When I first began to write The Paris Gown, I viewed it as a delightful chance to return to the exquisite world of Christian Dior and his fashion house, a milieu I had grown to love while writing Sisters of the Resistance. However, as novels tend to do, this story became so much more: a celebration and acknowledgment of the vital importance of female friendship in every woman’s life—particularly through times of hardship—and a loving tribute to my own dear friends.
As I wrote the story of Claire, Gina, and Margot, I also reflected on how often my close friendships have come in threes. In The Paris Gown, I have explored the dynamics of those tripartite relationships.
The gown around which the story revolves is fictional but based on the creation Dior designed for Princess Margaret for her twenty-first birthday party in 1951. The official portrait by Cecil Beaton shows the bespoke detailing chosen by Margaret herself; Her Royal Highness later described it as “my favorite dress of all.”
Claire, Gina, and Margot are fictional characters, but the background for Claire’s experience in the kitchen brigade comes from the impressive career and innovations of Escoffier, chef de cuisine at the Ritz Hotel, and also the story of Madame Brazier, who in 1933 became the first person awarded six Michelin stars—three at each of her two restaurants. Le Chat-qui-Pêche (the cat who fishes) is the name of a street in Paris. I liked it, so I stole it for Claire’s brasserie.
Margot is inspired by Australia’s answer to Nancy Mitford, Robin Dalton, whose excellent memoirs Aunts Up the Cross and One Leg Over are a joy to read. Dalton grew up in a mansion on the edge of Sydney’s red-light district, Kings Cross. Margot’s story about her father shooting himself in the leg with the pistol he kept in his surgery for protection against the unsavory characters who were sometimes his patients was gleaned from Dalton’s memoirs.
Dalton divorced her first violently abusive husband, ran off to London in 1946, and fell in love with David Mountbatten, Prince Philip’s cousin and best man at his wedding to Princess Elizabeth. David couldn’t marry Robin because of the rule against direct descendants of Queen Victoria marrying divorcées but the two of them enjoyed a committed relationship in spite of this. After many adventures, including spying for the king of Thailand, eventually Robin became a literary agent and producer with an impressive list of clients: Margaret Drabble, Arthur Miller, Iris Murdoch, Joan Collins, Laurence Olivier, and Peter Weir, to name a few. The movies Robin produced include Madame Sousatzka and Oscar and Lucinda. Andrew and Charlotte Mountbatten are my fictional additions to the Mountbatten family tree.
To write about Margot’s marriage, I undertook extensive research into the trauma caused by what is now called narcissistic abuse—sometimes known as coercive control. In my opinion, the best book on this subject written for laypeople is It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People by Dr. Ramani Durvasula. For those who haven’t experienced a form of abuse that can be so subtle and incremental and yet so devastating, it can be difficult to understand. Often victims feel very isolated, misunderstood by friends, family, and even professional therapists who are not trained in this area, so it is important to find the right help. Thankfully, this is more readily available today than it was in the 1950s.