The first time Soizic Pfaff set foot in La Galerie Dior, the Paris museum dedicated to the French luxury house, she “cried a little bit, because it was so important.” Pfaff joined Dior in 1974 as an assistant in the licensing department, and in the nearly half century since has become director of Dior Heritage, overseeing the brand archives. “They succeeded in the architecture,” she says from a corner booth in the gallery’s cafe, her eyes welling. “And it was what Mr. Dior, I’m sure, he wanted. I’m still emotional.”

The gallery, which opened to the public in the spring, occupies the same address as Dior’s original boutique and ateliers—30 avenue Montaigne in the 8th arrondissement—and is a monumental destination for the house, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. Such longevity is a notable achievement for any brand, but especially so for Dior, given that its founder, Christian Dior, died just 10 years after launching his eponymous label.

“The first Dior collection in 1947 had a tremendous impact,” says creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri. The original couturier’s designs, Chiuri notes, were instrumental in helping French fashion “reclaim its rightful center spot” following World War II, which ravaged the previously thriving industry. Famously coined the New Look by then Harper’s Bazaar editor in chief Carmel Snow, it was marked by full skirts, cinched-waist silhouettes, and rounded shoulders; a stark departure from more practical wartime dressing.

Seventy-five years later, with Chiuri as the first woman at the helm of Dior women’s and couture collections, Kim Jones as creative director of menswear, and Victoire de Castellane overseeing fine jewelry, it remains one of the world’s most influential luxury labels. Chiuri and Pfaff attribute much of this success to the brand’s commitment to its heritage, which chairman and CEO Pietro Beccari reaffirmed with the opening of La Galerie Dior and a revamp of the adjoining flagship boutique.

Born in normandy in 1905 and later raised in Paris, Christian Dior came from a wealthy family supported by his father’s successful fertilizer business. His parents “wanted him to be a diplomat,” says Hélène Starkman, the longtime cultural projects manager and exhibitions curator. They pressured him to study political science, but he never graduated. Dior père gave his son money to open an art gallery under the condition that it wouldn’t bear the Dior name; that, his parents believed, would be gauche.

When Dior was forced to close the gallery in 1931 following the collapse of his father’s business, he became an illustrator and then an assistant to designer Robert Piguet. After his stint in the French military, he returned to assistant life, this time under Lucien Lelong. Dior was approached by textile manufacturer Marcel Boussac in 1946 to revive the Philippe et Gaston brand. Dior had something else in mind. According to Starkman, he told Boussac, “ ‘You want to reopen a house that was open before the war, but I don’t think it’s relevant today. It’s 1946, the war is over, we have to appeal to people who are starting a new life after the war.’ ”

The argument was convincing, and the two opened the Christian Dior offices and atelier at 30 Montaigne. There, on February 12, 1947, Dior presented his first collection to the press and select members of high society: 95 looks that included Dior’s now iconic Bar suit, consisting of an hourglass-silhouetted cream jacket and a pleated A-line skirt. The success was immediate, and by 1953 the couturier was exhibiting his collections abroad, designing costumes for Hollywood films, and had opened boutiques in New York and Caracas.

“In a way, Christian Dior never wanted to become Christian Dior,” Starkman says. “He wanted to be open only for a few clients, the richest of them and the most sophisticated of them,” she adds, noting the expense of his garments due to the use of luxury fabrics and each piece being made-to-measure. “He didn’t mean to become a household name.” But he did.

When Dior died unexpectedly at 52 in 1957, he left behind an identity that allowed the company and his predecessors to thrive. Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, and Raf Simons successively filled the creative director role, then Chiuri in 2016.

“I think a lot of people don’t realize how focused and how business oriented he was,” Starkman says of the late designer. “If he hadn’t been like that, there would probably not be a house of Dior 75 years later, you know?”

By the time LVMH head Bernard Arnault purchased Dior in 1984, the brand had expanded to include ready-to-wear, menswear, and children’s clothes, as well as a cosmetics line. One of Arnault’s first big ventures was organizing a house retrospective at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris to mark the brand’s 40th anniversary in 1987. A small team was assembled to locate garments and documents for the exhibit, and shortly afterward the archives department was established. Pfaff took over the department in 1996. “I arrived there three weeks before Galliano,” she says. “I learned with him; we learned together.”

Pfaff and her team pursue various avenues to locate archival pieces. Many are found and bought at auctions or acquired from museums. Some, like the Junon gown from Dior’s fall-winter 1949–1950 collection, are obtained by referencing the designer’s extensive client records and contacting those families. “That dress, we bought it back from [the family of] a woman named Mrs. Newman from Florida,” Pfaff says. “She died quite young, and her husband organized an auction with all the garments she bought from Dior, and also accessories. Of course, we bought everything.”

“It’s really madness that led us to propose this,” Beccari says of La Galerie Dior, which the house conceived in 2018. His goal, he explains, was “to create a fantastic point of uniqueness for the Dior brand in Paris”—something that couldn’t be replicated. “It took courage to go to Monsieur Arnault,” he notes of the project, which required Dior to close the flagship boutique, offices, and atelier occupying 30 Montaigne for more than two years. The brand tapped longtime collaborator Peter Marino for the architecture. Nathalie Crinière, who has designed several past Dior exhibits, set the various scenes.

“What is incredible is that the story of Dior began here,” Crinière says, echoing a sentiment shared by her colleagues that the museum couldn’t be built anywhere else.

The exhibit opens with a spiral staircase ascending in front of a three-story glass enclosure that displays a rainbow of more than 1,800 3D-printed miniature Dior pieces. “The idea was how to go up without getting boring,” Crinière explains. “With this big colorama, people get surprised and understand that they are going to something very special.” The origins of Dior’s luxury house are presented elsewhere through original sketches, early press clippings, and the charts of fabric swatches Dior used to plan his collections.

Past and present are intertwined in multiple rooms. Two, filled with floral-motif gowns designed by various creative directors, serve as homage to Dior’s love of flowers. A re-creation of the backstage area where models prepared for shows, which resembles a cabin, is visible through glass flooring. There are odes to the Miss Dior fragrance and Dior’s days as a gallerist, when he displayed works by Picasso, Man Ray, and Dalí. Videos dedicated to each creative director play in a loop in one space, and another highlights some of the house’s most famous garments: the Bohan-designed gold lamé gown Lauren Hutton wore in the French film Tout feu, tout flamme, the navy Galliano slip Princess Diana donned for the 1996 Met Gala, a playful nod to scandal just after her divorce from Prince Charles. A space dedicated to Dior’s savoir faire has duos from various departments of the atelier demonstrating their skills in real time. “There are these really beautiful moments where [we] have an apprentice who’s in her 20s, and then next to her somebody who’s in their 60s and spent 40 years at Dior,” Starkman says. “The gallery welcomes over a thousand visitors each day,” she adds. “You hear a lot of languages when you walk through the museum,” Starkman says. “Of course, you will have fashionistas, students in fashion—all the people that you expect to have in a fashion exhibition. But there’s also a much wider audience.”

As La Galerie Dior was being built, the adjoining flagship boutique was revamped to include two eateries—a patisserie and Le Restaurant Monsieur Dior—three gardens, and various other trappings, like a dedicated haute couture salon and a towering rose sculpture by Isa Genzken.

“Every day we have people queuing in front of the boutique,” Starkman says. “Not necessarily to go in and buy something, but just for the experience.” Beccari likens it to “the anti-metaverse; you must come here and feel these emotions,” he says. This was apparent during a springtime visit to the boutique. Outside, a line of house enthusiasts and curious tourists awaited entry behind a Dior-branded partition. Inside, a group of women pored over thread colors in a space dedicated to customizing shoes and bags. Upstairs, diners partook in Dior’s favorite recipes as envisioned by chef Jean Imbert. Everyone everywhere was snapping photos—of the meticulously landscaped roof, of cappuccinos topped with foamy cinnamon Dior logos, and lots and lots of selfies.

“I told my staff the other day that I would like someone to leave here with a Dior ‘tattoo,’ ” Beccari says of the museum and boutique. “Meaning they liked it so much that not only do they not forget—maybe it’s a dress they don’t forget, or La Galerie Dior, or the Restaurant Monsieur Dior where they had a great meal—but that they’ll have something that reminds them of Dior.”

When Chiuri was offered the creative director role in 2016, she “could hardly believe it.” At the time she was co–creative director of Valentino alongside Pierpaolo Piccioli, having previously worked at Fendi. “At first, I was torn, but then I came to realize that this was a challenge that I could not and should not walk away from,” she says. Since then, the Rome-born Chiuri has sought to design for women whose wardrobes call for not just elegance and allure, but practicality. This approach means more T-shirts, denim, and sneakers, though the house’s ultrafeminine codes still exist by way of full skirts, corset bodices, and embroidered tulle gowns. Both Chiuri and Jones have collaborated with contemporary artists, such as Judy Chicago and Amoako Boafo, and their interpretations of Bohan’s oblique print and Galliano’s saddle bag are among reissues helping Dior grow profits year over year. According to Vogue Business, the house clocked an estimated $7 billion in sales in 2021, up from a reported $4.6 billion in 2019.

“What I am most proud of is having succeeded in giving shape to a contemporary femininity capable of reconciling the demands of feminism with an idea of fashion that is at the service of women,” says Chiuri. “And also to have shone a light, thanks to the communicative power of Dior, on artists, activists, and theorists committed to women day in and day out. Now I’m coming to realize that I’ve done a good job, thanks to the recognition I get. Of course, I don’t feel smug about it—there is still a lot of work to be done—but this motivates me to go on.”

Beccari likewise says he aims “not to just sell products, but to tell a story through them.” Projects like the renovation of 30 Montaigne are central to that vision, even if they aren’t the safest bet. “I think you must put a bit of chaos into the business,” he says. “Take risks and be provocative, because repeating the same thing isn’t going to lead to success.”

Though Chiuri feels there is “perhaps too much” talk about fashion and time, the feat of Dior remaining a paradigm of luxury fashion for 75 years is not lost on her. “When a brand is solid, because its vision is authentic, it withstands the test of time,” she says. “It endures because it knows how to read contemporaneity through the sensitivity of all its creative directors, and of all the artisans who make the magic happen. In this sense, Dior is an extraordinary example of the communicative and cultural power of fashion. It knows how to speak about all of us. It knows how to speak to today.”