Dior Fashion Quotes

A woman's perfume tells more about her than her handwriting.

Don't buy much but make sure that what you buy is good.

High heels? Painful pleasure.

One day we are looking at the Magnum photograph of Sophia Loren at the Christian Dior show in Paris in 1968 and thinking yes, it could be me, I could wear that dress, I was in Paris that year; a blink of the eye later we are in one or another doctor's office being told what has already gone wrong, why we will never again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels, never again wear the gold hoop earrings, the enameled beads, never now wear the dress Sophia Loren is wearing.

My aunts were elegant American women, dressed in silk and fur, with diamond rings and charm bracelets and other bracelets as heavy as chains. Their moving hands were jangling, they were playing a symphony in gold. The style of these people was so different from mine. They were as strange to me as I must have looked to them. That fall of 1947, women's fashions had changed entirely. While I left Bucharest, went through Europe for a month, a new `look' was launched in Paris by Christian Dior. Skirts were long, coats big and long, a sloppy style, a `new look', the Dior style.

Come now, Tichy. For half a century civilization hasn't been left to its own devices. A hundred years ago a certain Dior was dictating fashions in clothing. Today this sort of regulating has embraced all walks of life. If prostheticism is voted in, I assure you, in a couple of years everyone will consider the possession of a soft, hairy, sweating body to be shameful and indecent. A body needs washing, deodorizing, caring for, and even then it breaks down, while in a prostheticized society you can snap on the loveliest creations of modern engineering. What woman doesn't want to have silver iodide instead of eyes, telescoping breasts, angel's wings, iridescent legs, and feet that sing with every step?

Asia so degraded, so corrupted by the colonial era and by its own crowdedness that it can only choose between depravity and the puritan orgy of communIsm. The women of Thailand are so beautiful that they have become the hostesses of the Western world, sought after and desired everywhere for their grace, which is that of a submissive and affectionate femininity of nubile slaves - now dressed by Dior - an astounding sexual come-on in a gaze which looks you straight in the eye and a potential acquiescence to your every whim. In short, the fulfilment of Western man's dreams. Thai women seem spontaneously to embody the sexuality of the Arabian Nights, like the Nubian slaves in ancient Rome. Thai men, on the other hand, seem sad and forlorn; their physiques are not in tune with world chic, while their women's are privileged to be the currently fashionable form of ethnic beauty. What is left for these men but to assist in the universal promotion of their women for high-class prostitution?

So now I was a beauty editor. In some ways, I looked the part of Condé Nast hotshot—or at least I tried to. I wore fab Dior slap bracelets and yellow plastic Marni dresses, and I carried a three-thousand-dollar black patent leather Lanvin tote that Jean had plunked down on my desk one afternoon. (“This is . . . too shiny for me,” she’d explained.) My highlights were by Marie Robinson at Sally Hershberger Salon in the Meatpacking District; I had a chic lavender pedicure—Versace Heat Nail Lacquer V2008—and I smelled obscure and expensive, like Susanne Lang Midnight Orchid and Colette Black Musk Oil. But look closer. I was five-four and ninety-seven pounds. The aforementioned Lanvin tote was full of orange plastic bottles from Rite Aid; if you looked at my hands digging for them, you’d see that my fingernails were dirty, and that the knuckle on my right hand was split from scraping against my front teeth. My chin was broken out from the vomiting. My self-tanner was uneven because I always applied it when I was strung out and exhausted—to conceal the exhaustion, you see—and my skin underneath the faux-glow was full-on Corpse Bride. A stylist had snipped out golf-ball-size knots that had formed at the back of my neck when I was blotto on tranquilizers for months and stopped combing my hair. My under-eye bags were big enough to send down the runway at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week: I hadn’t slept in days. I hadn’t slept for more than a few hours at a time in months. And I hadn’t slept without pills in years. So even though I wrote articles about how to take care of yourself—your hair, your skin, your nails—I was falling apart.

Gossip, even malicious rumors, are worth more than the most expensive publicity campaign in the world. What alarmed me most in the course of my stay in the United States was the habit of spending enormous sums of money in order to achieve so little real luxury. America represents the triumph of quantity over quality. Mass production triumphs; men and women both prefer to buy a multitude of mediocre things rather than a smaller number, carefully chosen. The American woman, faithful to the ideal of optimism with the United States seems to have made its rule of life, spends money entirely in order to gratify the collective need to buy. She prefers three new dresses to one beautiful one and does not linger over a choice, knowing perfectly well that her fancy will be of short duration and the dress which she is in the process of buying will be discarded very soon. The prime need of fashion is to please and attract. Consequently this attraction cannot be born of uniformity, the mother of boredom. Contemporary elegance is at once simple and natural. Since there is no patience where vanity is concerned, any client who is kept waiting considers it a personal insult. The best bargain in the world is a successful dress. It brings happiness to the woman who wears it and it is never too dear for the man who pays for it. The most expensive dress in the world is a dress which is a failure. It infuriates the woman who wears it and it is a burden to the man who pays for it. In addition, it practically always involves him in the purchase of a second dress much more expensive - the only thing that can blot out the memory of the first failure. Living in a house which does not suit you is like wearing someone else's clothes. There will always be women who cling to a particular style of dress because they wore it during the time of their greatest happiness, but white hair is the only excuse for this type of eccentricity. The need for display, which is dormant in all of us, can express itself nowadays in fashion and nowhere else. The dresses of this collection may be worn by only a few of the thousands of women who read and dream about them, but high fashion need not be directly accessible to everyone: it need only exist in the world for its influence to be felt.

She was not a ‘femme de fashion’, but she was always elegant, said Laurent; always poised and well dressed.

Paris was already renowned for its gay and lesbian subcultures – homosexuality had been decriminalised in 1791 at the time of the French Revolution – and Catherine and Christian were both working in the fashion business, a milieu that celebrated talented gay men. Many were well known to Christian: Edward Molyneux, for example, and Georges Geffroy, who began his career at the couture maison of Jean Patou before turning to interior design. Unlike his openly gay friends Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard, Dior tended to be discreet about his private life – a consequence, perhaps, of his Catholic upbringing – but his sister was an integral part of it. When in 1938 he fell in love with an urbane young man named Jacques Homberg, he did not keep the relationship secret from Catherine.

But I have come to believe that Catherine was possessed of a rare grace and inner strength that would have protected her from the jostling fashion crowd, with their sharp

La Colle Noire took some time to sell, and passed through several hands before it was bought in 2013 by Christian Dior Parfums (now part of the mighty LVMH group, as is the Dior fashion business).

Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest. —CHRISTIAN DIOR, French fashion designer

Within the tiny changing space (four poles draped with fancy velvet) hung a dozen fabulous couture gowns from internationally well-known designers such as Christian Dior, Givenchy, Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino and Emanuel Ungaro. I was in seventh heaven having this rare and unexpected opportunity to study and scrutinize these exquisite designer dresses. I turned every garment inside out to see how they were sewn, beaded and constructed. That day, floating in a parade boat along other vessels in the middle of the Grand Canal in historic Venezia, my fashion schooling had begun. It was the first day of my professional fashion education.

I am especially concerned that American fashion not be forgotten. Once, I met the head of a hot design school in the Netherlands, and she expressed nothing but contempt for American design – an attitude I find very offensive when espoused by Europeans and downright tragic when held by Americans. When I look through ‘Project Runway’ applications, I am always struck by how few American designers are cited in their influences section. Invariably, the only designers they name are Alexander McQueen, Christian Dior, and Coco Chanel – often misspelled ‘Channel.’ You only rarely see American designers listed. If you do, it’s usually Donna Karan. (I don’t understand why people don’t write Michael Kors – even just in their own political self-interest.

Dior alone accounted for three-quarters of all fashion exports in 1947. He was a phenomenon. He might not have won the Croix de guerre or the Légion d’honneur, but he was a saviour of France nonetheless. More – he was a saviour of fashion itself, because he had single-handedly made being fashionable fashionable again.