Dior
The couturier who returned Paris to its throne and dressed the world in the New Look.
Few houses opened as triumphantly as Dior, and few did more to restore Paris to the center of fashion after the war. The maison that Christian Dior founded in 1946 gave women the New Look, raised costume jewelry to a place beside the couture, and set a standard of French elegance that every designer who followed has had to answer to.
The Architect of the New Look
Christian Dior was born in 1905 in Granville, on the Normandy coast, into a prosperous family whose fortune came from manufacturing. He dreamed of becoming an architect, but his parents steered him toward political science. In the late 1920s he opened an art gallery in Paris, showing work by Picasso, Dalí, and others, until the Depression and a series of family losses swept away both the fortune and the gallery.
To survive he sold fashion sketches, then found his footing designing for Robert Piguet and, through the war, for Lucien Lelong. In 1946, backed by the textile magnate Marcel Boussac, he opened his own house at 30 Avenue Montaigne. He was forty-one, and he had eleven years left to live. They would be enough to change everything.
The New Look
On 12 February 1947 Dior presented his first collection. Carmel Snow of Harper's Bazaar called it a revolution and a new look, and the name held. Against the rationed austerity of the war years, Dior proposed cinched waists, softly rounded shoulders, and full skirts cut from extravagant yards of fabric. It was a return to opulence and overt femininity, and it made him famous overnight. That same year he launched the fragrance Miss Dior, and the lily of the valley, his lifelong talisman, began its long appearance through the house's work.
A dress is a piece of ephemeral architecture, designed to enhance the proportions of the female body.Christian Dior
Why His Jewelry Matters
Dior was among the first couturiers to treat jewelry as an integral part of a collection, designing each piece with a specific look in mind so the adornment and the dress arrived as one idea. His earliest jewels were made by Maison Gripoix, the same Parisian atelier whose luminous poured glass gave Chanel its stained glass glow. He drew on the finest paruriers of the day, among them Robert Goossens, Roger Jean-Pierre, Roger Scemama, and Francis Winter.
As the house grew, licensed production spread. Mitchel Maer of London, who worked with Dior from 1952 to 1956, and Kramer of New York were each granted the rare honor of co-signing their pieces alongside the Dior name. Then in 1955 Dior struck the partnership that would outlast them all, with Henkel & Grosse of Pforzheim, Germany, who produced Christian Dior Bijoux for fifty years and dated their cartouches as a matter of practice, a small gift to every collector who came after.
His collaboration with Swarovski yielded the iridescent Aurora Borealis crystal in the mid-1950s, named for the shifting colors of the northern lights and copied everywhere once it appeared. Floral motifs, above all his beloved lily of the valley, run through the work. The earliest of these pieces are now genuinely rare, and they are the haute couture costume jewelry that collectors pursue most keenly today.
The House After Dior
Dior died suddenly in 1957, at fifty-two. The maison might have closed with him, but instead it passed to a twenty-one-year-old assistant named Yves Saint Laurent, who made his debut to acclaim before Marc Bohan steadied the house for nearly three decades and Gianfranco Ferré brought it Italian grandeur. Then, in 1996, John Galliano arrived and electrified everything.
Galliano staged couture as theater and revived Dior's romance with adornment in full. His Maasai-inspired beaded chokers, built up in dense strands and worn high on the neck, became an instant signature of his Dior years and are among the most collected pieces from his tenure. The choker shown here is one of them.
The House Today
Galliano led Dior until 2011 and was succeeded by Raf Simons, whose spare modernism reframed the codes, and then by Maria Grazia Chiuri, the first woman ever to direct the house. In 2025 Jonathan Anderson took the role, becoming the first designer since Christian Dior himself to oversee women's, men's, and haute couture together, and presenting his first Dior womenswear collection in Paris that October. Dior today stands among the most influential names in fashion and among the most collected in vintage costume jewelry.
Dior at MDVII
At MDVII, Dior holds a place of particular distinction. We have sourced and placed exceptional examples of the house's jewelry, including pieces brought to auction through Christie's. The Galliano choker shown on this page found a new home there in December 2025, a measure of how keenly these works are sought. The Dior pieces available now are gathered below.
