Fashion Designer.  He was the founder of Christian Dior, one of the world’s most renowned fashion houses.  One of five children of a successful fertilizer manufacturer, he took an interest in art at an early age and would sell his fashion sketches outside the family home in Paris, France.  In 1928 he established a small art gallery that closed three years later due to the Great Depression.  In 1937 he began working for fashion designer Robert Piguet and worked alongside Pierre Balmain.  When World War II broke out in September 1939, he joined the French Army.  Discharged in 1942, he began working for the fashion house of Lucien Lelong as one of their primary designers.  After the war, he was asked by French entrepreneur Marcel Boussac to design for the Phillippe et Gaston fashion house in Paris but he declined and set out on his own, and in December 1946 he established the fashion house that bears his name.  He named his first clothing line Corolle, and it inspired the Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief Carmel Snow to refer it as the “New Look.”  A master at creating shapes and silhouettes, his clothing utilized fabrics lined predominantly with percale, boned, bustier-style bodices, hip padding, wasp-waisted corsets and petticoats that made his dresses flare out from the waist, giving his models a very curvaceous form.  He died at the age of 52 while vacationing in Montecatini Terme, Italy.  The exact cause of his death was never officially disclosed. (bio by: William Bjornstad)