by Dior but more clearly in French christian dior et moi [Christian Dior and me]Through the composition ‘Two Christian Dior’, the iconic designer conveyed the tension between ‘public celebrity and intimate persona’. This is a situation perhaps peculiar to an artist’s life in a field that has an interesting relationship with time.
Scholars Ilya Perkins and Lara Haworth have argued that Dior’s urge to express two selves was a response to suspicions about the artistic world in which fashion designers worked and played, “publicly speaking as real artists. Dior wanted to “ensure an appropriate distance between his private self and his public persona.”
His conceptualization of the dual self was built around his profession’s complex relationship with time and place. As a fashion designer who used the past to revitalize the present, Dior, like his couturier peers, “dissolved the boundaries between past and present, between temporary categories that meant remaining separate. was already a “limited figure” in dissolving the boundaries of ”
Born in the middle of the Belle Epoque in 1905, he spent his childhood in Granville, Normandy, returning there in the summer after his family moved to Paris. Paris, he was responsible for the creation of the couturier Christian Dior. The Norman side made him crave privacy. Throughout his memoirs, Dior used the third person to describe his designer, a modern Parisian, and for the first time described a Norman who lived more or less in the past. Dior emerges as a “nostalgic theme”, though with his love of XVI interiors, acquired in Normandy, and the “new his look” that evokes pre-World War II opulence. , is not a reactionary theme. In fact, as he writes, “[w]We live in the times we live in. And nothing is more foolish than turning your back on them. ”
The nostalgia of Dior is ” Imagination It is tied to a sense of place…” Parkes and Howarth,
[The] The notion of the imaginative dimension of nostalgia makes it possible to see the reconstructive and practically creative work involved in connecting the past with the present. […] By bringing his childhood sense of place in the Belle Epoque into contact with the public and private spaces of his life as a 1950s celebrity, Dior is framed by the fluidity and ephemerality of the fashion industry. An imaginary synthesis that disguises and transforms the stagnation ostensibly represented by the past.
Dior has hinted that his “split subjectivity” is responsible for his success, and hiding in Normandy away from the public eye creates sparks of inspiration for his designs.
By showing how the spaces of childhood influenced the commercial spaces of adulthood, Dior inadvertently showed that it is impossible to separate private and public spaces. When his memoir was published without initial fanfare, the lack of distance between the public and private meant that the book was “inextricably linked to the demands of the audience and to the mass-market love of Dior.” It was further emphasized by being seen as “published to speak and make use of it.” ”
Dior’s memoirs, his goals for it and its reception, not only show the tension between the public and the fashion world, but accuse the former of being superficial and false. Spotlights “neglected areas of designer memoirs” that differ from the traditional autobiography of other businessmen at work.
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Author: Ilya Perkins, Lara Haworth
Biography, vol. 35, No. 4 (Autumn 2012), pp. 668–689
University of Hawai’i Press, on behalf of the Center for Biographical Research
