Story by Kim Parker
From its thorny stems to its silken blooms, the romantic rose was one of Christian Dior’s favourite flowers and grew to become an emblematic house motif for the couturier. We explore the story behind Christian Dior’s passion for the flower, and why it’s perfect to cherish the one you love.
Christian Dior was passionate about flowers. “After women, flowers are the most lovely thing God has given to the world,” he claimed in The Little Dictionary of Fashion in 1954. Indeed, the seeds of the great couturier’s life-long fascination with blooms, and with roses in particular, were sown very early on.
Dior spent his childhood by the sea at Villa Les Rhumbs in Normandy, and as the son of a successful importer of fertiliser, horticulture played a huge part in his formative years. The Dior family attended the flower festival in Granville together and the young Christian was a keen collector of lushly illustrated Vilmorin-Andreieux seed catalogues, which helped to hone his eye for colour. Dior’s mother, Madeleine, was an avid gardener (a passion she shared with, and later passed on to, her children) and nurtured over 20 different species of roses at Les Rhumbs, protected from the blustery coastal winds by a walled path and a white wooden pergola.
The house itself was built by a shipowner in the late 19th century and named for the old nautical term for the ‘wind rose’ that helped sailors to calculate wind speed. “My life and style owed almost everything to Les Rhumbs,” the designer later said. True to his word, both the wind rose and the real rose have become emblematics motifs at his eponymous fashion house.
Dior’s passion for the ‘femme-fleur’ came into bloom with his ground-breaking 1947 couture debut. His revolutionary ‘New Look’ focused on “women-flowers’, soft shoulders, fine waists like liana and wide skirts like corolla,” as Dior himself described. Believing that a touch of perfume was the final step in a woman’s dressing routine, the designer simultaneously launched his first fragrance, Miss Dior, which was spritzed around the salon so that the gathered press and clientele left with traces of it on their skin. The scent, a green chypre with notes of rose, jasmine, iris and neroli, was dedicated to Dior’s beloved sister, Catherine, who, after the war, became a flower trader and then a producer in Provence, growing blossoms for the perfume industry.
A few years later, having moved to his dream home at the Château de la Colle Noire just outside Cannes, Dior transformed the grounds into a tranquil retreat, planting fragrant May roses, lavender, and Grasse jasmine, and creating an ornamental pool that recalled his mother’s garden at Les Rhumbs. In 2013, the brand bought back the Château and lovingly restored both the house and its grounds in its founder’s memory, replanting thousands of May roses which, along with local growers, now provide blooms for Dior’s bestselling fragrances.
The rose still reigns supreme over Dior’s jewellery atelier, too. Victoire de Castellane, Dior’s artistic director of jewellery for over 20 years, has reimagined the rose “from A to Z” during her tenure, creating exquisite blooms wrought in precious metals and shimmering gemstones. The stackable rings and bracelets of the Bois de Rose fine jewellery line, for example, recreate the rose plants at Villa Les Rhumbs, where Dior learnt the art of pruning from his mother. Yellow, pink and white gold stems “coil around the finger, like a poetic jewel,” according to de Castellane, who has added pave-set diamond thorns for an element of danger amidst the delicacy, keeping the pieces chic rather than overly sweet.
For the Rose Dior Bagatelle collection, roses are immortalised in white gold and frosted in white diamonds – from their woody stems and curling leaves right through to their ruffled petals, as if sprinkled in fresh dew – like the May roses gathered in Provence at first light, ready to be turned into fragrance.
And for the flower’s latest incarnation, Rose Dior Couture, De Castellane has reworked the motifs from Monsieur Dior’s rose-printed couture confections, their whorls of silk and satin petals now recreated in pink gold and set with a round central diamond or studded with brilliants.
“Fortunately, there are flowers,” Dior once confided in his memoirs. This Valentine’s Day, there are also romantic roses ready to be plucked for the jewellery box, which are sure to be treasured for a lifetime.
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