It’s a fact: which Russian model did Christian Dior call his personal talisman?

On air – our column “It’s a fact”, where we share various facts and historical information from the world of fashion, is worthy of targeted coverage on Internet pages. In an earlier episode of our Robinsonade, we talked about how Irina Shayk managed to break Karl Lagerfeld’s main order with the help of only sweatpants at the Met Gala 2023 ball held recently. This time we decided not to go far from the design store and remember Christian Dior. For a moment, one of his muses was a domestic model.

Or rather, the Kazakh-Russian fashion model of Chinese origin Alla Ilchun. And her story is similar to Cinderella stories. Alla was born in 1926 in a simple family of railway worker and opera singer. During the Japanese intervention in Manchuria in the 1930s, he moved to Paris with his mother and had to work as a dishwasher in a cafe to earn a living.

The future model came to the casting in the House of Christian Dior almost by chance, deciding to support her friend. But while Alla was waiting for the last one in the hallway, an employee of the brand approached Ilchun and said that the designer himself was waiting for the girl in his office. Now, a short time later, the model passed a tough screening at Dior.

Since then, Christian and Alla have been working closely together for 11 years. Dresses in which the model appeared on the catwalks soon received the mark “out of stock”, and her love for arrows before her eyes became a real beauty trend. No wonder Christian Dior called Alla Ilchun his personal talisman, believing it to bring unprecedented luck. And this is a fact.