Inspiration Dior Abrams New York, 327 pages Available at National Book Store Does Dior need a New Look?

Few people are aware of one particularly salient fact about the late great Christian Dior: The designer was highly superstitious.

Before heading out, Dior would slip his good luck charms into his pocket, consisting of a four-leaf clover, a star and other periapts.

So it’s amusing to wonder how the designer would feel about the problems plaguing the house of Dior: John Galliano, on trial for flinging appallingly racist epithets at fellow diners at a brasserie near his apartment in Paris (and captured on video: Galliano praising Hitler), defended himself by claiming the amount of alcohol, Valium and sleeping pills resulted in “a state of complete and utter abandon.”

Inspiration Dior: The Pushkin exhibit’s exploration into the world of Dior offers fans an inside look into the label’s 60-year history.

LVMH head honcho Bernard Arnault informed the New York Times’ Cathy Horyn that he would not be rehiring the troublesome former head designer.

“He will not be working for LVMH,” Arnault informed Horyn after the Dior Homme show in Paris, noting that Galliano didn’t have the courtesy of contacting him after the scandal exploded. (Although expecting diplomacy from a man accused of misconduct is more than a little strange — but that’s just us.)

No doubt, Dior, a man who prided himself on gracious living, who christened his first dresses “Love,”  “Tenderness,” and “Happiness,” would have frowned on the kind of disreputable behavior Galliano displayed late last year, memorialized in blogs and tabloids.

In Inspiration Dior, the hefty tome devoted to commemorating the work of Dior, and in particular highlight the Pushkin Museum’s exhibit demonstrating the label’s evolution over the past 60 years, Dior is revealed to be a great lover of art, a master craftsman who would later on help shape the future of fashion.

Dior first made a splash in 1947, revolutionizing the woman’s silhouette with his “New Look,” a treatise on the feminine form. Dior essentially reconstructed the body, modeled after the curving lines of a Modigliani or Renoir. “I designed clothes for flower-like women, with rounded shoulders, full feminine busts and hand-span waists above enormous spreading skirts,” he once said.

The New Look became a thing — what US Weekly would call a Major Trend. A cinched waist, with a formfitting top and big skirt, became code for a certain era: of aristocratic ladies, of debutantes with lace-trimmed parasols, of ’50s housewives with perfectly-coiffed hair and of fetish figures like Dita von Teese. The wasp waist was evocative of a period of renewed femininity, and its creator as a master of the new form, what Pushkin curators Florence Müller and Jacques Rance refer to as the “Pygmalion of elegance and enhanced femininity.”

Dior, as seen on these pages, was an old-fashioned sort of man — who liked his dresses big and dreamy, which explains why old-time movie stars like Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor found his haute couture creations ideal for the red carpet.

It is also the reason why the house has floundered since. With the dresses getting shorter and the neckline getting lower, where does Dior, with its exaggerated flounces and tulle underskirts and heavily beaded bodices, fit?

The House of Dior’s artisans and the label’s signature garments in its original muslin incarnations

In the latter part of the book, devoted to handbags (another weak spot for the label, which has yet to produce an “It” bag) and perfume, the label attempts to craft another image for itself, one at a distance from the belles of the ball that populated the first hundred pages. In it, Charlize Theron and Marion Cotillard, both prominent faces for Dior campaigns, brood in slinky satin or a fitted suit. Perhaps this is where the label might find itself some success: in the mysterious allure of sophisticates like Cotillard, who bring a drama that the label desperately needs. It’s possible that in the hands of European bold-faced names like French First Lady Carla Sarkozy, who often sports the label’s tailored suits to political affairs, Dior can expunge some of the tarnish brought on by racist-slur-spewing Galliano.

Which should yield some good luck on a label that truly needs it. After all, fortune favors the (sartorially) brave.

Christian Dior: A great lover of art, a master craftsman who helped shape the future of fashion