Christian Dior’s younger sister is a largely ghostly presence in this nonetheless enjoyable book about the courageous Nazi-fighting florist
Postwar Europe is eternally fascinating: the sheer disjunction between past and present. “I will not disguise the fact that the Beistegui ball is a memory that I am proud to possess,” wrote Christian Dior of a more than usually lavish party he attended in Venice in 1951. “Europe was tired of dropping bombs and now only wanted to let off fireworks… It was reassuring to find that the coarse feasts of the black marketeers were being gradually superseded by the more elegant entertainments of smart society.” The designer, however, arrived at this gathering dressed as a phantom in a long white robe and a black mask. If the party was wildly immoderate, he was a vision of daring minimalism.
But perhaps ghosts were on his mind. Until 1949, after all, he’d had been living with a phantom of sorts, in the form of his younger sister, Catherine. A member of the Resistance, Catherine had been arrested in July 1944, brutally tortured, and deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp. When she arrived back in Paris in May 1945, having escaped a death march, she was so emaciated, her brother didn’t recognise her; she was too sick to eat the celebratory dinner he’d prepared for her. She was a spectral presence – and, to a degree, would always be so. So much would remain unsaid. For the rest of her life, Catherine never spoke of what she’d endured: the horrors that “on ne put pas nommer”.