By the end of day on January 29th, Mouna Ayoub, the Lebanese businesswoman, real estate titan, and major, major haute couture client, will have some 126 fewer pieces (from full looks to bijoux) in her sizable collection, all of it Christian Dior. Ayoub is auctioning them off at Dior Masterpieces with Kerry Taylor Auctions in collaboration with Maurice Auction at a sale at Le Hotel Bristol in Paris.
Let’s just say, importance-wise, this is like having fashion history flash right before your eyes; not just what Ayoub bought, but the story of the house of Dior itself, with her having ordered across the Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons, and Maria Grazia Chiuri eras. There’s everything from a 1985 Bohan tulle and sequin ballgown (lot 72, estimate 4,000-6,000 euros) to a lamé cloque Chiuri dress from 2022 (lot 1, estimate 6,000-10,000 euros), taking in along the way Ferré’s architectural rigor (a 1989 bead organza gown affixed with a lily of the valley corsage; lot 59, 5,000-7,000 euros), Galliano’s theatrical, push-the-envelope romanticism (including a cire metallic evening coat lined in sequins from his famed The Matrix collection of 1999, lot 30, 10,000-15,000 euros), and Raf Simons’s conceptualism, perhaps most exquisitely in the form of lot 5, a gilt embroidered 18th century redingote from 2014, its opulence in stark contrast to the minimalist top and pants for underneath, and estimated at 12,000-15,000 euros.
Still, despite the incredible iconicity of much that is going on sale, Ayoub is ready to let it all go. “My collection has been with me for 40 years, and it’s time for it to move to a new horizon, to make others as happy as it made me,” she says. “It has served its purpose; it’s not so much the pleasure of wearing them as much as [it is] the pleasure to live the experience of ordering them.” If some of us derive more out of the getting ready to go out at night than the going out itself (guilty as charged, here, on that one) then for Ayoub, the process of bringing a couture look to life over weeks and months is really what lives with her. And for her, there was always something particularly magical about the experience of Dior.sprin
“Interacting with all the people behind them: That has been the most pleasurable part of my experience of my Dior couture,” she says. “The directrice and the premiere…they listen to you, help you, and if you have a confidence problem about your shape, they give you a good feeling about yourself. They surround you with love. Even if the fittings themselves can be a little arduous.” Ayoub expands on that, laughing, “I have a difficult approach to dresses; it’s not just the owning, I want the full experience of all the fittings. I am the most annoying customer! I love to have as many [fittings] as possible. I want something to be perfect, and because I am not a model, I have many fittings so it looks on me as it did on the model. You see a prêt-à-porter dress and that’s it; the dress is done. With couture…the dress grows with you. That’s the other reason I have loved my Dior couture; the savoir-faire, the continuity of the craftsmanship that has existed for years—decades. I never felt like I was just ordering a dress. I was ordering, how can I say it, a whole construction, like commissioning architecture.”
Of course, it’s not just that her collection is some 40 years old; it’s also four decades of Ayoub’s life, and all that happened in it as she was ordering her couture. “In the old days, when I was married, I only chose with instinct,” she says, “knowing that I couldn’t wear them because my [then]-husband was extremely difficult and jealous, and wouldn’t allow me to wear any couture dresses because I looked very pretty and perfect in them. I only ordered what was unique,” she goes on, “knowing that I couldn’t wear them.”
From 1997, the year of her divorce, onwards, her life changed, and so did the way she thought about ordering couture. “The second phase of my life, after my divorce, I started ordering like most women, according to occasions, be it weddings, galas, birthdays, parties, whatever,” she says. “But that wasn’t as much fun. It was much more fun to be ordering by instinct than by need; I loved what Galliano did, but a lot of the things I wouldn’t have been able to wear because they wouldn’t have been appropriate.” Lot 11, a Galliano for Dior satin, silk crepe, and lace evening dress with Masai beading (estimate, 80,000-100,000 euros) is an exception. “This was a dress that I fell in love with,” Ayoub says. “I didn’t order it for any occasion because I had just gotten divorced and didn’t know anybody, I wasn’t invited anywhere. I loved it, but I never wore it. That’s why the beads are perfect.”
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Over her years and years of ordering Dior couture, Ayoub got to know each of the designers who led the house, growing closer to some than others. “They each had their own language in expressing Monsieur Dior’s heritage, and each one was very intelligent and emotional, in a way,” she says. The outlier, she says, was Marc Bohan, who, for her, “lacked emotion; he was an excellent designer, very serious, a gentleman, but there was no emotion flowing from his collections.” Gianfranco Ferré, his successor, she was much more in tune with. “Ferré used to say, ‘Mouna is a gift from God for couture’,” she remembers, laughing. “He was the closest to Monsieur Dior; he had fabulous shapes and an abundance of fabric. Unfortunately, the two most beautiful dresses of Ferré’s I owned I donated to the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Marseilles, so they’re not in this sale.”
Unsurprisingly, Ayoub adored John Galliano, defending him on television when controversy howled around him and the house after he showed his clochards-, or homeless-, inspired couture collection in 2000. (“I was almost shunned from every dinner,” she recalls of defending Galliano.) The sale includes two looks from that season, lots 40 and 41, with the former being a real favorite of Ayoub’s. She socialized with Galliano too, regularly going out with him and his partner Alexis Roche. She and Roche would dance, she says, while Galliano would always quietly sit by the dance floor; they going out started the year of her divorce when, she says, “I wanted to be liberated, to dance, to have fun.” One night, she says, they were joined by Christina Aguilera. “I thought she would go crazy on the dance floor, but she didn’t, she sat with John for three or four hours, chatting.”
Maria Grazia Chiuri was, for Ayoub, “the wise one of the group. You could never go wrong with Maria Grazia’s designs; I still have many of them and I absolutely loved her last collection that she showed in Rome.” As for Raf Simons, he was the only designer she never met, though his work is heavily represented in the sale, including her absolute favorite lot, that 18th century inspired coat. “I didn’t order it to wear it, I ordered it because I loved it,” she says. “[Simons] was spontaneous, with a unique vision of the house. I was attracted to his art.”
Yet if the sale closes one chapter on her history with Dior couture, Ayoub is also open to it being part of her future. She’s looking forward to seeing Jonathan Anderson’s debut haute couture show, which happens just a few days before her auction. She’s open to ordering something from it too. “I always try to order something,” she says, “because my biggest fear is for the couture to disappear one day. I love couture so much. If it goes, I’d be the most miserable person on the planet.”
Dior Masterpieces: The Mouna Ayoub Haute Couture Collection auction will take place January 29 in Paris.