In 1962, French socialite Françoise Dior—niece of couturier Christian Dior and cousin of Resistance fighter Catherine Dior—entered the British neo-Nazi underground after visiting Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement in London. She used her wealth, aristocratic connections, and social standing to help establish a French section of the World Union of National Socialists, an international organization founded by Jordan and American neo-Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell. Her marriage to Jordan on 5 October 1963 transformed a fringe political alliance into an international press spectacle. At the civil ceremony in Coventry, demonstrators pelted the couple with rotten eggs and apples as they gave the Nazi salute; the following day, at the NSM headquarters in London, the pair staged a second ceremony featuring Hitler salutes, the Horst-Wessel-Lied, and a ritual in which they cut their ring fingers with a dagger and allowed their blood to fall together over an open copy of Mein Kampf. Dior reportedly declared, "All I want is little Nazi children."
The spectacle provoked an unusually direct repudiation from her own family. Her aunt Catherine Dior, who had survived Ravensbrück concentration camp, issued a public statement condemning the press attention given to Françoise’s statements and warning that Christian Dior’s respected name must not be exploited to promote the scandal. The marriage collapsed almost immediately: within three months, Françoise publicly dismissed Jordan as a "middle-class nobody," while newspapers printed humiliating accounts of their separation and reconciliation. The episode permanently attached the Dior surname to one of postwar Europe’s most theatrical neo-Nazi scandals, despite no indication that Christian Dior or his couture house endorsed Françoise’s politics.
