DREAM TICKET

Dior’s global flagship in Paris reopens its doors with a new look, a museum, a restaurant and an apartment for overnight stays

- AMY SERAFIN

In 1946, when Christian Dior saw the four-storey hôtel particulier at 30 Avenue Montaigne, built in the 1860s for a son of Napoleon, he knew he had to have it for his new fashion house. It was elegant, of manageable size, and located close to potential customers staying at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée.

In 2018, when Pietro Beccari, the newly-arrived CEO of Dior, was formulating a strategic plan for the company’s future, he looked back to this beginning. ‘I was thinking of ways to make Dior even more exceptional. I thought the answer was under my nose. It’s rare to have a building where the history of your own Maison started, and where you still feel the owner, Monsieur Dior, in the walls.’

This was right after the ‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ exhibition at Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs (MAD), which drew more than 700,000 visitors in six months. Beccari wanted not only to renovate the historic flagship store but to install a permanent museum ‘where people can see the office of Monsieur Dior, the stairs the models walked down for the first time, the cabine [where the models changed].’ He envisioned 30 Montaigne (which had expanded over the years to eight adjoining buildings) as a new destination to shop, eat, experience the archives, or even (for a lucky few) spend the night. It would bring together the Maison's entire universe – past, present and future – in one astonishing location.