until Sunday October 31 2021
Christian Dior Museum
Villa les Rhumbs Rue d'Estouteville
Granville
50400 Paris
France
reservation@museechristiandior.fr
musee-dior-granville.com/en/les-expositions/dior-images-de-legende-2/
T : +33 02 33 68 58 30
pauline.robin@museechristiandior.fr
Dedicated to the most glorious of flowers, which was also one of Christian Dior’s favorites, the Dior and Roses exhibition can be seen in his childhood home, the Les Rhumbs villa in Granville. The rose inspired the flower-woman silhouette, initially imagined in the garden in Granville, before it bloomed in 1947 at the Dior fashion house’s first show. Its scent also features in the many perfumes created starting by 1947, including the first fragrance, Miss Dior.
The word “rose” refers not only to a flower but also to a color: pink. It is the color of the family home, with its “pastel pink roughcast walls” (as Dior himself described them). It echoes the delicate shade of the fragrant flowers that he admired in the rose garden added by his mother, Madeleine. It is the color of childhood, that of Les Petites Filles Modèles (“Good Little Girls”), the famous novel by the Countess of Ségur published as part of the Bibliothèque Rose collection. In 1939, this book inspired a dress by Christian Dior, who at the time was a pattern cutter for fashion designer Robert Piguet.
The exhibition offers an original interpretation of Christian Dior’s collections, by exploring the presence, layering, and interactions of an extraordinarily beautiful flower, the rose, and a boundless palette of pinks. Haute Couture designs and accessories, artwork, and decorative items, and objets d’art create an infinite unfurling of roses and pinks. They include exceptional loans from Christian Dior Couture, Parfums Christian Dior and museums in Paris: the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Musée National d’Art Moderne (France’s national museum of modern art in the Pompidou Centre), as well as museums in Normandy: the Musée André Malraux (MUMA) in Le Havre, the Musée d’Avranches, and the Granville museums. There are also loans from individuals.
