To help celebrate the bicentennial of the U.S.’s independence in 1976 and its strong links with the country, the house of Dior created a limited-edition bottle of its distinguished Miss Dior perfume.
It is likely that the special edition was created as a gift given to attendees at the Bal des Petits Lits Blancs held in New Orleans in May 1976. According to a WWD article dated May 24 of that year, with the headline “The Creole Connection,” 400 Europeans attended that high-society event.
Created in 1947, Miss Dior came in a white crystal amphora and honored Christian Dior’s sister, Catherine, who was a freedom fighter in the French Resistance.
More colorful, intricately designed limited-edition versions of the bottle were commissioned to Baccarat by Dior in 1950.
The Miss Dior bottle appearing in the Comité Colbert exhibition comes in blue crystal and with gold details. The words “New Orleans” were inscribed, and the flacon features the city’s coat of arms, as well as those of the first American states, plus the anniversary dates 1776 and 1976.
This bottle was an obvious choice for the exhibit, according to Frédéric Bourdelier, director of heritage and patrimony at Parfums Christian Dior.
“It was the brief of the Comité Colbert to reveal hidden treasure,” he explained. “I knew that we have this bottle in our collection, but we never displayed it before.”
Another limited-edition Miss Dior flacon came in three colors: blue cobalt, red garnet and opaline white.
“It’s the colors of the French flag and the U.S. [flag], too,” Bourdelier said, adding the bottle on show in New York is probably a prototype.
There has been an 80-year love story between the U.S. and Dior, he said. In mid-1948, the house created its first international subsidiary there for its fragrance activity, which was located in New York.
“It was to capitalize on the phenomenal success of the New Look,” Bourdelier said, referring to the waist-cinching, fan-skirted “New Look” fashioned by Christian Dior, which caused a sensation in 1947.
Miss Dior launched a year later in the U.S.
“Grace Kelly, Josephine Baker and Marlene Dietrich loved the couture and Miss Dior fragrance,” Bourdelier said. Diorama, the perfume that followed, was a favorite in the U.S., too.
“Grace Kelly also loved Diorissimo,” he continued.
In the ’70s, when the blue Miss Dior bottle appeared in New Orleans, Dior’s perfume business was highly important to the house — as it had been at the start and is today.
“We tried to adapt our fragrances to the local markets,” Bourdelier said.
Diorella was launched in New York on the ocean liner called France, for instance.
“We had intense creativity on the perfume side,” Bourdelier said. “And it’s still true.”
