Girl in Dior

The first quarter of the New Year usually yields very little in terms of interesting or memorable books, but this year that cycle has been broken and has produced  one more wonderfully engaging book about one of the greatest designers of the 20th century.

The subject is Christian Dior and the book is Girl in Dior. To be precise the book concerns itself with a 10 year span (1947–1957) in the life and career of Monsieur Dior. There have been countless books dealing with so many facets and areas of this designer’s life and career, but Annie Goetzinger has delivered one of the most charming and delightful reads that more than holds its own against the rest.

Without giving away too much of how Goetzinger pulled this off, suffice it to say that she has employed one of the oldest forms of reading material that can be remembered and one that might have been totally ingrained within your childhood. The method of storytelling here is a “comic book” but not the way you might have remembered them but this is most definitely a comic book for adults and students of fashion.

The illustrations are as spot-on and detailed as they can be, and the “conversations” are confined to the subject but with some humor and humanity tossed in for good measure. This is a historical read peppered with facts about the people who inhabited the world of maison Christian Dior as well information about the world of haute couture. One might say that the only thing missing is hearing the French accents from the characters in this book.

For someone who never gave a comic book a second glance, this little treasure has made me rethink the value of this type of reading material. Per chance, if history lessons were offered in the same way, kids might be far more knowledgeable than they are from just reading some dry text book. Somehow this petite volume made this prophetic decade come alive in ways no that no other book on the topic has been able to do before—and that includes the photo centric coffee table books!

The bottom line is simply this: if you are looking for an alternate way of reading about fashion then you better rush out and get yourself a copy. If you want a very insightful and historically accurate way of learning about this man and the world he inhabited, then get thee to Amazon or a book store if you can still find one. Lastly, if you want to get lost in fashion or introduce someone to fashion, this is surely a good way to do it.