Capturing the castle

Seventy years after Christian Dior’s last fashion show in Scotland, the brand returned under creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri for a celebratory event honouring local craftsmanship, the beauty of the land and the Auld Alliance, explains Kim Parker

- Kim Parker

I LINGERED a little in Scotland,’ wrote Christian Dior in his 1956 memoir, Dior by Dior. ‘I had heard so much about its beauty that I had feared to be disappointed—on the contrary, I was even more struck by the beauty of the country, the castles, and the moors, than I had expected.’

The Normandy-born couturier recorded his lasting impressions following two spectacular charity fashion shows he had held in Scotland the previous year—one at Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire and the other at the Central Hotel in Glasgow. Featuring 172 dresses (many named after Scottish locations, such as Dundee and Edinburgh) and watched by more than 1,000 attendees, including the cream of Scottish Society, Dior’s events were an enormous success, raising £4,000 (more than £88,000 today) for Friends of France, a wartime charity founded in Glasgow. Afterwards, the designer and his guests, such as the ‘delightful’ Duchess of Buccleuch, reeled the night away in the Gleneagles ballroom, enjoying themselves so thoroughly that, as he later recalled, ‘the floor shook and bounced’.

Dior was a lifelong Britophile, having first visited London as a young man to perfect his English in 1926. One of his earliest designs was a dress named Café Anglais, which he created in 1938 for the Parisian couturier Robert Piguet and served as a full-skirted prototype for the voluminous silhouettes he would go on to envisage for his own