The Last Dress from Paris, page 36
Additional thanks to the following authors and their books for helping to inform and guide this story:
Dior by Dior: The Autobiography of Christian Dior by Christian Dior
Christian Dior by Oriole Cullen and Connie Karol Burks
The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947-57 by Claire Wilcox
Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes by Claire Wilcox
The British Ambassador’s Residence in Paris by Tim Knox
The Englishwoman’s Wardrobe by Angela Huth
Diana Cooper: The Biography of Lady Diana Cooper by Philip Ziegler
Don’t Tell Alfred by Nancy Mitford
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
Another Me: A Memoir by Ann Montgomery
An Unexpected Guest by Anne Korkeakivi
READERS GUIDE
THE LAST DRESS FROM PARIS
JADE BEER
BEHIND THE BOOK
For several years I was fortunate enough to have a day job editing a glossy magazine that occasionally required me to fly from London to New York or to a European city and look at a designer’s collection. Whether I was sitting at a fashion show, watching the gowns snake past me, or chatting to the designer during a private viewing, the first questions I asked myself were rarely the ones people assumed I did. It was not What do I think of this dress? Or Is it a successful development on from the designer’s previous collection? Those tended to come later, back in the office, planning the pages.
It was instead always Who is this dress destined for, and how will it make her feel? In what ways might it change her or the course of her life? What thoughts and feelings might she experience while wearing a dress like this, that she may never share with another living soul?
All of these questions returned to me one January morning in 2019 when I found myself in the crush of people at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum for the Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams exhibition. The show had started its life in Paris in 2017 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs to mark the seventieth anniversary of the House of Dior, and then been reimagined for a London audience. It was hot, it was loud, it was mildly stressful as everyone jostled to see some of the standout items on display—including the monochrome Bar suit with its tiny nineteen-inch waist, a piece that came to define Dior’s much-lauded New Look fashion, and that remains, to this day, the most requested item to study in the museum’s Clothworkers’ Centre.
In among the dresses was fashion footage, cleverly interspersing models from decades past with the drama of the modern runway spectacle. The toile room revealed the test garments, Dior’s prototypes that came before the final gowns, exposing the famous dresses, as if they were undressed themselves.
When I left the museum that day, I knew so much more about the work of Christian Dior and how he defined an era of fashion. Much has been written of his legacy. But what of the women he dressed? I wondered. What happened to all of them and their beautiful gowns when they left the boutique for the final time? It was never quiet in the museum that day, there was never a moment for peaceful reflection, but I do remember thinking: What would the women, Dior’s clients, whisper from behind the glass cabinets if they could? If they could lean over the rope, what would they tell me about the occasion on which they wore these dresses? As Christian Dior once said himself, “the past lies so vividly around.”
The book that accompanied the exhibition referenced “three formidable women” whom Dior hired at the very beginning to oversee the making of his collections. It seemed fitting that there should be strong women in this story too.
With my imagination truly fired up, I started to think about the women I had encountered in my life and career so far. My own mother, who sacrificed everything to raise a happy family, and what I have learned from her example, despite our lives taking very different courses; friends who had unwittingly sacrificed a family to prioritize a career; women who worked round the clock to climb the career ladder, only to discover their dream job existed only in their imaginations; entrepreneurial businesswomen who lived and breathed their brands, whose daily accomplishments made me wince at my own inadequacies. I thought about how I might have been a different woman if I had had a sister as well as two brothers. How some of the strongest moments of friendship I’ve experienced have been with the very newest of friends. I thought about all the meetings and lunches and drinks I had enjoyed with women whose lives seemed incredibly enviable from the outside, only for the gloss to slide off once we were really chatting. It wasn’t that they necessarily hid the truth, just that I had projected an easier, simpler reality onto them, just as those in Alice’s world do to her. Rarely was anything what it outwardly appeared. Is it ever?
There were so many dresses I fell in love with that day at the V&A, ones that I had to say goodbye to, that didn’t fit the timeline of the story or the lifestyle of the character who would wear them. Take a moment, if you can, to look at two near misses: the Blandine dress from Dior’s spring/summer 1957 collection, and the Muguet dress from the same collection, a dress that is covered in delicate rows of lily of the valley, Dior’s favorite flower—so much so that he is said to have asked seamstresses to sew a sprig into the hems of dresses for good luck. Did some of that luck rub off on the women who wore them?
Sometimes I think I would like to go back and write this story all over again with an entirely different set of dresses, to see how it would alter the balance, change the course of the narrative, and flick the women’s lives in a different direction. Can a dress do that? What if Alice hadn’t worn the Debussy to the Musée de l’Orangerie that night? But then, just as with a couture dress, isn’t it the strength and construction of what is on the inside that shapes and molds what is on the outside? I think that notion is what is truly at the heart of this story.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Are Antoine’s actions forgivable? What about those of Alice’s mother?
2. Who is the bravest woman: Genevieve, Lucille, Alice, Veronique, or Marianne?
3. In what ways does the book challenge traditional ideas of motherhood?
4. Why do you think Alice changes her name to Sylvie after leaving Paris? Would you have done the same?
5. What is the most memorable dress you have ever worn? In what way was it transformative?
6. Do you believe a sense of style can be taught and learned?
7. How did a previous life choice—romantic, platonic, or other—shape your future? Do you think it was for the better?
8. If you could wear one of the Dior dresses featured in this book, which would it be? What life event would you wear it to?
9. In your own experience, which type of love is strongest: familial love, romantic love, love between friends, or self-love?
10. Christian Dior offers to make you a dress. What is your brief to him?
ON MY “TO BE READ” PILE
I’m researching my next book and immersing myself in the deep, messy trenches of familial love, so I’ll be reading and in some cases rereading . . .
The Consequences of Love by Gavanndra Hodge
Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn
Dear Life by Rachel Clarke
Travel Light, Move Fast by Alexandra Fuller
Somebody I Used to Know by Wendy Mitchell
After the End by Clare Mackintosh
Where We Belong by Anstey Harris
Lady in Waiting by Anne Glenconner
Author photograph by Holly Clark Photography
JADE BEER is an award-winning editor, journalist, and novelist who has worked across the UK national press for more than twenty years. Most recently, she was the editor in chief of Condé Nast’s Brides. She also writes for other leading titles, including the Sunday Times Style, Harper’s Bazaar, the Mail on Sunday’s YOU magazine, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Tatler wedding guide, Glamour, and Stella magazine. Jade lives in the Cotswolds with her husband and two daughters.
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Jade Beer, The Last Dress from Paris
