Riccardo Tisci at Fall 2011 Givenchy show. GoRunway.comWe’ll ignore unsourced morning Dior buzz that Riccardo Tisci is a ‘go’ at Christian Dior and focus on WWD’s business assessment of the candidates, which is totally on target with our own. Like NYT Cathy Horyn, WWD questions Tisci’s design vision as lacking femme fatale glamour but agrees that he’s the front runner.

I’ve written why I adore Tisci as a man designing for women — one who truly loves women. The designer’s personal relationships impress me greatly for their apparent substance, as described by his friends.

My impression of the designer got another boost this morning, reading Vogue UK’s story about Riccardo Tisci not wanting to take the Givenchy job in 2005 and what changed his mind.

“I wasn’t interested,” says Tisci. “Not at all. I was going to say no. But the week before, my mother called me and said to me, ‘I am going to tell you something I haven’t even told your sisters: I think I am going to sell our house because your sisters are struggling, they’re able , they’re having children, they need the money. I will go to a retirement home.’ When I heard that it was like a knife in my heart. I felt like such a failure, that my mother had to sell the house of my father whom I don’t remember. And then I went to Paris, and they showed me a contract with all these zeros on it, and it was like help from God. I thought ‘If I sign this, my mother will never have to worry again.’ So I signed it.”

The John Galliano fallout is still simmering around the Christian Dior brand. Even the Jerusalem Post wrote about the Nazi history of its founder and the reality that “Collusion with the Nazis produced enormous profits for the French fashion industry during the period between 1941 and 1943.

Christian Dior’s niece FrancoiseThe video of Christian Dior’s niece Francoise in 1963 to the British Nazi Colin Jordan has been traveling the Internet, although not here. While the furor has been understandably focused on Galliano’s comments about loving Hitler, he made some pretty abominable statements about women, too.