Christian Dior

“Immediately, he transformed Dior Couture into a holding company, allocated its stake in LVMH, and offered the capital to the holding company, and offered the capital of the holding company to private investors. Why did he do that? Because this brought Bernard …”

“Bernard targets Boussac because he wants Dior. That is the first in a chain of events that's going to eventually lead him to overtaking and taking over LVMH.”

“If you have a powerful brand, all these other things can be fixed.”

“Christian Dior called Balenciaga the master of us all, and Coco Chanel said that Balenciaga was the only couturier in the truest sense of the word, and that everybody else was simply a fashion designer.”

“During this decade, Dior sold over 100,000 dresses made from 16,000 design sketches and using 1000 miles of fabric.”

“Dior could not actually make a dress. He was a designer, as Coco Chanel said, not a courtier.”

“Boussac's business is the business that a young Bernard Arnal buys. I think he's like, 35 years old at the time.”

“The sheer volume that they produce, being prolific, increases your surface area of luck.”

“Without this financial disaster, Dior would probably have spent his life as a middle-ranking art dealer and died unknown.”

“Dior dressed the rich. Balenciaga the very rich. And this was known at the time. It says during the 19 fifties, a woman graduated from Dior to Balenciaga.”

“During this decade, Dior sold over a 100,000 dresses made from 16,000 design sketches and using a thousand miles of fabric.”

“His great-great-grandfather was one of the first people in France to ever import bat guano, which is just bat shit. He's, his great-great-grandfather, I think, in 1832, is, was the first person in France to import bat shit from Chile and use it as fertilizer i…”

“His biggest customers by far were not the French. They were not the Europeans. They were the Americans.”

“And so what Christian Dior has at his core is imposter syndrome. And the way he got around this is he literally invented a character, an alter ego.”

“His first collection turned out to be the most successful in fashion history.”

“Without this financial disaster, Dior would probably have spent his life as a middle ranking art dealer and died unknown.”

“In short, it's the impossibility of making something new out of something old in a trade where novelty is all important.”

“It is widely and quite erroneously believed that when the house of Christian Dior was launched, enormous sums were spent on publicity. On the contrary, not a single penny was allotted to it.”

“Genuinely with people that get excessively good at what they do. We see that theme over and over again.”

“Like I've read biographies of Christian Dior and Coco Chanel and Balenciaga and Ralph Lauren. They are way more like Steve jobs in their approach. They have a perspective. They have a point of view. They have an idea in their mind's eye that they want to bring…”