Remembrance Of Things Past

The place where artistic directors go to find not only the original story, but their own version of it— Dior Heritage, an archive of the fashion house in Paris, plays the role of both keeper and muse

- Komal Sharma

In a tiny booklet dated December 1951—its yellow pages made brittle with time—Christian Dior had catalogued sketches and notes on his first boutique shop at 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris. “We didn’t even know that this booklet existed. It was found in another building, among a pile of other things. For us, it’s a treasure because we saw what Monsieur Dior wanted to promote from his first small boutique,” says Soizic Pfaff, a silver-haired woman, delighted like a child over the historic material she was about to show us, as Bazaar toured Dior Heritage, the archive of Christian Dior in Paris, last year. The curator and director of the department, Pfaff has been with Dior for 44 years.