Walk in Paris – La Galerie Dior & Catacombs of Paris
Christian Ernest Dior was a French fashion designer, best known as the founder of one of the world’s top fashion houses, Christian Dior SE, which is now owned by parent company LVMH.
His fashion houses are known all around the world, specifically “on five continents in only a decade”.
Dior’s skills led to his employment and design for various fashion icons in attempts to preserve the fashion industry during World War II. Post-war, he established the Dior fashion house, with his collection of the “New Look”.
Throughout his lifetime, he won numerous awards for Best Costume Design. Upon his death in 1957, various contemporary icons paid tribute to his life and work.
The Catacombs of Paris (Catacombes de Paris) are underground ossuaries in Paris, which hold the remains of more than six million people in a small part of a tunnel network built to consolidate Paris’s ancient stone quarries.
Extending south from the Barrière d’Enfer (“Gate of Hell”) former city gate, this ossuary was created as part of the effort to eliminate the city’s overflowing cemeteries.
Preparation work began shortly after a 1774 series of basement wall collapses around the Holy Innocents’ Cemetery added a sense of urgency to the cemetery-eliminating measure, and from 1786, nightly processions of covered wagons transferred remains from most of Paris’s cemeteries to a mine shaft opened near the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire.
The ossuary remained largely forgotten until it became a novelty-place for concerts and other private events in the early 19th century; after further renovations and the construction of accesses around Place Denfert-Rochereau, it was opened to public visitation from 1874.
Since 2013, the Catacombs have numbered among the fourteen City of Paris Museums managed by Paris Musées. Although the ossuary comprises only a small section of the underground mines of Paris, Parisians currently often refer to the entire tunnel network as the catacombs.
Video Source: PARIS VLOG: Visiting the DIOR EXHIBIT and THE CATACOMBS from Ally Travels on Youtube ⁄ CC BY
