By Stephanie Warren

Taking place from 13 to 25 November at the Grand Palais in Paris, the House of Dior is celebrating the history of "Miss Dior", its first fragrance created by Monsieur Christian Dior in 1947, with an exhibition exploring the French luxury label's intimate connection to the world of art.

20 years before the opening of his house, the young Christian Dior had one ambition: to live out his passion for art. In the gallery he founded with two of his friends he exhibited the works of the biggest names of the period: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Giorgio De Chirico, employing his intuition and artistic sense to recognize such promising talents as Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder and Salvador Dali.

When he wasn't working at his gallery, the young man devoted himself to his personal art collection and spent time with his friends, the painter and illustrator Christian Bérard, the poet Jean Cocteau, and Salvador Dali and his wife Gala.

When Christian Dior became a couturier, this passion for art visibly informed all his designs. Each one bore witness to an acute color sense and a quasi-architectural conception of form and shape. He baptized them with names such as Braque, Matisse, Mozart  and Chopin, in homage to the great talents he so admired.

Today, in an expression of mutual influences, Christian Dior's heritage is inspiring fifteen women artists from around the world.

With the Miss Dior exhibition, the artists have reinterpreted the codes of the house's very first perfume and its iconography with a contemporary zest. Thus the houndstooth, the iconic motif that graces the Miss Dior flacon, is revisited in a rainbow-colored carpet by the American artist Polly Apfelbaum, while the knot that wraps around the perfume bottle stopper inspired the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos to create a sensually curving sculpture.

In other works, the cannage motif, the rose, the adverts by René Gruau, and Tim Walker's portrait of Natalie Portman give way to new and original interpretations.

With this tribute exhibition, a new page has been written in the story uniting Dior and the artists of the world.