Christian Dior FAILED Before He Saved Fashion

His art gallery collapsed, leaving him broke. A decade later he would rescue fashion.

Born to a wealthy Normandy family, young Christian Dior wanted to make art, not clothes.

He opened a gallery showing Picasso and Dalí, until the Depression wiped out his fortune.

He lost his mother to illness, then sold fashion sketches just to eat.

For years he designed quietly inside other people's houses, an assistant in the shadows.

Paris had survived the war, but its women still dressed in grey, rationed cloth.

In 1947 he unveiled the New Look, with tiny waists and vast, lavish skirts.

The world was stunned, and overnight Paris was the capital of fashion again.

In ten years his name became an empire, dressing stars and selling perfume worldwide.

In 1957, at just fifty-two, his heart gave out, and a young Yves Saint Laurent inherited the house.

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