Margaret is a fashion curator at a museum, and she is planning an ambitious exhibition about the New Look, Christian Dior’s ground-breaking 1947 collection. Margaret idealizes two men, Dior and her father, and as she struggles to temper her hero-worship, the personal and the professional intersect. The more she studies the beginnings of the house of Dior, the more the German occupation of France uncovers its troubling face. Was Dior an innocent bystander or something more sinister? At the same time, the clouded story of her father’s Judaism finally demands that Margaret acknowledge it.
Someone with a grudge against Dior or Margaret or both begins sabotaging the exhibition by stealing pieces of the priceless clothes meant for the show, and Margaret must turn sleuth. Fortuitously, her husband writes mysteries and her twin daughters are precociously mystery-savvy, so Margaret gets plenty of advice.
Aside from Katherine’s love of mysteries, the novel is informed by her admiration for textiles, designers and well-made clothes from couture to homemade. Funny and serious, light and dark, Margaret’s New Look asks how well we can ever know the past or another human being, and how we can continue loving when hero-worship is no longer appropriate.