If it's possible to write a biography of a time and place, then Justine Picardie has done precisely this with Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture. Nominally a biography of fashion designer Christian Dior's younger sister Catherine, who was awarded the Légion d'honneur for her role in the French Resistance, the book is actually a doggedly researched, wide-angle look at the German Occupation's toll on France's beau monde.
In 1944, while Christian's career as a couturier was ascendant, Catherine (1917-2008), who had been an active part of a Resistance network, was arrested in Paris, tortured and deported to Ravensbrück, the women's concentration camp in Germany. When she returned to Paris the following year, Catherine started a flower business and confided little in her family and friends about her wartime ordeal.
Such reticence makes for a tricky biographical subject, as does the fact that Catherine didn't write about herself, had no offspring and, with Christian's sudden death in 1957, moved to the village of Callian, where she devoted the rest of her long life to gardening. (Catherine cultivated the jasmine and roses that were signature fragrances of Miss Dior, the perfume her brother had named for her.) The resourceful Picardie (Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life) taps Resistance archives and memoirs by Catherine's fellow resistants and unearths a wealth of archival photos in order to piece together her subject's experience. Catherine is not always central in Miss Dior, but when she is, she represents exquisite grace under fire. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer