Bouquet de Dior

A ROOM full of flowers welcomes guests to Dior's first boutique in Australia, in another sign of our growing intoxication with luxury goods.

dinner

WHEN Dior wants to say it has arrived, it says it with flowers. Just as the brand's newly appointed women's wear designer, Raf Simons, announced his arrival at the House of Dior last year with flowers - a million of them, in fact - so too did the brand use a floral tribute to proclaim that it had arrived Down Under.

At an exclusive dinner to celebrate the opening of the first Christian Dior boutique in Australia (on Sydney's Castlereagh Street) guests were greeted by flowers, flowers and more flowers. It wasn't quite as extravagant a display as the one used for a backdrop to Simon's first haute couture show for Dior last July, whereby five rooms in a classic Parisian mansion were filled with one million blooms, but it was as jaw dropping.

After the official opening of the store earlier this year, a select group of 48 guests were whisked away from the flagship boutique in a fleet of limousines to Catalina Restaurant on the harbour's edge at Rose Bay. It was high summer and one of those perfect Sydney evenings that the city is known for but doesn't always put on. But what drew wows and gasps as the guests filed into the restaurant was not the last remaining sunlight of the day glistening on the water, nor the boats bobbing in the bay, nor the sea plane parked outside the restaurant but the incredible display of flowers covering almost every surface. And then there was the smell. Vases upon vases were filled with antique roses, gardenias, hydrangeas, David Austin roses, blackberries, lisianthus and asparagus fern and the scent as guests entered the room was intoxicating.

A room full of flowers - not to mention a stunning harbour view - never fails to bring a smile to the face of even the most jaded party goer. Flowers are significant for the House of Dior. Christian Dior loved flowers and cultivated them in his country garden at Granville in France and referred to the silhouettes of his famous New Look collection as his "Flower Women". As guests entered the room - they included singer Tina Arena, actor Isabel Lucas, designer Collette Dinnigan and her husband Bradley Cocks, model Megan Gale, former Olympian Geoff Huegill and his wife Sara, architect Nick Tobias and his wife Miranda Darling, property billionaire Ian Joye and his wife Maggie, model Nicole Pollard as well as Dior executives including chief executive Sidney Toledano, chief operating officer Serge Brunschwig and general manager of Oceania and Micronesia Mark Browne - their faces lit up.

It was a similar scene at the cocktail party in the store. New luxury stores hardly ever seem to be built on time which means the official opening of the store is often after it has opened for trading, but that wasn't the case with this one. The cocktail party, which necessitated street closures and traffic marshals in the CBD, was the great unveiling for Dior in Australia and a crowd that was used to going to store openings responded with excitement and awe. Not bad considering that retail is supposed to be in a slump. Whether the party mood translates into sales remains to be seen, but Sydney has been through something of a luxury boom in the past 18 months with store openings and expansions by brands including Louis Vuitton, Prada, Chanel, Gucci, Ermenegildo Zegna, Hugo Boss, Omega, TAG Heuer, Bottega Veneta and Salvatore Ferragamo, and in the luxury business supply is almost always driven by demand.

Sidney Toledano joined Christian Dior in 1994 as its director of leather goods and has been the company's chief executive since 1998 and, as such, has been at the helm during a period of unprecedented growth that has propelled Dior to become one of the world's biggest luxury brands. During his tenure, Toledano has visited Australia several times and says the country's growing appetite for luxury goods prompted the house to search for a location for a boutique years ago, but it had to be in the right location. "It was not only a problem of real estate and finding the right location, it was also a problem of finding the right type of building," he says. "So when Louis Vuitton decided to move to a bigger location, we thought this building [the old Vuitton store] was the perfect one for us to present the house in the right way. So it took us some time to find the right space, but on top of that it was just the right timing. I haven't been here in over five years, but the centre of the world is changing now from Europe to Asia, and that like a wave has brought me back here."

Dior, like most luxury brands, says its core business in Australia will come from local customers and that a growing demand and wealth here are driving the boom in luxury store openings. But there is another factor fuelling the growth: tourism from China is booming. The number of Chinese tourists visiting Australia last year grew by 16 per cent to almost 630,000, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (overall tourists numbers grew by 4.6 per cent). The number has tripled in the past decade and is set to reach a million by 2015. China is now the second-biggest tourist source market for Australia (after New Zealand) and, according to Tourism Australia, when the Chinese visit they're big spenders. For the 12 months to last September, the total trip spend by Chinese visitors was more than $4 billion. And the growth is coming not only from China but other Asian markets as well. In fact, eight of the top 10 source markets are in Asia, compared with just six a decade ago. Despite reports of an economic slowdown in China, Toledano is confident the Sydney store will perform well and says there is scope for more Dior stores in other Australian cities.

"Obviously, this country is going to be visited by people from everywhere," he says. "So that makes us think we will have a lot of potential here. More stores are definitely on the agenda. My colleagues in Melbourne [Dior's watches, fragrances and beauty products have been available in Australia for many years] have convinced me that there is potential for Dior there to showcase everything the house has to offer, and I still have to go to other cities like Perth. My next trip will be a longer visit and to see more people and discover the future potential of Dior here."

Christian Dior is part of the luxury conglomerate LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, whose chairman and chief executive is Bernard Arnault, France's richest man. While Louis Vuitton is said to be the biggest driver of profits for the group, it is Christian Dior that is thought to be Arnault's real pride and joy.

In the mid-1970s Arnault inherited a small fortune - the family business was in construction - but a decade later he set out on a path to transform his fortune and the luxury industry at the same time. In 1984, he bought Boussac Saint-Freres, a bankrupt textile and disposable nappy company that owned a mixed bag of assets, which just happened to include the French department store Le Bon Marche as well as the House of Dior. Arnault promptly sold off the company's other assets, except for the department store and Dior, and went on an acquisition spree that would ultimately create the world's biggest luxury conglomerate, which now stretches into wine, watches, jewellery and beauty as well as fashion and leather goods. Dior was Arnault's entree into the luxury business - his daughter Delphine is the brand's deputy general manager - and Toledano is, therefore, one of his most trusted executives. Toledano, together with Delphine, was responsible for appointing the Belgian designer Raf Simons to the position of women's wear designer after the sudden demise of John Galliano, the British designer who put Dior back on the fashion map when he joined in 1996. "You know, Dior has been a company with many designers since Mr Dior, including Yves Saint Laurent and Gianfranco Ferre as well as Galliano. Now for women's wear it's Raf's time," says Toledano. "It took us some time to make a decision but his vision is the right one for Dior. Yes, it's a new era for the house but we continue with the building blocks given to us by the founder."