Anne Diamond learns the story behind the famous Miss Dior fragrance with author Justine Picardie
hello and welcome to this week’s thursday interview with me ann diamond here on viking tv this week we’re looking at love and of course we all know that love marks and sometimes scars our lives in so many different ways in everything from romantic love through parental love to even the love of one’s country even to die for it my guest today has discovered the most amazing story of love from a source you might not even think as being about love at all yet oh my goodness it certainly is when you hear the story let’s start then in an amazing setting a location in the south of france fantastically famous for its distinction as one of the most romantic places in the world for perfume indeed it is called the world’s perfume capital it is grass in france if you go there of course it’s an exquisite location on the french riviera all sun-drenched mountains and fields of wonderful flowers and you can go visit some of the most iconic names in the world of perfume you’re a fan of chanel number five like marilyn monroe you can go see where some amazing perfume invented it originally created with jasmine i gather grown ingress so it must always be made that way you love coco or dior or just conjure up a name most of those perfumes started with perfumes whose noses were trained there many famous names were born there and edith piaf died there but just outside the town of grass is where christian dior set his home the chateau de la col and it was while my special guest today was researching her book on coco chanel that she came across an amazing story of love fierce patriotism sacrifice and danger and that has resulted in her latest book it’s that one there yes miss dior and it’s the story of christian dior’s sister whose life was most certainly not about luxury and perfumed high life she was christian diehl’s sister catherine and during the war she joined the french resistance and was captured tortured and incarcerated in the hideous concentration camp at ravensbrook my guest today tells her incredible story against a backdrop of the hideousness of world war ii and the beauty of southern france and of course its perfume heritage how amazing but then my guest today is a renowned journalist and editor so let us welcome justine piccadi novelist fashion writer biographer and former editor-in-chief of harper’s bazaar hello and welcome hello anne it’s lovely to be with you today it’s okay i hope i got most of that potted history correct you absolutely did oh good good because the history of fashion is fascinating enough and you certainly know it well from the jobs you’ve held but how did you stumble across this amazing story well i it was actually after my biography of coco chanel came out and i received um an invitation from the house of dior in paris asking me if i would like to look in their archives in the dior archives to see whether i might be interested in following up my chanel biography with a book about christian dior and i looked in the archives in paris i went there often and and it i mean for me looking whether it’s the archives of chanel or dior and the past in other books i love being in archives but there was very little about catherine dior there but it wasn’t until some time later and i was sitting in the garden of la cole noire which was christian dior’s beautiful chateau in provence near grass as you introduced viewers to and i was talking to an archivist there who said catherine dior christian’s younger sister used to grow the roses that were used for misty or the perfume that was named in tribute to her and that alone seemed extraordinary yeah and the story hadn’t been told before and then he mentioned as if in passing that catherine in her early twenties had joined the french resistance during the second world war had been captured and sent to ravensbruck concentration camp and at that moment i became absolutely obsessed with the story and i wanted to tell the story of christian dior the great katurian perfumer which there hadn’t been an english language biography of him before but i felt that i needed to tell katherine’s story in order to explain christiane’s story as well because they were incredibly close to each other they were brother and sister but they were also each other’s best friends and she really was the woman that he loved most in the world and before the war she had been um a model for him when he was training as a young designer and he was just freelancing and catherine had modeled for him so the fact that this you know young woman um who like christian had worked in the fashion industry in paris in the late 1930s should then go on to risk her life for the love of of her country and for the love of freedom um just seemed to me a remarkable unknown story that deserved to be told oh absolutely i mean as a journalist and you’ve been an investigative journalist as well i think for the sunday times weren’t you yeah it’s almost like stumbling across a gold mine what an incredible story to tell yes i felt really um it’s one of the most remarkable stories that i’ve ever you know come across but i also what i found as i researched more and i was literally following in the path of of christian and catherine um from their childhood home in granville on the normandy coast then down to provence where they’d lived together paris where they’d live together and then following catherine on her own terrible journey she was deported on the last train out of paris of deportees before the liberation of paris in august 1944 and i followed that trail to ravensbruck concentration camp in germany and i felt by going to all these places by sort of undertaking my own journeys in search of of this lost woman that i also uncovered other stories of other women whose stories had not been told women who were in the resistance with catherine women who’d been in the concentration camp with catherine and i’ve realized more and more how the stories of women are often forgotten by history history is literally his story her story and her stories are too often forgotten and history is very often the story of you know of men of presidents of generals of of the men that have fought battles of prime ministers and yet women who who have played huge parts in important episodes in history um including the second world war have very often been completely forgotten so as well as restoring catherine to her rightful place and the story of dior i also wanted to restore um her the stories of of her comrades in the resistance and at various concentration camps and and remind people that they had two had played incredibly important parts in history so it became a real passion absolutely i can hear it on your voice now and that’s why it’s such a thick book actually there’s an awful lot of it what were you able to find out about um what she did how she got caught and why she was sent to ravensbrook uh well she’d been working as part of a network um called f2 which were part of the french resistance but they were gathering intelligence on behalf of the allies and transmitting intelligence via radios and secret wireless transmitters to british intelligence in london and she operated all along the south coast of france from you know marseille nice can and then in 14 1944 she went back to paris and was operating in paris and she was actually her network was infiltrated and betrayed by a french collaborator and this is a very dark period of french history and when catherine joined the resistance there were literally no more than about 100 000 active members of the french resistance in a population of 40 million so what she was doing was very very unusual and very very brave and after the infiltration of her network and the betrayal she was captured in paris in july 1944 and tortured by french members of the gestapo i hadn’t realized that there were actually you know french people in the gestapo and then she didn’t give away a single name she gave away no information she remained silent and in doing so she saved the life of her brother who’d been sheltering her and protecting her and other members of the resistance of her lover who was in the the resistance with her of all her comrades in the resistance but because she remained silent because she wouldn’t collaborate she was then first sent to a prison uh in on the outskirts of paris then to a internment camp and then deported to ravensbrook and ravensbrook was hitler’s only concentration camp for women it’s about 80 miles north of berlin and i knew nothing about raven brook until i started researching this book and i went to raven’s book twice and while i was researching the book and unlike um some better known camps um hardly anybody goes there it’s not a sort of site of pilgrimage but much to my astonishment when i went there having been really terrified actually of of going there of going to such a dark place but i knew as a writer i had to go there i discovered to my astonishment that amidst you know the darkness of this terrible place there are there was such uh resilience and resistance and indeed love because for the women to survive this terrible experience it was love that kept them the the ones that survived love was part of the thing that kept them alive so a love for one another the support that they gave to each other that sort of sisterly solidarity and at ravensbruck is one of the most miraculous and remarkable things i’ve ever ever encountered which is there is a rose garden that was planted by some of the survivors on the site of what had been a mass grave next to the crematorium and where a gas chamber had been nearby and after the war some of the survivors returned to plant roses in memory of their loved ones of their sisters their mothers their friends um who had died there and the roses are still there and that rose was bred by a french member of the resistance and the rose is called resurrection and it’s bred to withstand the harshest winter and these winters in ravensbruck are really bitter because it’s so far north but i when i went for the first time which was um in in winter i was there at the end of november but some of the roses were still in bloom and as a symbol of renewal of of lit of literally the miraculous natural resilience i’ve never seen anything more remarkable and catherine having survived this terrible imprisonment first at ravensbrook and then at three slave labor camps um she was part of a system called extermination through labor where people were literally to death that she astonishingly survived and she returned to paris at the end of may 1945 and her brother christian who had no idea whether she was alive or dead but had kept faith you know his love for her was such that you know he’d not given up hope and he’d actually been to see a clairvoyant in paris uh who’d done a tarot card reading for him and had said you know your sister is still alive and she will return so he’d kept the face and finally a message received a message that was after the end of the war after the e-day in um may 1945 and he went to the train station to meet her and such was her emaciation and her head had been you know had been shaved like the other prisoners that he didn’t recognize her but nevertheless you know they their love for one another helped her recover and she then went to the south of france um her lover and the resistance had waited for her they remained together you know until the end of their of their life and she recovered in provence their father had a little farm in the rose growing district near grass where roses and jasmine were grown and there in the sort of sunlight of a provencal summer of 1945 she regained her strength and that she returned to paris that autumn lived with her brother christian again and um started she was awarded a license um in cut flowers so she became a florist every morning at 4am she would go to the flower market in paris and gather cut flowers and she also started growing roses on their father’s farm in prevas and he died in 1946 and he left the farm to her and there she grew roses jasmine um and some irises and when her brother christian whose return to the world of fashion his wholehearted return to couture coincided with his sister’s return to paris and he kind of seemed to discover within himself the bravery and the ambition to set up a couture house of his own having only ever worked for other people so he sets up christian dior in 1946 and then he launches in february 1947 and literally we’re talking um very close to the 75th anniversary of the launch so the couture house launches on the 12th of february 1947 in paris and it launches with what becomes known the new look as the new look collection but in fact it was called lacquer roll and the collection la coral means literally the corolla which is the inner part of the flower surrounded by the of petals and he says it is for a flower woman and everybody assumes that it’s this idealized you know romantic ideal of a woman but there really is a real flower woman in the audience his sister catherine who is growing roses who is gathering roses who has filled the couture house with flowers for her brother’s launch and at the same time as launching this new look collection he also launches miss dior the perfume he has named as a tribute to her she is mamos el dior miss dior and the the scent of miss dior where the the essential ingredient is provencal roses um is fills the couture house 75 years ago and it is a bitterly cold february in paris where they are still suffering christianity or said in his memoir that paris still bears the scars and the wounds of the war um you know there are bullet holes still in paris and yet with the launch of miss dior and the launch of the dior couture collection there is this wonderful belief in beauty and in the magic of beauty and that after the ugliness of war this can still be meaningful he also calls miss dior the scent of love and it truly is it’s a very tender sense it’s not a sort of highly sexualized such sense there’s a real tenderness to it and it is the sense of a brother’s love for his sister but it is also i think a scent that comes to embody what it means to still go on believing in love and in beauty after the trauma and the ugliness of war and we’re talking to each other 75 years after its launch but i think it’s also very meaningful for all of us now because we’re emerging from the trauma of a global pandemic and where you know we’ve many of us have been through very dark times and i think that that by talking to each other about the beauty as you know we began the beauty of the riviera the beauty beauty of those flower fields in provence you know i for one can’t wait to go back there indeed actually when the french edition of my book was published in last october and i returned for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic first to paris and then to la connoir and to those beautiful that beautiful garden where my book the first idea for my book began i looked at those flower fields those gardens again and i just felt so lucky to be there i went back to grass i did a talk at the perfume museum in grass and i think that perhaps none of us will ever take you know beauty that natural the beauty of that natural landscape for granted ever again um i certainly won’t do and it felt like the most astonishing blessing to be there in the south of france again in the sun it’s just an unbelievable story that the roses you said that were planted in reverencebrook and that that she survived and she came back to the south of france and grew roses herself it’s it’s a perfect story arc isn’t it and her perfume of course lives on it really does and she lived until the age of 90 and she carried on growing roses she gave up her her cut flower business in paris in the late 50s and she devoted herself fully to rose growing and jasmine growing and while i was researching the book i actually went to stay in what had been her farm house which is very close to her brother’s house and her rose meadows are still there and they are used for miss dior and every year and i was there in may during the annual harvest of the rose to may the may roses and catherine dior’s roses are still there and are still harvested every year for misty or so that she lives on um and her her roses live on i mean that the natural resilience that she showed is still embodied in that in those rose fields i mean it’s just extraordinary it is it is extraordinary what sort of research was involved you said that christian dior left a memoir and i know you’ve been able to um rummage through the archives and get letters i mean where was where is all this information for you some was in the dior archives others were in the archives in rais in ravensbrook and various other archives in germany which i went to in order that’s picture is me in the dior archives finding and being presented for the first time with catherine dior’s typewriter used this typewriter when she was in the french resistance to type up her intelligence reports secretly which were then you know transmitted to the to the british intelligence authorities and so the free french goal in london and she kept that typewriter until the very end of her life and she always used to type her letters on it when she carried on you know she carried on working until the end of her life as a rose grower she brought her last harvest in in may 2008 before she died at the age of of 90 a peaceful death in june 2008 so also i went to the archives of the french resistance which has scattered throughout france um there are archives in this country in the uk of british intelligence because she was working with them this picture of me um from the uh is for in the dior archives and i’m with there the original misty or dress so everybody knows about the misty or perfume but christian dior also designs a misty or couture dress as a tribute to his sister and it’s embroidered with literally hundreds of beautiful hand-embroidered flowers roses jasmine iris and in every single couture collection he would design something specifically for his sister and i don’t know if you saw the dior exhibition at the vna it was a beautiful exhibition called dior designer of dreams and i think that often we associate christian dior with sort of beautiful ball gowns and princess margaret’s beautiful 21st birthday dress was in the exhibition but um he did also do very beautiful tailoring for women like the bar jacket and taylor jackets and and i think that that represents the kind of dignity that he gave to to women inspired by the dignity of his sister catherine a woman who never lost her her independence i mean she remained with the man she loved herve de charbonnery who she’d been in the resistance with but they never married and she remained katherine dior until the end of her life a very very independent woman but some those beautifully tailored pieces uh that christianity all made that that catherine would have worn as well as the more romantic pieces like the mystery dress that is covered uh covered with flowers and those those pieces are in the couture archives of paris and i spent a lot of time with those pieces and there’s something about sitting with the dress as i did with the misty or dress and there’s something so extraordinary about them because the people that sewed them the women that sewed them the women that that wore them um are gone and yet the dress remains it is this material evidence of the past so there’s this real the kind of veil between the past and the presence becomes translucent in the dior is this one on the yes the picture on the cover of the book is a dior couture dress from the late 1940s and i wanted to use that picture which first appeared in harper’s bazaar where i had been the editor this picture was of taken of a deorcature dress in the 1940s by a female photographer called lillian bassman and i wanted to use as many images in the book including this cover that had been by made by women so lillian bassman was a wonderful female photographer and there’s a phrase in art history which is the female gaze which is very different to the male gaze and the idea is that a woman artist uh will portray women in a less perhaps objectified way in a different way to how a man may do and so i wanted in a subtle way by using as many images of women by women including things that have been created in secret in ravensbrook by the prisoners themselves as an act of resistance so the book also contains pictures from the ravensbrook archives both of drawings made in secret and tiny little embroidered symbols of resistance which very often would be a rose so a rose in ravensbrook became a symbol of resistance so these women that were dehumanized by the nazi regime and turned into literally you know slaves just with a number just like a kind of cog in this horrific slave labor machine showed that they were still women by these tiny little drawings or embroiders of embroidery of roses that they made in secret and so by including those in the book i wanted to include a sort of visual um thread which could lead from the resilience and the resistance represented by the roses of ravensbrook so the beauty of the roses in the ravensbrook rose garden all the way through to catherine dior’s roses and provence and the roses of miss dior and all that stay apart yes beauty and the sheer fact that she did survive and came out and went back into a world of beauty and nature is you know is is it’s the greatest thing she could have done like you say a symbol of resistance she only died in 2008 oh goodness you must have wished you could have met her i know i mean i didn’t start the research my chanel book came out in 2010 and that um my research for dior began in about 2011. so i just i just missed her i missed her but i did get to meet people that had known her well so i was very fortunate in that way um and she was a very private woman but i felt that during the process of research that kind of various doors as if magically opened for me so i felt somehow that her spirit was letting me find things um that otherwise i might not have found um it’s incredible that the story hasn’t been told before but maybe it’s because as you say she was a very private woman and had been through such a lot but it’s a it’s a wonderful story to have finally uncovered because it matters doesn’t it and i think it would perhaps would have been impossible for the story to come out while she was still alive i think that great silence fell um in many parts of europe after the war and i mean i’m half jewish and my father’s parents um who who had lost family in the holocaust and they survived they never ever talked about the events of the second world war and catherine rarely talked about what had happened to her both her torture by the french gestapo and then what happened to her in germany but i think that in france because of its the shame and humiliation of being an occupied country and then you know the extent of collaboration between the vichy regime which was the fascist collaborating regime with the nazis meant that for france to sort of be healed after the war and to be you know reunified there was a silence really about collaboration and what’s interesting that my book has been published in a number of different languages but including french and some of and i’ve been to france to do you know interviews and publicity and a lot of people have said that it’s it’s taken a british writer or i have a french name and i have um you know some french family but that it took a british writer perhaps to be able to tell this story of such a painful part of french history and yet i mean not only is her story incredible but her brother became one of the most famous names in the whole world of history history of fashion exactly exactly i mean there’s um i was reading some of the press clippings and from when for example he went to new york for the first time in 1947 in the autumn of 47 and and then went across american crowds were gathering everywhere you know and the newspaper reports were saying he was drawing bigger crowds in america than winston churchill did he was more famous than charles de gaulle so i think that there was after the the horror of the war i think there was a real hunger amongst people women around the world for beauty which is what christianity or represents both with clothes but also with a beautiful lipstick or a beautiful perfume and okay you might not have been able to afford a couture christianity or couture dress but you could buy a dior lipstick or a pair of dior stockings so he becomes incredibly famous and he restores this idea of french luxury french beauty french prestige which becomes very very important after france’s humiliation of occupation and collaboration but as a consequence katherine’s story is not told and that silence about catherine and women like catherine i think really continued until i came along with you know this sort of mission to an obsession to want to tell their story so i feel like i’ve sort of done my bit and now other women like her their stories are they have rightfully been restored in both the story of christian dior but also the story of post-war fashion and post-war recovery that miracle of recovery that took place after the horror of war and it is a miracle um it is faced with something you know it’s not what we’ve lived through we’re so lucky i mean we’ve lived through so many years of of prosperity of relative prosperity if we live in the west and of peace you know there hasn’t we haven’t lived through a war you know fought on in on in european soils so that pandemic has been our first great challenge that we have faced and now you know our challenge again is you know to discover that resilience within ourselves in the same way that previous generations um who survived had to find ways of of going on and finding meaning and beauty and and after all as you know as our conversation started love you know love is what gives our lives meaning and love and loss are the things that all of us share so it’s so very it’s so very french isn’t it as well that beauty and style and artistry also triumphed exactly exactly very french it’s lovelier they always said didn’t they that our queen um always wanted to wear dior but couldn’t because she always had to wear a british designer but princess margaret did exactly so princess margaret who becomes this symbol um as the young you know princesses do in the immediate aftermath of the war that the princesses are these symbols of hope and youth and beauty and renewal and princess margaret famously wears dior and here she is in this picture wearing her beautiful white dior 21st birthday dress and she’s she she became so symbolic of of that renewal and there she is um with christianity or at a fashion show for the red cross that took place at blenheim palace uh after the war and christianity did a lot of fashion shows in aid of the red cross and obviously the red cross was very close to his heart because of his sister’s experiences so here he is he came to um to england he did a fashion show at the red cross and there’s a little personal link to this picture which is that and when i i first saw this picture and others like it in the dior archives and in the background i spotted somebody that i realized was prob was my mother-in-law who i never met because she died before i met my husband and she turned out to have been she’d been in the red cross um during the second world war as a young woman she was a you know was in london during the blitz she’d been a she’d driven an ambulance bicycled through london being in the red cross supported the red cross and then she became a dior client um at the end of after the end of the war and and so there she was in the background of these pictures sitting behind princess oh my goodness you were definitely meant to write this book yeah like you said catherine was pulling you into her story and and rewarding you with that back to your own job i mean how did you start out and how did you become in the end the editor-in-chief of harper’s bazaar and i think you edited vogue at one point as well didn’t you get into this well i started out um as as a a news journalist actually as a i studied english literature at um you know cambridge and then i um did a journalism course and i was taken on at the sunday times as a where i received my training and and i worked in all parts of the sunday times but but i did news and investigative reporting and some foreign reporting and feature writing and um and and i did you know went to sort of did everything from writing about the new york mafia sir i did the colombian drug pop cartel but then i had um children and i had my first son a baby boy in my uh i was pregnant when i was 27 and i just didn’t want to do those dangerous things anymore and so i moved into feature writing and edited the observer magazine um and i’ve always been interested in fashion though and when i was at university i entered the vogue writing competition and um was offered a job at vogue which i didn’t take at the time i went to work for the sunday times instead but i’ve always been interested in fashion not just the sort of the polished surfaces of fashion what i’m interested in is what clothes tell us about our emotions and i think that what we wear can tell us this is so intimate i mean a perfume can be very intimate so it’s so our skin but you know jewelry can be so intimate so these pearls that i’m wearing and this pearl bracelet that i’m wearing belonged um to my mother-in-law who i never met but my my husband um gave them to me on our on our wedding day and so that sense of of history of continuity and this ring that i’m wearing and i’ll hold it up belonged to my my russian grandmother that a jewish grandmother and it belonged to her mother before her and you know they’d had to flee so often because of prosecution and being jewish and and some of their family ended up in in france and you know that this diamond ring was all that could be put in a pocket when you were fleeing and you know this stripey top that i’m wearing which um i got when i was researching my chanel book and i bought it in a market in one of those wonderful sort of markets in the south of france where you get wonderful sailors tops alongside you know bunches of lavender and coca chanel always used to wear a stripy top and which she had you know started wearing those old sailor breton tops so i you know i love the memories that come with the shop so i think that i’m interested in fashion not in its sort of most oh that is wearing a stripey top exactly there she is in her own garden in the south of france surrounded by lavender and there she is in with her stripey top and she you know she introduced trousers for women um her that’s called lapauser her house it’s in rock broom overlooking cat ma mata and um it’s it’s between monte carlo and and um you know those those wonderful windy roads and she used to sail along um wearing her stripy tops in a yacht that was owned by her then lover the duke of westminster a man with not one but two private yachts myself kind of go to the riviera in the south of france i’m thinking about the history of fashion of chanel of dior and when you know if i when i was editing harper’s bazaar and when i was at vogue i always wanted to place fashion within its context both its emotional context but also its historical and political context too i mean chanel became famous in after the first world war and at a time when black was associated with women wearing mourning because so many people had died during the first world war and she herself had lost people that she loved and the great love of her life who had was a captain english captain who’d survived the first world war but then died in a car crash on the riviera in 1919 and chanel went into deep mourning but then sort of found a way to go on living it’s that resilience again and she invents the little black dress and so the color of death and grief and sorrow and mourning becomes associated with independence and the 1920s and and the jazz age and women living life on their own terms so that’s what interests me that’s you know what always interested me as a as an editor there she is with winston churchill um who beca she became friends with in england in the in the 1920s through her lover the duke of westminster and she got to know when churchill and there they are you know together so again when i wrote my chanel book i wanted people to understand her link uh with history with obviously with winston churchill but also with that idea of how a woman could have independence in her case through setting up her own business but also how a woman might express her independence through wearing trousers through wearing a sniper stripe top that sartorial dignity that had been denied to women when they wore corsets and you know long skirts and sort of couldn’t could barely walk let alone run or ride a horse like chanel did yeah it’s a it was the triumph that’s that’s chic isn’t it i don’t know whether as time sheekness comes into the story but that’s what it is it’s sort of understated but it is saying a lot well the fact you look at what we’re both wearing you know whether it’s a jacket or a stripy top and you know we wouldn’t be wearing those were it not for the fact that chanel introduced um those elements of what had been seen as gentlemen’s men’s tailoring whether it was a jacket or um you know or trousers and then gave women the opportunity to wear those things and you know she literally adapted the wardrobe of whether it was you know the duke of westminster or before that um her partner boy capel who’d played polo and cricket and you know just that sort of sporting uh fabric jersey which had been associated with with men playing polo or flannel which which cricketers had worn and she she gives women that sort of ease with the fluidity of the clothes that they could wear did you do the same sort of forensic research into her um going back to visit places that she’d lived or i know at one point you went to an abbey i think that where she was but at the time of her childhood there yes after her mother died her father had abandoned her and her siblings and she and her two sisters were abandoned in an abbey which was called aubergine where there was an orphanage run by the catholic nuns there and when i went there i mean i was the first writer to have ever gone there and the nuns were an almost silent order so i couldn’t kind of ring them up and say can i come and see you i had to write a letter to them and they agreed that i could go uh and i obviously told them i was writing about chanel but they said i had to sort of live with them and follow their routine so i stayed there and it meant you know getting up at first light and going to their eating with them going to their prayers with them but it gave me such a sense of understanding of what chanel’s childhood had been like and i was given the opportunity uh you know to write at her desk in her apartment in paris and i slept in what had been her bedroom at the the ritz and i went to la houser her home in the south of france so whenever i write i try and go to those places where you feel the spirit of the place um as a writer i need to actually kind of go and and do the research and and often to actually write in the places where the people i’m writing about have once lived and loved and dreamed and worked and that’s what i try and do i mean what an extraordinary adventure these two women that we’ve just talked about have taken you on yes um i’m very grateful to both of them for for those astonishing adventures that i’ve been able to kind of go on my own odyssey odyssey’s in fact i mean back to back to when you were editor of harper’s bazaar what what sort of editor-in-chief were you i mean obviously we’ve all watched um the devil wears prada were you that sort of character no i was the absolute opposite um i i really believe in in sisterliness and i think it’s because of the love that i have always had for my sister ruth who um was two years younger than me and right from the start ruth and i used to sort of play together but we would make little magazines together and little books together so literally my very first um colleague or collaborator from childhood onwards in making a magazine or um or newspaper was my sister and we would be a readership you know of two but do the drawings together and do the writing together and my sister was was my best friend as as well as my sister and she became a journalist she went to cambridge she then became a journalist and tragically she was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 32 and she died nine months after diagnosis and when she died she had her little baby twins were had just turned two when she died and her life and her death have had have shaped me you know love and loss as we were talking about earlier are the things that make us who we are and and my first book was was about my sister and and about her death it’s it’s called if the spirit moves you and i think that that i do literally believe in women being supportive to each other and and you know i’ve got two sons who i adore i have a husband who i adore who’s been incredibly supportive to me i mean he was the one that you know got me to go to ravensbruck i don’t think i could have done that journey without him um so it’s not that you know i don’t understand how important men can be in our lives and as a mother of sons but i very often magazines such as harper’s bazaar are largely female suddenly creatively editorially it’s very often mainly women and you know i want to support other women i want when i was young um there were women that influenced me and then as i myself you know became an editor i wanted to be able to support and encourage um other women and and i’ve remained you know close friends with the women i used to work with at harper’s bazaar and and if any of them you know my former assistants i’ve always kind of wanted to promote and encourage and and be be there for them i think that that that’s what you know women should do generation of us when i joined the sunday times as a young reporter they’re just one other women working as journalists in those days there were very very few women in journalism and slowly that’s changed but you know sexism still and the gender pay gap you know in battles that women still have to fight the gender pay gap still hasn’t closed in this country so you know we still there are still battles for a new generation of women to fight yes and the moral of the story is is that you only get anywhere actually fighting things like that if women stick together yeah um what what what are clothes because the clothes themselves you’ve also written about my mother’s wedding dress for instance uh the afterlife of clothes um it’s a family memoir but but it’s also about the relationship we all have with our clothes um do you have an enormous amount of clothes and what how do you store them what do you do with them well i i do but i’m also quite good at giving letting go of them of giving them away so from you know my time uh vogue and harper’s bazaar where you kind of have a working wardrobe and that’s those clothes i mean some of them i’ve i’ve kept and i i think that one should the clothes that you know you will love forever which for me um would be you know a beautifully cut dior jackets the dior bar jacket maria grazia curie speaking of feminism who’s the first female creative director of of dior and who is a friend of mine you know she has done so much both to to put feminism at the heart of dior again but also the way that she will cut a dior bar jacket is much more kind of gentle to women put it that way and as a woman herself and a woman in her 50s you know she understands how to make a jacket flattering um and but she also has a daughter in her 20s and a mother who’s in her 80s so she’s dressing for you know women of all she’s women of different generations so i would never get rid of one of those dior jackets that maria grazia curie has designed and i hope that i will wear them for the rest of my life but then some things i’ve given um to my daughter-in-law um and to my younger son’s partner um to you know clothes that i gave to women younger women i worked with at harper’s bazaar or you know not necessarily always younger women um but yeah i try and give things away and share you know spread the love yes and i’ve also so you know given things to charity that can be you know can raise money for a good cause as well and when you think of it there are some incredibly iconic um clothes of the way that women have worn them in history and you think of jackie kennedy in a chanel suit wasn’t she that she was wearing when um jfk was was assassinated um yeah i mean that history can be contained literally within the threads of clothing and of course and something some very important clothes like that like um that just the pink suit that jackie kennedy was wearing i mean it contains the blood of her husband and those things need to be preserved in you know in museums and and archives i also believe very strongly um that you know you should just buy what you love and wear what you love don’t ever get anything that makes you feel bad about yourself you know as we get older our shape changes i mean i i now turn 60 and i’m not the same shape that i was i know tell me about it i know but you know but rather than kind of denying myself um the joys of life um whether that’s a delicious slice of cake that i’ve just made or you know a glass of wine or um i’m not going to beat myself up about it i’m not going to starve myself to try and make myself fit into the clothes that i would have been able to fit into at 30 but um and so you know those kind of things i will always pass on and yeah never buy anything that is a size too small never fall into that trap of thinking oh you know if i just lose that half a stone everything in my life’s gonna be better believe me it’s not the times in my life where i have lost that half a stone have been the most unhappy times of my life and it’s been pure misery that has you know has made me feel that way and and far better you know to embrace happiness or contentment or when none of us can be happy all the time but to enjoy those those you know those moments of joy every day don’t you think it’s true though that some designers only design for skinny women yes i do and is isn’t that a shame it is it’s a terrible shame and just you know my advice is just don’t don’t go there you know go to the places where there are and very often it’s female designers that will be celebrating other the way other women look i also you know i think it’s so important in terms of environmental sustainability don’t buy fast fashion don’t there is always a cost to cheap very cheap clothing somebody has suffered for that you know whether it’s it’s you know terrible kind of slave labor and factories on the other side of the world and i i wish that i could so my mother was wonderful at making clothes when my sister and i were children and which i write about my mother’s wedding dress and she got married in a little black dress that was sewn from a chanel pattern um so i you know make i think i’m filled with all for anybody that can make their own clothes but also you know people that i mean are trying to buy vintage sometimes is a good idea but yeah just have a handful of things that you really love when i was researching the chanel book um i was shown chanel’s own clothes by her surviving great niece who she she had also been chanel’s goddaughter and she was called gabrielle herself and she sadly is now dead but i got to know her well when i was researching the book and i went to see her in her home in france and i stayed the night she very kindly invited me to stay and she said to me i want to show you something and we walked down this long corridor into a little bedroom and there was a picture of chanel on the wall as a young woman and then there was just a ordinary wooden wardrobe not a big wardrobe and she said open it open the doors and i opened the doors to the wardrobe and in it were just a few no more than 10 pieces but exquisite chanel couture and she said she used to call her auntie coco she said these were auntie coco’s own clothes and she said you know try them on you can’t write your book without trying it on so i put on first of all this exquisite tweed coat chanel used a lot of as chanel still does today but sort of scottish fabrics and cumbrian tweed and so you know british textiles so this exquisite tweed coat and then this absolutely exquisite white cream tweed jacket trimmed with black grosgrain but there were very very few pieces and i said did she have a lot more and um gabrielle the younger because of course coco chanel was gabrielle chanel said no she just said it was much better to have a wardrobe of things you truly loved um and that you could put on and you would always feel good in them than a wardrobe filled with things that you didn’t quite trust exactly or or didn’t quite you know made you feel that you didn’t fit them it’s another bit of love isn’t it you you learn you can learn to love certain clothes and like i said trust them yes and boats love you yeah you know being in a kind of constant state of of battle um and and feeling not good enough because the waistband’s tight or you think look at your something as we all do oh my god you know have you ever been on a cruise no i would love to oh gosh well i’m sure you might one day but it’s funny because my mother used to love going on cruises and now i do um and when my mother died we went through her wardrobe and again her her collection of clothes i mean me and my sisters got very upset because it was just like seeing her again it said so much about her but she had a whole cruise wardrobe yes fabulous yeah and i i’m doing the same now i can’t believe it but it is wonderful i mean i have a harper’s bizarre wardrobe oh and there it’s no point me keeping all of it and i have gone you know i’m not going to i was there for eight years you know going to sort of you know london milan new york paris fashion week um ready to wear couture i’m not gonna go through that thing of sitting in the front row again so i am slowly sorting it out but i do think i went to a wonderful burns night um in london because my husband’s um has scottish family and he’s been playing the bagpipes since he since he was 10 and he was asked to go and play the bagpipes you know for burns night and he looks great in a kilt he was wearing the same kilt he we got married in scotland and he was wearing the kilts he wore when he got married and um which had been his father’s kilt and a and a wonderful yellow silk waistcoat that had been his father’s um and i wore this so really beautiful long dress i wish i could show you a picture of it um but i’d worn it for when my son and daughter-in-law uh got married and i put this dress on because the print i thought it would go well with his kilt which was sort of in greens and blues and yellows it’s by a designer called erdem and it’s a beautiful floral prince and i thought yes i i’m not you know i can get dressed up and i can wear a wonderful dress and it was so amazing to wear a wonderful it was a long dress again after you know practically not going out for yeah for two years because of covid and in the pictures that you saw of me earlier in the dior archives you know in one of them i’m wearing an embroidered dior jacket that is covered in embroidered flowers and was designed by my friend maria grazia and i will always keep that jacket and i want to wear it as often as possible it means it means something extra was always actually i i must say uh just hearing you tell the stories you’ve humanized those those very iconic names that we all know about um but how much do we ever know i mean the idea that there was this amazing human story behind chanel behind um christian dior and his beautiful sister i i mean that’s just amazing makes you want to makes you want to wear something of theirs or or go out and buy a bottle of misty or because now it means something that little bit extra so you and i will be on a cruise one day um toasting yes yes your and each other and both wearing clothes you’re fabulous oh wouldn’t that be nice so given that the adventure that that these um biographies have taken you on are you planning another who is off well um my next book i’m at the beginnings of and um it’s there’s probably me more of me in it than um in previous books but it there will also be other people in it and it’s about um a series of gardens that have been very meaningful in my from childhood onwards and i think and it will include you know chanel’s garden but i think that there was something so powerful about being in the rose garden at ravensbrook then in katherine’s own garden in the south of france that i and i’ve spent a lot of time i love gardening and i’ve spent a lot of time gardening in our garden in norfolk where i’m talking to you today and we live in a old rectory um in norfolk and if anybody follows me on instagram they’ll know that every day i do a sort of greetings from the old directory and often i’ll talk about the garden and um and so i want to in the same way that i suppose i’ve explored fashion um and emotion and love and loss i want to do that through garden but i also want to write about some secret gardens too um there’s those amazing secret gardens um of italy and and france you know the first person i followed this properly so you’re the first person i properly talked to about the book apart from my husband’s an agent you’re very good at at some drop out well but i just find it so fascinating i mean your love your love of gardens it’s the same thing and it’s an appreciation of beauty and nature which has which has been a string through right through this conversation but given that we’ve all been through this awful pandemic still going through it to a certain extent the love of the outdoor space and the ability to go out into the garden has been i don’t know what i would have done without my garden well it’s sort of literally been life-saving and i think that the i’ve every single day you know i’ve gone out and i’ve looked at the sky and even on a gray day or a rainy day you know i’ve gone out there and there’s been days even just in the rain where there is beauty and i’ve learned to find that solace and i know it might sound you know a bit silly but you know the solace in mother nature that that that at a time when it’s it’s you know i mean it was terrifying the beginning of the pandemic and and so many people were losing people that they loved and and now you know what we’re going through now you know just the idea that when people say well when’s it gonna be back to normal well it’s never gonna be the same as it was just as when people have lived through a war or or a personal bereavement you know through grief we are changed by our experiences that’s who we are so by going through all of them um we have changed and and what are we going to do with our changed selves be stronger i hope but also embrace what it is that we know we love the people we love the places we love the pleasures we love it’s interesting you talk about the love of nature and the the respect for mother nature it certainly pulled catherine through didn’t it it did and i in my own life i have felt that so powerfully both through the experience of catherine actually which that changed me profoundly a garden in her rose garden surrounded by her rose meadows being in the rose garden at ravensbruck but and again earlier in my own life after after facing the challenges of my sister’s illness and my sister’s death that i realized that just by getting outside you know going for a walk being in the garden my sister and i shared a love of gardening and and just being there with your hands you know on the ground in the ground your feet planted on the ground being grounded can be a source of great solace and strength yes i certainly found after a tragedy in my life that going out into the garden and planting a flower watering it because that’s all you have to do and it grows and you suddenly find yourself nurturing something um and that’s good for the soul it’s been such fun talking to you i can’t tell you how much i’m looking forward to your next book actually it sounds like it would be a real tribute to your sister too which is a celebration of love which is what we’ve been talking about yeah honestly it’s been brilliant talking to you justin you’d you tell a story so well you really do it’s been engaging listening to you thank you so much for joining us thank you anne it’s been absolutely brilliant and next week here on viking tv uh we’ll be sailing down the danube and i’m going to be speaking to a man who knows that area of the world so very well he’s father pius that’s next week there he is until you can join me again next week then do stay safe and i look forward to seeing you then bye
Gain insights into the world of French fashion and fragrance as British journalist Anne Diamond interviews author Justine Picardie, who recently released her latest book Miss Dior A Story of Courage and Couture. Revealing the story behind French designer Christian Dior’s famous Miss Dior fragrance, the book explores the relationship that Christian had with his sister Catherine, who was the inspiration for his iconic perfume. In her conversation with Anne, Justine shares her research into the fascinating life of Catherine, who as a member of the French Resistance during WWII was incarcerated in a German concentration camp and, in her post-war life, was dedicated to growing flowers in the South of France.
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