Dior and His Decorators: How Two Interior Designers Created
a “New Look” for the Home
Dior and His Decorators is the first work on the two
interior designers most closely associated with Christian Dior. Like the
unabashedly luxurious fashions of Dior’s New Look, which debuted in 1947, the
interior designs of Victor Grandpierre and Georges Geffroy infused a war-weary
world with a sumptuous new aesthetic—a melding of the refined traditions of the
past with a wholly modern sense of elegance. Author Maureen Footer recounts the
lives and work of this influential trio, illustrated with a trove of evocative
vintage photographs. Grandpierre designed Dior’s first couture house, creating
not only the elegantly restrained look of the salons but also the template for
the Dior brand, including typeface, logo, and packaging. Both Grandpierre and
Geffroy (who worked independently) designed the interior of Dior’s townhouse.
After the couturier’s untimely death in 1957, Grandpierre and Geffroy went on
to design salons for other couturiers, as well as homes for the likes of Yves
Saint Laurent, Marcel Rochas, Gloria Guinness, Daisy Fellowes, and Maria
Callas.
“With her latest book, on Christian Dior’s decorating
legacy, design historian Maureen Footer gives us a private tour of her couture
quarters.”
—Veranda
“Maureen Footer spins a terrific story … [a] rarefied world
of passementerie and peau de soie. The stories bowl you along on a puff of pink
chiffon …”
—House & Garden
Design historian Maureen Footer holds degrees from Wellesley
College, Columbia University and studied French eighteenth-century decorative
arts and design at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris. Her previous book, George
Stacey and the Creation of American Chic, chronicled American design as the
country came of age culturally, politically, and socially. Ms. Footer and her work have received notices
from the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Vanity Fair, the New York Times,
Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Le Figaro. She has lectured at the Sorbonne, the
Institute of Classical Architecture, Winterthur, the Huntington Museum, and the
New York School of Interior Design. A lifelong balletomane, Ms. Footer sits on
the board of the New York City Ballet.
Dior and His Decorators: How Two Interior Designers Created
a “New Look” for the Home
SEPTEMBER 21, 2018 10:30 PM
by HAMISH BOWLES
This piece appeared as the foreword to Vendome Press's Dior
and His Decorators: Victor Grandpierre, Georges Geffroy, and the New Look by
Maureen Footer, with a foreword by Hamish Bowles.
When Christian Dior created his first collection, in the
frigid winter of 1946, his vision was escapist. In a Paris assaulted and
traumatized by the years of war and the Occupation, Dior imagined a bouquet of
flower women, of full corolle skirts and melting shoulders, hand-span waists
and plumply buttressed bosoms – the silhouettes of his Edwardian infancy,
before the vicissitudes of conflict transformed the world order for the
affluent classes.
Dior’s vision for décor ran along similar lines, for
although he came of age as a purveyor of avant-garde art, by the time he reached
his forties Dior thought not of a brave post-war modernism, but Les Rhumbs, his
family’s pretty pink house nestled in rose gardens on the cliffs of Normandy,
symbol of the affluent bourgeois life that the Diors had led before the crash
of 1929.
To realize a vision in décor that would match his concept of
fashion, Dior turned to the talents of his two friends Victor Grandpierre and
Georges Geffroy.
As an unusually fashion obsessed little boy I found a copy
of Dior by Dior, the designer’s elegantly written autobiography, in a jumble
sale and had devoured its riveting contents, and therefore knew of how Dior had
distributed the decorating of his opulent town house in Passy between
Grandpierre and Geffroy, two men as steeped in fashion as their friend and
client. Grandpierre had been a fashion photographer, and Geffroy a designer for
Jean Patou, a forward-thinking rival to Gabrielle Chanel in the 1920s.
In a world that was looking to reinvent a post-war aesthetic
in architecture, furniture, automotive, and fashion design through innovation
that focused on practicality, speed and labor-free invention, this triumvirate
created a parallel modernism. Their brave new world of fashion and design was
steeped in the past – the world of Sem and the Comtesse Greffulhe (who came to
witness Dior’s debut collection looking as though she had stepped from a
Lartigue photograph in a Merry Widow picture hat and lavish fur stole).
Just as Dior’s ateliers found themselves reviving Victorian
dressmaking techniques to bring his elaborately constructed clothes to life,
his couture house drew on techniques honed over generations to provide their
perfect setting. Chez Dior, the well-heeled denizens of café society, the stars
of screen, stage, and the cultural firmament who came in droves to admire the
couturier’s creations were enveloped in melting dove grey, and perched on the
sort of Louis Quinze revival sofas and Louis Seize oval-backed chaises on which
the sitters of Boldini and Helleu had posed half a century earlier.
When Dior’s young protégé Yves Saint Laurent inaugurated his
eponymous haute couture house in 1962, the dauphin created a tabula rasa - a
spare white décor that suggested the promise of the Youthquake era and provided
a neutral foil to the mannish pantsuits and hippie de luxe evening
extravaganzas that redefined the way women wanted to look.
By the time I made my own debut in the perfumed world of the
haute couture in the early 1980s, however, Saint Laurent’s mood was elegiac
rather than revolutionary. He had moved his haute couture establishment to a
Haussmanian townhouse on Avenue Marceau, where, nostalgic for the spirit of his
master Christian Dior, he had summoned that designer’s accomplice in décor,
Victor Grandpierre, to create an environment that evoked both Dior’s couture
salons and private residence.
Underfoot, carpet swirled in whorls of moss and bottle green
like the shimmering pools of a bolt of watered silk; the high-back sofas were
tufted in crimson damask and shaded by potted palms. The cabine mannequins,
dressed in stockings and heels and their uniform starched white wrappers as
they waited to be fitted by the master, looked like Toulouse Lautrec houris in
a maison de passe – although admittedly an establishment with royal and
imperial patrons.
It was the perfect backdrop to the Saint Laurent clothes of
the era – clothes of impeccable construction executed in a breathtaking gamut
of colors. It was haute couture for the home and it seemed to me then and now
to represent the giddiest height of high style. At home on the Rue Babylone,
meanwhile, Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge worked with Jacques Grange –
inheritor of the spirit of Geffroy and Grandpierre – to create a wonderland of
eclectically arranged treasures. The dining room, however, like the Avenue
Marceau salons, was a direct quote from Dior, Grandpierre, and Geffroy. The
rock crystal droplets that hung from the chandelier, the eighteenth century
tapestries on the pale walls, and the fall of emerald damask at the windows
evoked the defiantly mid-century look of Dior and his co-conspirators in
design, nostalgia on nostalgia, a look that swept the world, then and now.
This piece appeared as the foreword to Vendome Press's Dior
and His Decorators: Victor Grandpierre, Georges Geffroy, and the New Look by
Maureen Footer, with a foreword by Hamish Bowles.
When Christian Dior created his first collection, in the
frigid winter of 1946, his vision was escapist. In a Paris assaulted and
traumatized by the years of war and the Occupation, Dior imagined a bouquet of
flower women, of full corolle skirts and melting shoulders, hand-span waists
and plumply buttressed bosoms – the silhouettes of his Edwardian infancy,
before the vicissitudes of conflict transformed the world order for the
affluent classes.
Dior’s vision for décor ran along similar lines, for
although he came of age as a purveyor of avant-garde art, by the time he
reached his forties Dior thought not of a brave post-war modernism, but Les
Rhumbs, his family’s pretty pink house nestled in rose gardens on the cliffs of
Normandy, symbol of the affluent bourgeois life that the Diors had led before
the crash of 1929.
To realize a vision in décor that would match his concept of
fashion, Dior turned to the talents of his two friends Victor Grandpierre and
Georges Geffroy.
As an unusually fashion obsessed little boy I found a copy
of Dior by Dior, the designer’s elegantly written autobiography, in a jumble
sale and had devoured its riveting contents, and therefore knew of how Dior had
distributed the decorating of his opulent town house in Passy between
Grandpierre and Geffroy, two men as steeped in fashion as their friend and
client. Grandpierre had been a fashion photographer, and Geffroy a designer for
Jean Patou, a forward-thinking rival to Gabrielle Chanel in the 1920s.
In a world that was looking to reinvent a post-war aesthetic
in architecture, furniture, automotive, and fashion design through innovation
that focused on practicality, speed and labor-free invention, this triumvirate
created a parallel modernism. Their brave new world of fashion and design was
steeped in the past – the world of Sem and the Comtesse Greffulhe (who came to
witness Dior’s debut collection looking as though she had stepped from a
Lartigue photograph in a Merry Widow picture hat and lavish fur stole).
Just as Dior’s ateliers found themselves reviving Victorian
dressmaking techniques to bring his elaborately constructed clothes to life,
his couture house drew on techniques honed over generations to provide their
perfect setting. Chez Dior, the well-heeled denizens of café society, the stars
of screen, stage, and the cultural firmament who came in droves to admire the
couturier’s creations were enveloped in melting dove grey, and perched on the
sort of Louis Quinze revival sofas and Louis Seize oval-backed chaises on which
the sitters of Boldini and Helleu had posed half a century earlier.
When Dior’s young protégé Yves Saint Laurent inaugurated his
eponymous haute couture house in 1962, the dauphin created a tabula rasa - a
spare white décor that suggested the promise of the Youthquake era and provided
a neutral foil to the mannish pantsuits and hippie de luxe evening
extravaganzas that redefined the way women wanted to look.
By the time I made my own debut in the perfumed world of the
haute couture in the early 1980s, however, Saint Laurent’s mood was elegiac
rather than revolutionary. He had moved his haute couture establishment to a
Haussmanian townhouse on Avenue Marceau, where, nostalgic for the spirit of his
master Christian Dior, he had summoned that designer’s accomplice in décor,
Victor Grandpierre, to create an environment that evoked both Dior’s couture
salons and private residence.
Underfoot, carpet swirled in whorls of moss and bottle green
like the shimmering pools of a bolt of watered silk; the high-back sofas were
tufted in crimson damask and shaded by potted palms. The cabine mannequins,
dressed in stockings and heels and their uniform starched white wrappers as
they waited to be fitted by the master, looked like Toulouse Lautrec houris in
a maison de passe – although admittedly an establishment with royal and
imperial patrons.
It was the perfect backdrop to the Saint Laurent clothes of
the era – clothes of impeccable construction executed in a breathtaking gamut
of colors. It was haute couture for the home and it seemed to me then and now
to represent the giddiest height of high style. At home on the Rue Babylone,
meanwhile, Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge worked with Jacques Grange –
inheritor of the spirit of Geffroy and Grandpierre – to create a wonderland of
eclectically arranged treasures. The dining room, however, like the Avenue
Marceau salons, was a direct quote from Dior, Grandpierre, and Geffroy. The
rock crystal droplets that hung from the chandelier, the eighteenth century
tapestries on the pale walls, and the fall of emerald damask at the windows
evoked the defiantly mid-century look of Dior and his co-conspirators in
design, nostalgia on nostalgia, a look that swept the world, then and now.
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