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##### October 24, 1957 OBITUARY ## Dior, 52, Creator Of 'New Look,' Dies ##### By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS MONTECATINI, Italy, Thursday, Oct. 24--Christian Dior, for many years the leader in the world of fashion design, died here early today of a heart attack. His age was 52. M. Dior, who tended to conservative suits and ties for his own attire, died at the Hotel La Place. He had been vacationing in northern Italy for the last week. M. Dior's greatest feat was the "New Look" in 1947, when he seized and held for France the style leadership of the world after it had threatened to pass to the United States in the post-war years. For his achievement the French Government awarded the Legion of Honor to him. Because his business sense matched his creative genius, M. Dior made fashions pay off. In 1953 his business totaled $17,000,000. He always denied any intention of making fashion sensations. "Changes just come about and many things contribute when everybody is ready for them," he once said. In a book, he wrote that styles go in cycles, with a complete revolution about every seven years. The post-war year 1947, he said, was the psychological time to bring back femininity. One of his precepts was "to make elegant women more beautiful; to make beautiful women more elegant." 'Tyrant of Hemlines' Crowned by tacit consent as monarch of the haute couture (but sometimes also as the "tyrant of the hemlines") M. Dior once credited the fame of his creations to this credo: Please the ladies by enabling them to please their men. "Cri-cri," as he was called by his intimates, was by his scope as well as by his styles Designer Number One in the world of high fashion. He branched out faster and farther than any other couturier ever had. The Dior interests at his death included not only the original Maison Dior on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris--a business structure of mirrored and chandeliered elegance--but also Dior enterprises in twenty-four countries, reporting grossing $15,000,000 a year. His creation of the long hemline and full skirt in 1947 set off an international controversy, but clearly re-established Paris on its fashion throne. But behind the vast Dior enterprises was always the plump, pink-cheeked master, who twice each year went into seclusion to create the newest designs. And much of that time each year he spent in the bathtub, usually his Empire tub of green marble lined with silvery metal and fitted with swan's-head faucets. There he soaked, and pondered a new line, and sketched his ideas on scraps of paper. M. Dior's "New Look" came out about a year after he had established his own salon, but he created almost as much of a sensation three years ago with his "H-line," often called the "flat look." Other Dior innovations included the Zigzag (generous decollete), the Vertical (high value on the bosom, leaving to the legs their length and elegance), the Oval (underlining the roundness of the hips), the Profile ("precision" in molding the contours) and the Tulip (high bosom). 'Luxury Must Be Defended' M. Dior saw more than mere cloth-cutting in his world of fashion. "In a machine age," he once declared, "dressmaking is one of the last refuges of the human, the personal, the inimitable. In an epoch as somber as ours, luxury must be defended inch by inch." He had no intention, as a young man, to become a dressmaker. The son of a wealthy chemical fertilizer manufacturer, young Dior--born at Granville, France, on Jan. 21, 1905--was expected to go into diplomacy. He prepared for college at Janson de Sailly, the fashionable Paris preparatory school, and then was sent to the School of Political Science of the University of Paris. But at the age of 23, influenced by friendships he had formed with a number of artists, he turned his back on diplomacy to become an art dealer. His art gallery was said to have been among the first to exhibit surrealist paintings, displaying pictures by such friends of his as Salvador Dali, Christian Berard and Jean Cocteau. In 1934 Mr. Dior became ill and was forced to give up the little art gallery. He spent a year convalescing, then returned to Paris during the world-wide crisis of the Nineteen Thirties. The Dior family had lost much of their fortune and young Dior had to do something more than sell pictures to exist. The Figaro Illustrated engaged him as an illustrator for a weekly page devoted to haute couture. His designs for hats quickly captured feminine fancies in Paris, and Agnes, the famous Place Vendome milliner, ordered entire collections from him. He went briefly into dress designing for Piguet, but then the war broke out and he was mustered into the French Army as a private first class in the Engineers. In 1941 he became a designer again, this time for Lucien Lelong. In 1946, when the French Ministry of Production lifted cloth rationing, M. Dior, with the backing of Marcel Boussac, French cotton millionaire, set up his own salon. It was almost big business from the start, operated on terms of big business unknown to other firms in the fashion world. The Dior organization includes general statistical surveys, the control of revenue and costs through the use of business machines and a program against copying that permitted the immediate identification of dresses sold in France and overseas. M. Dior, who remained a bachelor, once was described as "diffident, unassuming, balding." He was a hard worker, often insisted that his lunch--usually a salad, boiled ham and fruit--be taken to him in his studio, where the lights often stayed ablaze long into the night. A Dior presentation was one of the high points of the fashion world, but M. Dior once described the opening of his shows this way: "The dressing room is a picture of hell, whereas to the public it has to appear as a bouquet."
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