YouSaid · the spoken record

Justine Picardie

lines on the record: 32
first: 2022-09-16
most recent: 2022-09-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So in your own village, in your own community, you would see every day somebody that you knew had collaborated. How do you go on? How do you make life of yourself in those circumstances? As we know from the story of Prino Levi and others who know many people that survive the camps then killed themselves or their physical or mental starring, both physiological and psychological with whom that they might not live as long as they might otherwise. Catherine lived a long and meaningful life in truly remarkable ways, but still it would be wrong to say that her experiences had not left her.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So every village, you would have had to see that have collaborated with the Germans, as well as there were members of the resistance there. And I remember there was just outside, so her brother lived very close. Christian lived very close and at the end of his drive in his home Provence there's a memorial to a young member of the French resistance who was shot there, who died in a literally just fine whose front gate. And she was incredibly young, but this young mass brother had joined the French version of the SS, and so was a French Nazi. There was the terror.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Testimony they literally say it is indescribable. It is beyond words. And I think that for Catherine to survive, first of all, probably people couldn't bear to rear it, and then if silence becomes the norm which it did in France, even if you wanted to talk about it, if people don't then sear it, then silence becomes a way of life. But for me her Rosefields are so powerful, and they're still there now on her to plant a tree as she did is an act of hope in the future and to carry on tending roses as she did. I mean, her rose fields are still there and they're still producing roses for a perfume as today. But her little house where I went to stay”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I saw her medical records are part of her records in the resistance archives, and she was psychologically, as well as physically sparred by her treatment both by the French Gestapo and then in Germany. And I think the things that she suffered were very, very difficult to describe. I think that she talked to her closest friend, Lily Anne, who I write about and whose son was Catherine's bod son. Catherine remained close to and her godson was more than a godson. Catherine was unable to have children because of the physical damage that she had suffered. And I spoke to him, but I think that Linne, her best friends, have not been in the camps with her. I think that most people that have been in the camps, when you look at their”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I think that it was a combination of things, I mean, I think that FAPA, the way he lingling for her was through the garden. She'd inherited enough of gardening from her mother, as did her brother. And for anybody that loves gardening, as I do.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sir Francis to be unified, and the way to do that was to sort of this myth that really begins with the liberation of Paris went to Gaul gives this famous speech when Hussein, as France has been master's, but Farce has liberated itself the whole of France, Bout France. So this myth is born that everybody resisted, nobody collaborated, and everybody has to be unified together. And that means that the stories of women like Catherine become largely forgotten.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a rose grower, and she continues to grow the roses that I views for her brother's perfumes, and she carries on working until she is in Nansu, and she brings, she dies of old age, she dies gently in her sleep, but having brought in her final rose harvest, which she does, and then she dies one June, a very invarying, principled, independent, idealistic, astonishingly strong woman, but whose story was never told, partly because there became such a taboo in France, and right from the time of the liberation of Paris to not talk about how widespread collaboration was. So I think that de Gaulle, General De Gaulle had to make a decision that the liberation of Paris”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every single one of his cature collections, she would design something for her sister Catherine. Dior becomes synonymous with a beautiful pot of dresses and ball gowns and Princess Margaret's famous twenty first birthday dress that the dresses were of, I suppose, as it were, a young princess. But he is also in every collection he was doing clothes that grown up women can wear, so there's always ejaculator skirt. And I think those are the kind of clothes that his make him for his varied independent sister Catherine, who never marries, she remains with her partner who she met an French resistance. They never marry she remains Mr for the rest of her life. She continues to earn her own living fast as a florist and then she gives that business up.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It uses a lot of fabric, it's very romantic, and it's also, everything is very softly padded, so the hips are padded, the bust is padded, the shoulders are softly padded. And I think that this arises directly because Catherine and women like her was so shockingly sane when they returned that it's subconsciously or not, is designing clothes of both soft lupad, but also it's almost like a sort of act of architecture. It's by creating this soft padding. It's like creating a sort of safe, soft place for his sister. And in every single collection, the only survived ten years before he died too young of a heart attack.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When literally everybody is wearing black as the colour of morning and Chanel launches Chanel number five in the letter black dress and that becomes associated with the jazz age with modernism with female independence and then twenty five years later you see you're doing something as radical and remarkable which is when clothes are still being rationed when fabric is rationed when there is still austerity do all creates this incredibly romantic look and who actually calls it la cural which is the French for part of the flower come usu the ben editor of Harper's Bazaar calls it the Mulook and everybody else starts calling it the Moul and it looks new because”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“but we also decides who's going to launch his own small couture house and that after the ugliness of war he wants to desire something hopeful and beautiful, which is a very remarkable and radical thing to do. It really does revolutionise fashion overnight. There's very few moments where you can say that in fashion. I mean, it happens maybe less than once in a generation. Sometimes it will take several generations for that. And you see it with Chanel over the little black dress which happened at the ends of the First World War and after the darkness of the First World War and the First Global Flu pandemic”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She did recover, and physically she recovered first by going to their home in Provence, there's a letter that she wrote in the period saying that they had just to bloom a sunnight and soon have below roses again helped her recover. But then she needed to earn a living and she was awarded a license to deal in cut flowers, so she became a wholesale forest in Paris and she lived with her brother, who at this point was still working for the couture house of Lucien no long, but it's at this period that he begins to conceive of what he calls a flower woman who decides to launch a scent in honour of Catherine, which you will call this thrill and the main ingredient are the roses from Provence that are from their”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, initially, the catsure houses closed, so when war broke out, and then they reopened. And there is a myth, really, about the mature industry in Paris, that it was just the German occupiers, the Nazis that were buying couturel for their wives and girlfriends and mistresses. And it's true Gerbor's loved luxury buying cature, but in fact there was also a very healthy couture market because wherever there is war, there is money and there were black marketeers, there were collaborators that were making a lot of money. And so there were French buyers of couture. At the end of the war, really the French economy, as the economy right across Europe was... In ruins and the infrastructure of Europe was just devastated because of bombing trains, factories, harbours, everything was in ruins. But the mature industry had”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ravensburg, although it has a very good archive and a very powerful memorial site and museum, it's really not widely visited. There was one French woman who was still alive one talked to, and there was one Hungarian Jewish woman who Catherine had met who was just fortunate at the time. And their testimony was very powerful and very internal. And so those chapters in the book come both from my archival research going towards most of them and also extraordinary to survive.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Help with the resistance. There were members of the Czech resistance, of the Dutch resistance. There were a couple of Americans there that had been helping the resistance in France and there were Polish women, Russian women, and there were German women who had also resisted the Nazi regime. So there were many different nationalities. And Ravensbrook was a place, there was a gas chamber there, but they used also something called extermination through labor, so slave labor. And Catherine was used as one of many, many thousands of slave laborers, and she was moved first on Ravensbrook to three different sub camps where she resused as a slave laborer. Each time I went, there was really nobody else there, so unlike Auschwitz, which really was a place of pilgrimage.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even though I am half Jewish and there were people on my father's side of the fam whose extended family had died in the Holocaust, I had never heard of Raven's book. I didn't know there was a place specifically for women. And it's interesting when I told people that I was researching this book and, you know, talking about Christims Raw and Catherine being deported to a camp, it's astonishing how many people would say to me, Oh gosh, we didn't know that all was Jewish. There was this assumption that the only people were deported to camps were Jewish, but in fact, that's not the case, that there were people at Ravensbrook from many different countries, including there were British women there who had been in the SOEs special operations executive and parachuted into France.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“on the outskirts of Paris, and then finally she was deported on the last train out of Paris just days before the liberation of Paris in august nineteen forty four, and she was deported to Ravensbrook Concentration Camp, so she was on a train whether about two thousand men and about four hundred women, and the men were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp and the women Sir Ravensbrook, which was Hitler's only concentration camp specifically for women, and there she arrived it was a week's journey, and she arrived in this terrible place. And I knew in order to research the book that I would have to go to Ravensbrook myself, which I felt a kind of real reluctance to do so because it's such a dark part of history.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was betrayed by somebody who'd infiltrated the network, a young woman of the same age, a French woman of the same age. And in 1944, she was living with her brother Christian in Paris, who is sheltering her and other members in the resistance of her network, and she was arrested by a unit of the Gestapo, but in Paris actually had a number of French coupons in it who were known as the Gesta Fouste because they were French, and she was arrested, tortured, and didn't give away a single name of office of information. And as a result she saved her partner's life, her best friend's life, her brother's life.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“section of the resistance which was an intelligence gathering network called F two which was a Franco Polish network being set up by Poles that had found themselves behind enemy lines in off the mud. France and so they were gathering intelligence on behalf actually of British intelligence so their intelligence gathering activities were going directly to London both to Polish intelligence and to British intelligence and it was absolutely crucial when it came to the Allies being able to plan to invade or retake France”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For she undertook her first act of resistance was to go and get a radio so that she could listen to the BBC, listen to the band broadcasts of Charles de Gaulle, General de Gaulle, who had escaped to London and was broadcasting on the BBC, calling on his fellow countrymen, and he called them countrymen to resist. And De Gaulle was the leader of the Free French in London, and Catherine, merely by going to get a radio to listen to his broadcast, was risking arrest and imprisonment. When she went to go and get this radio, she met somebody, a man who was older than her, who was the same age as her brother Christian, and like Christian who'd studied politics in Paris at the same university, and he was already in a particular.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On this area of history, of occupied France, I think there's a myth that the majority of resist it's really not true. Vichy France and the collaboration, which was an official French policy that was enacted by the official French government, which also enacted its own anti-Semitic legislation, it didn't need the Nazis to make Vichy France, as it was known, enact its own anti-Semitic legislation. So Catherine was one of a very few people who risked their lives by joining the resistance.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like many people in France, there was just no food, there was rationing in place, but even the rationing meant there was very little food. And they started growing vegetables alongside roses. Then eventually Christian made the decision because the family were destitute to return to Paris and started working for Coutier called Lucien Le Long in occupied Paris at the end of 1941. And Catherine at this point joined the French resistance down in the south of France. She was still just in her early twenties and was a very unusual thing to do. At this point there was probably an maximum hundred thousand members of the French resistance in a population of fourteen million. And I think that when we look back”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Christian joined the Franch Charm, but France fell very rapidly at the invasion of the German troops France capitulated and was occupied very rapidly. And Christian was fortunate for him was not taken a prisoner of war and he managed to make his way back to their father's little home Provence, as did Catherine. And there”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Set up as a mature house who was a freelance designer at this point, that they had a life of kind of Bohemian freedom together in Paris at this point. And I think that economic necessity, both of them had to earn a living. And there's no doubt that Catherine discovered a kind of independence and freedom which she wouldn't have done as the daughter of a prosperous industrialist. But then their lives were thrown into chaos again by the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So then he had to earn a living and he taught himself to do fashion illustrations. First of all that she sought a newspapers and magazines and then he sold dancer cature houses. And as soon as he was able, he sent for his younger sister Catherine to go and live with him in Paris. Catherine had been living with her father in this very remote part of Provence. So she went to live with her brother in Paris and she got her a job in the cature industry in the thirties and what was known as a Mesoon de Maude selling accessories and gloves and hats. And she also became his first model, so in the Dior archives I found pictures of Catherine, you know, modelling her brother's first creations, but this was before he was famous. I mean, he hadn't.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then everything fell apart and their father for obscure reasons ended up, I think just to escape the humiliation of having lost all his money and also was grief-stricken after the loss of his wife and the illness of her son. He ended up in this tiny little small holding in the remote part of Provence but that was in the centre and still is of the Rose Grove Amalia. And Christian at this point had actually also suffered because of the Wall Street crash he had set up his first business which was a modern art gallery and he had shown great aesthetic judgment and taste that he was showing an artist like Darley and Picasso but again in the aftermath of the crash nobody wanted to buy modern art.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And photocultum I ascent. And so they were a prosperous family and their oldest brother actually who was quite a lot older than them fought in the First World War. And after the war, just a series of personal traumas happened to the families. So their other brother developed schizophrenia and this was a time when there was no treatment and he was institutionalized. Then their mother died of septic senior when Catherine was just their tomb.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, they were born in a prosperous family in the early 20th century, what was known in France as La Belle Pot, the beautiful age, or in America it was known as the Gilded Era. But it's a golden age. It's the era before the widespread trauma of the Franco. And then the wars grew crash, the great depression and the Second World War. And their father had inherited the family business, which reserved fertilizer business. He'd inherited that. And the Dior family at this point was synonymous in the 19th century with the stench of Guanel, which is penguin poo, which had been they imported to France and then turned into Fertoniser Agriculture.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, so important about going to climb resources to pick up a piece of paper with handwriting on it or a sketch on it where even though people that wrote letters or drew pictures might now be dead, the pomek remains. And there's something magical about that. But it was also incredibly important to be in the place where they had grown up, the son Catherine had grown up and also where they had lived together. So in Norman's rue, Paris and Provence. So those were my starting points.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, whenever I write and this is my sixth book, I always try and spend time in the places where the people I'm writing about have lived, obviously my starting point was the Dior Archives in Paris. But there are also, there's a Christian Dior Museum in Gravium on the coast of Normandy, which had been the Diors family home. So as important first of all to go to the Dior Archives in Paris, but then go to the family archives in Normandy. I mean, as a writer, I love archives. I think there was something.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Catherine grew the roses for this perfume and that her rose meadows were still very close to Christian's Herman Garden where we were sitting and then he said almost as if by way of an afterthought and Catherine was in the French resistance and was deported to a concentration camp. And I was so astonished to hear this. I mean, I was astonished in so many ways, but I said, you know, why is nobody talked about this before? So I became determined to find out more about Catherine, but the book is not Misty or the title of the book. It's not just about Catherine Dall. I mean, the book is still, does tell the story of Christian as well as Catherine, but I think it's impossible to write. About Christmas rule and to understand Christians without understanding whose relationship with Catherine”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Originally, I thought or I was hoping to write a biography of Christian Rural, and I didn't know anything about Catherine and really nobody knew anything about Catherine. I hadn't quite found my way into the Dior biography, but I'd been doing a lot of research, I'd been Maduro archives. And then I was sitting in what had been Christian deor's garden in the south of France, in Rue Provence up in the hills of Provence, and I was talking to one of the Dior archivists and he mentioned for the first time Catherine Dor, Christian's younger sister, and he said that Misty Or the perfume that had been this Christian Dior's first sense who had launched it at the same time as his dead Lou Collection in Louis was named in honour of Catherine.”
2022-09-16 · Intelligence Squared · The Extraordinary Life of Catherine Dior, with Justine Picardie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT