Christian Dior was born on 21st January 1905 in Granville, Normandy, where his family lived a comfortable bourgeois life supported by a successful fertiliser company. As a boy, he lived in his own little world, amused by “anything that was sparkling, elaborate, flowery or frivolous,” he wrote many years later, but his greatest love was for flowers and plants. Like so many couturiers, he adored his mother and her Belle Époque way of dressing was fixed in his memory forever. His father, in one of these misdirected actions that can often blight the career and even life of a son not understood, wished Christian to join the Diplomatic Corps. He was sent to study in Paris but, in probably the first example of what later flowered into a will of iron, Christian spent all his time on the fringes of the bohemian creative world of Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, Salvador Dalí and, especially, Christian Bérard — the illustrator who was to play a significant role in the success of Dior’s first collection.