Avenue Montaigne

"The house opens on December 15th, and the collection is presented on February 12th, 1947. That’s the short amount of time it took to prepare the “bomb” that was to turn the fashion world “upside down.” Boussac gave Dior complete freedom to conduct this “lace” war as he saw fit. Dior’s success was having an absolutely precise idea of what he wanted to create and orchestrating its preparation with exemplary meticulousness and assurance. For the setting, he first wanted to create, “in the charming hotel on Avenue Montaigne, a decorated but not decorative atmosphere… whose invisible elegance was not to disconcert or divert the eye from the collection.” He chose the neo-Louis XVI style that had charmed his childhood with its classical and Parisian tone. In turn, his impeccable taste created, with those white and pearl gray wood panelings, those bronze sconces with small lampshades under a flow of Quintia palms, the famous “Dior” style, so characteristic was its imposed eleganc"

"fortune continued to favor him because, even before he started looking for a location, someone happened to inform him that the small hotel at 30 Avenue Montaigne was for rent. Now, Christian Dior had always dreamed of settling there: “In a city as vast as Paris, only one suited me: the one I had, without knowing it, described to Boussac. Indeed, many years before this decisive conversation, I had stopped in front of two small adjoining hotels on Avenue Montaigne, 28 and 30. I praised their small proportions, sober elegance, without too overwhelming a ‘pedigree’… It had to be 30, Avenue Montaigne.”"