He was forty-one years old when he started. Fifty-two when he died. Eleven years. That is all Christian Dior had.

In those eleven years, he rebuilt the French fashion industry from the wreckage of the Second World War. He dressed Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Princess Margaret, and the future Jacqueline Kennedy. He introduced a silhouette so radical that women tore dresses in the streets over it. He launched one of the most successful perfume businesses in history. He invented the licensing model that the entire luxury industry still runs on. He trained Yves Saint Laurent.

He did all of it while consulting fortune-tellers before every major decision, carrying six lucky charms in his pockets at all times, and sometimes needing his chauffeur to drive in circles around the block because he was too anxious to walk into his own headquarters.

This episode tells the full story: the clifftop villa in Granville and the gardens that shaped everything. The art gallery, the tuberculosis, the collapse of his family's fortune. The war, the occupation, and his sister Catherine's imprisonment at Ravensbrück. The founding of the house and the New Look of 1947. The empire he built in a decade. His private character — the anxiety, the superstitions, the solitude. The young Yves Saint Laurent. And the death at fifty-two that nobody saw coming.

A podcast about fashion, superstition, gardens, and the strange alchemy of genius and anxiety.

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