Maurice Dior was born in Normandy and came from a family of industrialists who were former farmers from Savigny-le-Vieux, on the border between the Calvados and Manche departments.

[3] The company's success was buoyed along by innovations and the diversification of its activities: the Diors were the first people to produce sulphuric acid for phosphate fertilizer.

[1] The Diors opened factories in Brittany – in Landerneau, Rennes and Saint-Marc, a town not far from Brest that was to give its name to the famous washing powder created a few years later.

In 1905, the family left for the center of Granville and moved into a villa—Les Rhumbs—which Maurice's wife Madeleine decorated in the fashion of the time and where she created a garden sheltered from the wind.

[1] He then found himself unable to pay back the loan that he had taken out as part of the real estate operations intended to ensure his fortune and that of his sons.

[1] It was in Callian, in Les Naÿssès, the small Provençal farmhouse that he purchased in 1932, that Maurice Dior died on December 9, 1946, a few months before the inauguration of his son's couture house and the resounding success of his first runway show.