Rue Poissonnière

"The Dior house must therefore pay certain “royalties”: submit to styling consultations and tolerate the prying eyes of Rue Poissonnière. This is part of the owner’s rights. Willingly or not, one complies with these not particularly excessive demands."

"Except for the protagonists, there was no witness that day in the large office on Rue Poissonnière to report how the connection was made between Boussac, fifty-seven years old, at the peak of his power, and Dior, forty-one years old, still waiting for his moment, between the great self-made man and the aesthete converted late in life to work, between the “king of cotton,” who nearly forty years earlier had revolutionized fashion in the countryside and small towns with his fancy cottons, and “the stout gentleman dressed in the neutral colors of a Parisian from Passy”—as Dior describes himself—who proposed to create a selective and exclusive couture house that would bring back to Paris the clientele of elegant women from around the world."