Girl in Dior by Annie Goetzinger

Sometimes you read a book because it's there and you've heard of it. Maybe you don't remember exactly what you heard about it, or why, or in what context, but it's been in your head and you're pretty sure it was for positive reasons. The world is full of books: you need to stretch sometimes and that's an easy way to do it.

That's more or less how I came to Girl in Dior, a graphic novel by Annie Goetzinger originally published in France in 2013 and translated into English for this 2015 NBM publication by Joe Johnson. It's available in Hoopla - is there a reason why every Internet-era business needs to have a stupid and infantilizing name? - an app my library system uses to provide various digital things (TV shows, movies, comics, audiobooks, even 'real' books) - and I started reading it after realizing How to Read Nancy was far too dense to dive into on a Saturday afternoon. (And don't get me started on its aggressively hostile introduction, by some academic who was at pains to be clear he hated comics, modernity, 90% of all artists ever, the concept of sequential art, and anything else the reader might possibly love or respect.)

Girl in Dior, I learned after reading it, is a fictionalized account of the first ten years of Christian Dior's high-fashion house, founded in 1947 in Paris. It centers on a young woman, Clara Nohant, who is the primary piece of fiction: she is a minor reporter for the launch, later becomes a model for Dior, and ends by marrying a rich client. (Thus encompassing most of the potential dream-jobs for the book's audience.) I think she's just there as an audience-insert character, and to have a gamine, Audrey Hepburn-esque face to provide a through-line, but it does make me wonder why the book couldn't or didn't focus on Dior himself (surely the more interesting figure) or, considering the audience is primarily women who care about dresses, instead digging into one or more of the large group of women who worked for and with Dior to do all of this - one of his major designers, or models, or seamstresses, or several of the above.

Instead, Girl in Dior is lighter, more of a travelogue - Clara thinks Dior's work is wonderful, but she's not deeply invested. Her story is light, her crises few and easily solved, her endings entirely happy. The book has a lot of detail and color: Goetzinger is particularly good at both drawing the dresses to be very particular and using color to make them pop off the page, in a comics version of the sensation they caused on runways in the late '40s.

I think I wanted more about the real people and less of "look at this gorgeous dress," which is on me. Girl in Dior is very much a "look at this gorgeous dress" book, and my sense is that it's deeply researched and carefully assembled to show specific, distinct gorgeous dresses from those first few Dior collections. There's extensive backmatter to detail chronology, the sources (year and season) of the dresses shown in the book, quick biographical sketches of the historical people who appear (from Dior to Lauren Bacall), lists of potential careers in fashion and types of fabric and accessories, and, finally, a bibliography. This book was clearly very heavily researched, and I have no doubt that everything in it (except Clara) is as close to true as it's possible to be seventy years later.

And it is gorgeous, full of sumptuous expensive formalwear for rich, thin, young, connected women  [1] ready to be elegant and sophisticated (and maybe just a bit useless) after the war years. I always want more context and cultural criticism; I always want more why and less "remember this thing?" Again, that's entirely on me: Girl in Dior is a lovely evocation of a time and place - I haven't even gotten into Goetzinger's faces, which are magnificent, deeply specific, and much less pretty-pretty than the dresses she draws. If any of that sounds appealing, check it out.

[1] Pick at least two.