Vintage Dior Bead

On 1stDibs, you can find the most appropriate vintage dior bead for your needs in our varied inventory. Each design created in this style — which was crafted with great care and often made from gold, gold plate and mixed metal — can elevate any look. Find an antique version now, or shop for 375 vintage or 35 modern creation for a more contemporary example of these cherished accessories. Finding the perfect vintage dior bead may mean sifting through those created during different time periods — you can find an early version that dates to the 18th Century and a newer variation that were made as recently as the 21st Century. Finding an appealing vintage dior bead — no matter the origin — is easy, but Christian Dior, Chanel and John Galliano for Christian Dior each produced a popular version that is worth a look. A vintage dior bead of any era or style can lend versatility to your look, but a version featuring pearl, from our inventory of 11, is particularly popular. See these pages for a bead iteration of this accessory, while there are also round cut cut and baguette cut cut versions available here, too. There aren’t many items for men if you’re seeking a vintage dior bead, as most of the options available are for women and unisex.

Prices for a vintage dior bead can differ depending upon size, time period and other attributes — at 1stDibs, these accessories begin at $97 and can go as high as $20,581, while this accessory, on average, fetches $995.

When Christian Dior launched his couture house, in 1946, he wanted nothing less than to make “an elegant woman more beautiful and a beautiful woman more elegant.” He succeeded, and in doing so the visionary designer altered the landscape of 20th century fashion. Vintage Dior bags, shoes, evening dresses, shirts and other garments and accessories are known today for their feminine and sophisticated sensibility.

Dior was born in Granville, on the Normandy coast, in 1905. His prosperous haute bourgeois parents wanted him to become a diplomat despite his interest in art and architecture. However, they agreed to bankroll an art gallery, which Dior opened in 1928 in Paris with a friend.

This was the start of Dior’s rise in the city’s creative milieu, where he befriended Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau. After seven years as an art dealer, Dior retrained as a fashion illustrator, eventually landing a job as a fashion designer for Robert Piguet, and in 1941, following a year of military service, he joined the house of Lucien Lelong. Just five years later, with the backing of industrialist Marcel Boussac, the ascendant Dior established his own fashion house, at 30 avenue Montaigne in Paris.

Just two years after the end of World War II, the fashion crowd and the moribund haute couture industry were yearning, comme tout Paris, for security and prosperity, desperate to discard the drab, sexless, utilitarian garb imposed by wartime deprivation. They needed to dream anew.

And Dior delivered: He designed a collection for a bright, optimistic future. “It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian!” exclaimed Carmel Snow, the prescient American editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, famously proclaiming, “Your dresses have such a new look.” The press ran with the description, christening Dior’s debut Spring/Summer haute couture collection the New Look. “God help those who bought before they saw Dior,” said Snow. “This changes everything.”

Dior’s collection definitively declared that opulence, luxury and femininity were in. His skirts could have 40-meter-circumference hems, and outfits could weigh up to 60 pounds. They were cut and shaped like architecture, on strong foundations that molded women and “freed them from nature,” Dior said. Rather than rationing, his ladies wanted reams of fabric and 19-inch waists enforced by wire corsets, and the fashion world concurred. The debut got a standing ovation.

In the subsequent decade, Paris ruled as the undisputed fashion capital of the world, and Christian Dior reigned as its king. With the luxuriously full skirts of his New Look, suits and his drop-dead gorgeous couture dresses and ball gowns worthy of any princess, Dior gave women the gift of glamour they’d lost in the miserable years of war.

On 1stDibs, find an exquisite range of vintage Christian Dior clothing, jewelry, handbags and other items.