COUTURE 

DIOR  COUTURE

       Christian Dior was born on January 21, 1905, in Granville, a seaside town in the north of France. He was the  second of five children born to Alexandre Louis Maurice Dior, the owner of a highly successful fertilizer  manufacturer, and his wife, Isabelle. When he was a boy, Dior's family moved to Paris, where he would spend  his youth. Although Dior was passionate about art and expressed an interest in becoming an architect, he  submitted to pressure from his father and, in 1925, enrolled at the École des Sciences Politiques to begin his  studies in political science, with the understanding that he would eventually find work as a diplomat.

       After his graduation in 1928, however, Dior opened a small art gallery with money he received from his  father, who had agreed to lend his son his financial support on the condition that the family name would not  appear above the gallery door. In the few years it was open, Dior's gallery handled the works of such notable  artists as Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Max Jacob. He was forced to close the gallery in  1931, a year that included the deaths of both his older brother and mother and the financial collapse of his  father's business.

       In 1957, several months after appearing on the cover of Time magazine, Christian Dior traveled to Italy to  vacation in the town of Montecatini. While there, on October 23, 1957, he suffered what was his third heart  attack and died, at the age of 52.   continued article on Dior Couture

                                                                                                                                  CHRISTIAN DIOR