ABOUT MADAME BRICARD and CHRISTIAN DIOR

From Ilya Parkin's book on the return of femininity to fashion after the masculinization of style due to the World War II demands on women...

In this book we learn that Dior's inspiration, in terms of his notions of femininity may have been his mother and memories of her, while his sister, who also had presence and impact in his work, had been part of the French resistance and had actually been arrested and put into a concentration camp. He had a nostalgia of femininity that had been abandoned in the War years. Perhaps he was even thinking of the Belle Epoque. He relied on a few women for their opinions - collaborations - with him at his workshop where he designed. One of them was Mitzah Bricard who he ever called "Madame Bricard," never getting on first name basis with her. She is portrayed as icy cold emotionally and yet...

Excerpt page 123

Dior's entwinement with femininity as a condition of his selfhood as a designer and celebrity can be most clearly seen in his very close working relationship with women over the course of his career. Unlike Poiret or Schiaparelli, Dior was not heavily invested in the image of the designer as genius who both found inspiration for and executed his craft entirely alone. Dior's work contains many references to the process of dress design as collaborative, as 'passionate collective research.'

Excerpt page 125-126

It is perhaps Dior's descriptions of Mitzah Bicard that are most telling, even if they do not have the same quality of incorporation that his discussions of Mms, Raymonde and Marguerite, the other members of his exalted triumvirate of women, have.  Like the others, he characterizes Mme Bircard as collaborator. But her role is never clearly specified. She functioned as a kind of muse, and certainly she had been memorialized as such. Her collaboration appears, in all of his portrait of her, to simply be, embodying elegance outside of time: 'Mme Bricard is one of those people, increasingly rare, who make elegance their sole raison d'etre.  Gazing at life out of the windows of the Ritz, so to speak, she is superbly indifferent to such mundane concerns as politics, finance, or social change." In Talking about Fashion, he says, 'if times are hard, she will ignore them, and troubles leave her unmoved.' Notably, it is Mme Bricard who inspires Dior's ideas; she catalyzes the process of creation. 'Her moods, her extremes of behavior, her faults, her entrances, her late appearances, her theatricality, her mode of speech, her unorthodox manner of dress, her jewels, in short her presence, bring the touch of absolute elegance so necessary to the fashion house.

Unlike Dior's smooth and harmonious incorporation of Raymonde and Marguerite, the relationship with Mme Bricard is described as tempestuous. He writes, "I knew that her presence in my house would inspire me towards creation, as much by her reactions - and even her revolts - against my ideas, as by her agreements.' It is a curious formulation, since what Dior values in Mme Bricard is ostensibly the same quality that is understood to be key in his success; an essential, almost inherited, understanding of the grammar of chic as something timeless, removed from the vagaries of history.  And yet he describes himself as being inspired by a motto he attributes to her, one which he struggled to apply to himself: 'I will maintain." What he takes from her is her compulsion to tradition. It is a compulsion that does not come entirely naturally for him, even if that traditional orientation is the trait on which his celebrity is bu8ild,.  Through Mmm Bricard, he learns to 'maintain,' to steadfastly carry on the timeless French traditions of chick and couture despite the vagaries of history and commerce.  In simply being, she fills an educational role in Dior's life, temporarily reorienting him to tradition and to the French past.

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And yet... there are many an image of her in which she is not posing in an aloof or haughty manner, but smiling with warmth or as an active participant.  So, she is not just around posing at all...

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