The Timeless Allure of the Christian Dior Rose Plant
For many people, Christian Dior will mean the quintessence of elegance – the epitome of haute couture, a sense of style always a few steps ahead, a change in fashion that swept the world in the mid-20th-century. These references to the life of the great French couturier who died exactly 70 years ago resonate with associations of beauty, timelessness, femininity or even love. However, the allusion to roses might not be quite so obvious. In the world of Dior, his passion for roses has become more famous than it was during his lifetime. The Dior rose plant stepped into the limelight in the 1950s when he began to design perfume bottles shaped like roses. But the love story between Dior and roses is way more complex than a fleeting fashion statement. The Dianthus genus – of which roses are part – seems to become an idée fixe in the couturier’s multifaceted life: it forms a bond between nature and fashion in his designs and his personal life.
The Rose: A Symbol of Dior’s Heritage
When the 21-year-old Christian Dior (1905-57) opened his first couture house in Paris in 1947, he quickly and famously made the rose his brand’s symbol, declaring it the ‘queen of flowers’ and ‘the embodiment of femininity’. The founder of the House of Dior had been born in the seaside town of Granville, on the Normandy coast, and raised in the family home, its flourishing gardens filled with roses. Dior’s childhood surrounded by vibrant floral displays left a mark on his aesthetic sensibility. Many of his signature designs hum with rose-like qualities: the soft, ruffled quality of the rose’s petals; changes in its colour hue; and the floral fragrance.
Dior’s autobiography refers to his ‘weaning on these gardens, and I think it was there that my love affair with flowers was born, the roses in particular.’ He also repeatedly called the rose a ‘symbol of beauty, femininity, subtility, power’, and it was indeed something that he wanted to imbue his clothing with. The rose is both decoration and the presiding concept of the brand.
Roses in Dior’s Fashion and Design
Directly and indirectly, roses were everywhere. From the beginning of his career, Dior threaded floral motifs, particularly roses, into his couture collections. The groundbreaking ‘New Look’ collection he debuted in 1947, which heralded the post-war era with its nipped-in waists and voluminous skirts, came out of Dior’s desire to reflect the contour of a rose in fabric. The silhouette was part of it: Dior wanted to create an effect that matched the soft, bulging shape of rose petals, as well as the rigid organisation it required. It was feminine at its core, but his intentions spoke of a certain biological fatalism.
Even when more abstract, Dior’s thread count was rose-obsessed, with many pieces featuring complex floral embroidery, rose prints and even three-dimensional appliqués that called up the texture and depth of the flower. Such details are not just ornamentation, but champions of natural beauty, meticulously rendered to highlight the grace of the women wearing them.
Rose mania soon extended to the house’s accessories, of course: the scent of the iconic Miss Dior perfume being intended as an olfactory rendition of his ideal of femininity. Dior created Miss Dior in 1947 to bid farewell to the rationing of materials that had hobbled perfume design throughout the war years. Launched the same year as the New Look collection, Miss Dior instantly established Dior’s reputation as a master parfumeur, its dominant note being the scent of Grasse roses. The rose, in fact, soon became the house’s signature note, and Miss Dior remains one of the most internationally popular perfumes today, the fragrance of a timeless love between a designer and his flower.
The Christian Dior Rose Plant: A Living Legacy
The rose and its associations penetrate surprisingly far in Dior’s life and career, and the history of his beloved fragrance, even beyond fashion and perfume. After Christian Dior’s death in 1957, the house’s selling point was very much the founder himself, and the roses grew. After experiments with many different varieties, the house settled on a particularly beautiful one, the ‘Christian Dior’ rose plant, which its teams had painstakingly bred to perfection. Among its many virtues, the rose variety proved to be pleasingly evergreen.
The deep, velvety red colour of the Christian Dior rose and its thick, velvety petals evoke romance and luxury, both of which are associated with this fashion mogul’s own creations. Its heavenly fragrance also evokes a breath-taking hazy scent you would tend to associate with the fashion house.
The Christian Dior rose varietal has become emblematic of Dior’s commitment to preserving the legacy and vision of its founder. It is cultivated in the gardens of the Château de la Colle Noire, Dior’s last home, which he bought in 1950. Set in the hills of Grasse, the region famed for its rose fields, which supply the raw material for Dior’s perfumes, the Christian Dior rose plant is lovingly cared for in the grounds of his final home, a living monument to his love of nature as well as his enduring presence in the luxury world.
Roses in Contemporary Dior: Fashion, Beauty, and Beyond
The rose plant that still inspires Dior’s modern creations embodies an unchanging, timeless revival of beauty Row upon row entwined, plucked and re-embraced on every level, this floral motif offers an endless possibility for renewal. In fact, Dior’s contemporary designers and perfumers still turn to the rose’s symbolism and beauty, keeping the flower as a central component of the House’s identity.
More recently, modern re-interpretations of the rose can be seen across many of Dior’s collections, including the work of the designer’s current creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri. Whether through bold embroidery or delicate lace, or some other iteration of this persistent floral motif, the rose continues to flower across Dior’s haute couture and ready-to-wear collections. Although contemporary, Chiuri’s designs still hold on to the classic sense of easy, elegant glamour that Dior himself celebrated – a demonstration that the rose will always have a place within the Dior brand.
Culturally, the Christian Dior rose plant’s beauty has inspired the creation of new skincare and beauty products; Dior’s eponymous skincare line, for instance, contains various products containing rose extracts, drawing particularly on the rose’s renown for its soothing and anti-ageing qualities. In the Dior Prestige skincare line, the wild rose variety from the town of Granville, where Dior spent much of his childhood (and hence dubbed the ‘rose de Granville’ or ‘the Dior rose’ in his honour), is particularly highlighted as being resilient enough to flourish ‘where nothing else will grow’. The rose we cultivate is about the pseudonym, about flamboyance This rose’s adaptability amid the harsh conditions of life puts it in striking dialogue with the enduring success of Dior’s brand across time.
Of course, when Dior uses roses in their cosmetics, that’s not only about the physical properties of the rose, but about its connotations of luxury and indulgence. It’s fun to play with Dior products, because it transforms the act of cleaning your face into a ritual where we emulate the clergy of luxury, watering our rose plant with our gentle hands.
The Christian Dior Rose Garden: A Cultural and Historical Treasure
It is a space both botanical and cultural, historical and literary. It is first and foremost a space of immersion, where walks through the garden can bring us closer to nature, a nature that Dior wanted to bring into his fashion shows in his quest for beauty and tranquility. Like other spaces created by designers and artists – etwa Suzanne Munk’s (1913-2004) gardens at the Villa Haussmann outside Paris or John Maynard Keynes’s (1883-1946) garden at Cambridge – Christian Dior’s rose garden at the Château de la Colle Noire has been maintained to bring us closer to the worlds that inspired them. All images courtesy the author.
From the centre of the rose garden, it’s easy to see how the colours and scents of the roses provided inspiration for his dresses. This is a living museum that displays the floral garden as it was interpreted by Dior in his creations. Here, in the fragrant heart of the garden, one can note Dior, from his professional life to his leisure time, always oscillated between fashion and nature.
The rose garden inspires contemporary artists and designers who still visit the estate and take inspiration from the roses to create new works of art, clothing and fragrance in tribute to Dior.