Christian Dior credits his success to Fortune Tellers and Mystical Learnings
Christian Dior – Fashion success through reinvention
Christian Dior at a feast of St. Catherine, circa 1950.
Those invited to the house of Dior know this history. A century ago, a palm reader told an impressionable young boy in a seaside town in northern France that he would succeed — through women. She saw him penniless one day, and later amassing great profits. That boy was Christian Dior.
The prediction would prove accurate and would fuel the appetite of the boy. An appetite for mystical guidance well into adulthood.
Crossing paths with Dior on the narrow, winding staircase of their clairvoyant’s building was Countess Jacqueline de Ribes and Pierre Cardin. Their fortune-teller came in the form of Madame Delahaye, who resided in the well-to-do 16th arrondissement of Paris.
“Without her, he did nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing,” said Cardin.
Delahaye guided Dior on such key decisions as setting up a couture house under his own name and, according to de Ribes, the clairvoyant had pressed Dior not to travel to Montecatini, Italy. He died on the ill-fated voyage in 1957, at the age of 52.
Dior obsessed about numbers, always having 13 models when he presented his collections, recounted Victoire Doutreleau, one of his favorite mannequins.
He also had a fondness for the number eight, founding his house in the 8th arrondissement of Paris on Oct. 8. One of the lines in his first collection, for spring 1947, bore the name Eight before becoming known as part of the New Look movement.
Mulling over the question of whether to take up an offer by a wealthy textile merchant to head a couture house bearing someone else’s name, Dior’s foot struck a metal star that had fallen on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. That was it. He would answer yes, but under his own name. And keep the star.
The imprint of Dior’s mysticism has left lasting traces at the couture house even recently. Current Dior’s collection is selling a navy blue silk scarf with a celestial map of the stars outlined in gold and a series of candles, each bearing a zodiac sign.
Meanwhile, the symmetry of the brand’s ultra-modern Ginza store in Tokyo is broken by a star that sits on the rooftop, a wink to a crucial moment in the house’s history.
