Fashionably Fascist - The Forgotten History of Dior

Guest post by Simon Biryani

Francois Dior (centre) and Colin Jordon (far right) in 1964

The world-renowned fashion designer John Galliano has been in the news recently for  disgraceful displays of anti-semitism. His employers, Dior, have summararily sacked him, and the Face of Dior,  actress, Natalie Portman, has said "I am deeply shocked and disgusted by the video of John Galliano's comments that surfaced today. In light of this video, and as an individual who is proud to be Jewish, I will not be associated with Mr. Galliano in any way." 

However, there is a piece of history that puts an interesting twist to this whole affair that has seemingly gone underground, despite having some its roots in that pivotal decade of change for fashion and many other things besides, the 1960s. This is from the book ‘The National Front’, by Martin Walker, published by Fontana in 1977:

"The major problem with the N.S.M. [National Socialist Movement], which was to cause the split in 1964, was the attractive French  heiress, Francois Dior. She had been married to Count Robert-Henri de Camount-la-Force and had been a fervent monarchist. She had first appeared at the Princedale Road HQ in the summer of 1962, and [Colin] Jordan courted her. While Jordan was still in prison¹, she became engaged to [John] Tyndall, and on Jordan’s release the two men vied for her hand. Her marriage to Jordan took place on the 5th of October, 1963, and a curious ceremony it was.

For the occasion, she wore a black and gold swastika necklace, encrusted with diamonds. They supped mead, toasted the British Nazi movement to the strains of the 'Horst Wessel Lied', and over a swastika-draped table, swore that they were of untainted Aryan blood, cut their fingers and let the mingled drop of their blood fall on to an open page of a virgin copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Within  three months they were separate,; they were briefly reconciled, but Jordan was granted a divorce in October, 1967. In 1965, Francoise was the French representative of the World Union of National Socialists, and, in January 1968, was sentenced to eighteen months in prison at the Old Bailey for conspiring to commit arson on synagogues. On the eve of her trial, she told the Daily Telegraph: 'I would like to make an Act of  Parliament to burn down all synagogues by law'."

This next section is from the book The Other Face of Terror: Inside Europe’s Neo-Nazi Network, by Ray Hill with Andrew Bell, publisshed by Grafton Books, 1988;

"Among those who had deserted the fold... was the perfume heiress Fancoise Dior, a bitter anti-semite whom  I knew personally from my days as a National Socialist Movement member in Britain. It was her marriage to Colin Jordan in 1963 that led a scorned John Tyndall to break away and form his own organisation. Even today, Tyndall remembers being jilted by his fiancee with incredible anger. Later she was jailed for her part in arson attacks on synagogues in and around London.
 ...I was completely taken aback by the news....that she had joined up with Jacques Chirac’s conservative RPR [Rassemblement pour la République] opposition. [We discovered later that she was also a member of the Paris branch of the British Conservative Party]. This was a leopard, I felt sure, who would never trade in  her spots, an assessment which was borne out a couple of years later when she was found to be financing Our Nation, Martin Webster’s ill-fated group set up after he had was expelled from the National Front."

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1) Two months for "insulting words likely to cause a breach of the peace". What he actually said (from the plinth at the NSM Rally in Trafalgar Square on 1st July, 1962) was: “More and more people every day are opening their eyes and coming to see Hitler was right. They are coming to see that our real enemies, the people we should have fought , were not Hitler and the National Socialists of Germany but world Jewry and its associates in this country”.