The atelier on Avenue Montaigne keeps its windows closed in summer

The atelier on Avenue Montaigne keeps its windows closed in summer. Air conditioning would disturb the drape of silk organza, or so the logic goes, and so the premier d'atelier works in what feels like a greenhouse with north light. On a Tuesday in July, Sylvie Millot stands before a half-dressed mannequin wearing the bones of what will become a Bar jacket — Dior's signature silhouette, first shown in 1947, still made to the same template seventy-six years later. She pins the canvas underlayer at the shoulder, steps back, removes two pins, repositions them a millimetre lower. The model, if you can call a wooden torso that, does not complain.

Millot has been with Dior for thirty-one years. She is not famous. Her name appears nowhere on the garment, nowhere in the show notes, and until recently nowhere in the press materials either. That has begun to change, incrementally, as the house has started to name its artisans in certain contexts — a documentary here, an exhibition wall text there. It remains selective. But when Maria Grazia Chiuri, Dior's current artistic director, speaks about the atelier, she now names names.

The Bar jacket is not one piece. It is five: the shell fabric, the canvas interlining, the silk lining, the shoulder pads, and the petersham ribbon that runs along the inside hem to prevent the wool from stretching under its own weight. Millot oversees the construction of all five layers, but she does not sew them herself. That work is distributed among three petites mains — the term translates as 'little hands', though there is nothing diminutive about the skill involved. Each woman has a station, a lamp, and a drawer of tools she has accumulated over decades. They do not share needles.

The canvas interlining is horsehair and linen, woven in a twill that gives it a diagonal grain. It must be cut on the bias, which means at a forty-five-degree angle to the weave, so that it moulds to the body rather than resisting it. This is not a task you give to an apprentice. Sylvie Koffel, who has worked alongside Millot since 1996, does the cutting. She uses shears that were made in Nogent-sur-Marne in the nineteen-sixties, before the factory converted to industrial production. The blades are carbon steel, which holds an edge longer than stainless and rusts if you leave them wet. Koffel does not leave them wet.

Once cut, the canvas is basted to the shell fabric with a stitch called a point de chausson, which translates roughly as 'slipper stitch'. It is a running stitch worked from the underside, invisible on the exterior, and it must be loose enough to allow the two layers to move independently. If the tension is wrong, the jacket will pucker. The basting alone takes four hours. After the first fitting, the seams are adjusted, the canvas is re-basted, and the process begins again. A Bar jacket goes through three fittings before it is delivered, and each fitting generates revisions that ripple backward through all five layers.

The topstitching, which runs along the lapels and pockets, is done by hand. Machine stitching is faster and, in most contexts, indistinguishable. But hand stitching allows for adjustments mid-seam — a slight curve here, a tighter pull there — that a machine cannot replicate. It also produces a subtle irregularity, a rhythm that reads as human even if the client cannot articulate why. Nathalie Roche, the third of Millot's team, does the topstitching. She uses a size ten needle and a silk thread that Dior commissions from a supplier in Lyon. The thread is dyed to match the shell fabric, which means that for every new colour introduced in a collection, a new thread must be ordered six months in advance. Roche has worked at Dior since 1989. She can stitch a lapel in ninety minutes. An apprentice would need four hours and produce something that looked, to an untrained eye, identical. Millot would see the difference immediately.

The shoulder pads are made by an outside supplier, a small firm in the Sentier district that has been producing them since the nineteen-fifties. They are wool felt, layered and shaped by hand, and they come in six thicknesses. Dior orders the second-thickest, which gives structure without bulk. The pads are sewn into the jacket at an angle, higher at the back than the front, so that the shoulder slopes gently forward. This is a Dior signature, established in the original 1947 collection and maintained ever since. If you put on a Bar jacket and your shoulders sit level, something has gone wrong.

The petersham ribbon is stitched along the inside hem after the final fitting. It is a narrow band of grosgrain, stiff enough to bear weight, and it is sewn with a catch stitch that allows the hem to flex without tearing. The ribbon is not strictly necessary — plenty of jackets manage without it — but it extends the garment's lifespan by distributing stress away from the seam. Dior's clients, who pay upward of thirty thousand euros for a Bar jacket, expect it to last. The ribbon helps ensure that it does.

Millot learned her trade at the École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, the industry's primary training ground, in the early nineteen-eighties. The curriculum was classical: pattern drafting, draping, hand sewing, and the construction of a tailored jacket from start to finish. She graduated in 1984 and worked briefly at Chanel before moving to Dior in 1992. At the time, the house was under the direction of Gianfranco Ferré, who favoured sculptural volumes and complex construction. Millot describes those years as formative. Ferré, she has said in interviews, treated the atelier as collaborators rather than executors. He would sketch an idea, bring it to the atelier, and ask whether it was possible. Often it was not, at least not as drawn, and the atelier would propose an alternative. The final garment was a negotiation.

That dynamic has persisted under Chiuri, who arrived in 2016 and has made a point of foregrounding the atelier in her public statements. In a 2019 interview with System magazine, Chiuri noted that the atelier holds institutional memory — they know what works, what has been tried before, and what the house's clients expect. A designer who ignores that knowledge, she suggested, does so at their peril.

Millot is fifty-nine now. She will retire in six years, at sixty-five, which is standard for her generation. The atelier has begun training her successor, a woman in her early forties who has worked at Dior for fifteen years. The transition will take the full six years. There is no manual for what Millot does, no written record of the adjustments she makes by eye and by touch. The knowledge is passed laterally, through observation and correction, and it cannot be rushed.

Whether that model will survive another generation is an open question. The fashion industry is consolidating, and consolidation tends to prioritise efficiency over craft. Dior is owned by LVMH, which is not, by any measure, a small operation. But the house has so far maintained its atelier structure, and LVMH has shown no inclination to dismantle it. One suspects this is partly commercial — clients paying couture prices expect couture methods — and partly reputational. A Dior jacket made in a factory would still be a Dior jacket, legally speaking, but it would not be the same object. The house knows this. So, apparently, does LVMH.

For now, the atelier continues. Millot pins her canvas, Koffel cuts on the bias, Roche stitches her lapels. The work is slow, specific, and mostly invisible. Which is, when you think about it, the point.