Dior

Christian Dior came late to fashion. The son of a Normandy fertiliser manufacturer, he ran an art gallery in Paris in the early 1930s, showing Dalí and Giacometti, until the Depression ruined his family. He sold fashion sketches to survive, then worked as a designer for Robert Piguet and, during the Occupation, for Lucien Lelong. In 1946, backed by the textile magnate Marcel Boussac, he opened his own house in a townhouse at 30 avenue Montaigne.

His first collection, shown on 12 February 1947, was a sensation. Carmel Snow of Harper's Bazaar declared it a "New Look": rounded shoulders, a cinched waist and full skirts using metres of fabric, after years of wartime rationing. The Bar suit, in ivory silk jacket and black pleated skirt, became its emblem. The same year brought the fragrance Miss Dior. Within a decade the house accounted for a large share of French couture exports and had pioneered licensing, putting its name on stockings, ties and accessories around the world.

Dior died suddenly in October 1957, at fifty-two. His 21-year-old assistant Yves Saint Laurent succeeded him and showed the Trapeze line in 1958, before conscription ended his tenure in 1960. Marc Bohan then led the house for almost three decades with a gentler, wearable elegance. In 1984 Bernard Arnault took over the bankrupt Boussac group, Dior's owner, the first step in building LVMH. Gianfranco Ferré succeeded Bohan in 1989.

John Galliano arrived in 1996 and his first couture collection appeared in January 1997, celebrating the house's fiftieth anniversary. For fifteen years he staged theatrical, romantic shows and created the Saddle bag in 1999; the house's quilted Lady Dior bag, introduced in 1995, was named after Diana, Princess of Wales. Galliano was dismissed in March 2011. Raf Simons followed in 2012 with a couture debut of rooms walled with flowers, and left in 2015.

Maria Grazia Chiuri, appointed in 2016, was the first woman to lead Dior's women's collections. Her debut T-shirt reading "We Should All Be Feminists" set the tone for nine years marked by the Book Tote, the revived Saddle and a steady stream of collaborations with women artists. Menswear has its own lineage: Hedi Slimane's skinny Dior Homme from 2000, Kris Van Assche from 2007 and Kim Jones from 2018, whose Dior and Air Jordan sneaker became a collector's piece.

In 2017 LVMH brought Christian Dior Couture fully under its control, and Delphine Arnault has been its chief executive since 2023. In 2025 Jonathan Anderson, formerly of Loewe, became the first designer since Christian Dior himself to oversee women's, men's and couture collections, showing his first menswear in June and his first womenswear that October.