Piguet

"At thirty, Dior had to start earning a living and first asked his friends for help. They were named Henri Sauguet, Christian Bérard, Max Jacob, Pierre Gaxotte, Francis Poulenc, a youth passionate about the latest discoveries of Cocteau, Satie, or Diaghilev… Sauguet named their group “The Club.” Meeting point: the Tip Toes bar, rue Tronchet, where this youth spends hours gossiping, backbiting, inventing mimed stories while devouring pastries. A marvelous era that of this Paris of the “Roaring Twenties.” Only boredom was banned, and quirkiness served as the theme for the patrons’ balls: Etienne de Beaumont or Charles de Noailles. The fashion was for costumes, a game at which Dior excelled. He had an astonishing gift for turning an insignificant rag into an evocative costume. With a friend, he opened an art gallery, but these young people loved painting too much to make money from it. It was then, on the advice of another friend, Jean Ozenne, that Dior tried his hand at dress sketches: the talent that was accidentally revealed thus led him straight to Piguet, then to Lelong. It was there that destiny came to disturb him!"

"The events will suddenly greatly increase the role of the sponsor. On October 23, 1957, Christian Dior suddenly dies, struck down by a heart attack, during a treatment he was undergoing in Montecatini. Dior’s tragedy was his gluttony: he couldn’t resist a cake or dessert. “Boss, you’re too fat,” he heard every day. But the slimming diets he strained to follow imposed very tough physiological challenges on him. Several times, he had fainted. His disappearance creates a huge shock in the fashion world—Dior, before being admired, was very loved—and raises a concerning question about the survival of the company. In the fashion world, few houses have managed to overcome the loss of their creator, and there is no shortage of examples since Paquin, Rochas, Piguet, Relong, of survivals that couldn’t maintain their brilliance after the disappearance of such talents."