Dior’s grand tour of high jewelry presentations in Italy culminated this week with a sweep through Florence, where the house opened the doors, as if by magic, to cultural lodestars and hard-to-access venues, starting with the Basilica Santa Maria Novella. On Monday night, that Renaissance gem—whose chapels house treasures by Giotto, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Lippi, Michelangelo, and many others—became the backdrop for a candlelit seated dinner for 230 guests, featuring rosettes of prawn and a whorl of artichoke and black truffle feuilleté by the Michelin three-star chef Mauro Colagreco, served on lavish Italianate tablescapes by Dior Maison. The evening was capped off by a jewels-and-couture show for Diorama, Victoire de Castellane’s latest high jewelry collection, in the cloister.
De Castellane began her stellar 25-year tenure as Creative Director of Dior Joaillerie by shaking up the staid ways of Place Vendôme, rebooting the landscape with cheeky, colorful, scaled-up or scaled-down pieces that transformed how we think about buying and wearing jewelry to this day. “It’s like salt and pepper: it’s about seasoning things,” the designer offered. “Just because the stones are real doesn’t mean jewelry has to be boring and bourgeois.”
With Diorama, the designer reconnects with whimsy and playfulness by patinating an aristocratic 18th century fabric — the one Monsieur Christian Dior chose for the walls of his first boutique at 30 Avenue Montaigne—with gemstones, revisiting bucolic scenes with painstaking relief and a nod to women’s collections by Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri. A smattering of couture looks made for this presentation also reprised the house signature.
“I never consider the archives in a literal way,” de Castellane told journalists during an interview in the terraced gardens of the Villa San Michele hotel in Fiesole, with the Tuscan capital stretching out below. “I look at reality, and then I keep it flou and think of it like a dream. I always hold onto that freedom, because if I overthink I am no longer free,” she added, likening the image in her mind’s eye to Milly-la-Forêt, where Christian Dior once salvaged a millhouse, turning it from “a ruin in a swamp” into a favorite refuge.
The masterpiece in the 172-jewel collection, the Diorama Forêt Enchantée necklace stars a glyptic bestiary: a trio of does, a swan, a rabbit, and a squirrel carved in pale green chrysoprase are nestled into a thicket of foliage set with 1,300 gems, from white diamonds and tiny cultured pearls to yellow sapphires, green tsavorites, and emeralds. The piece is anchored by a 16.16-carat emerald-cut emerald set amid tiny branches.
Éric, the head of Dior’s high jewelry atelier, said crafting such a fragile piece entailed calling on several specialized artisans, starting with a master gem-carver and -engraver. It also called for compressing about four years’ worth of work — some 6,500 hours — into just under 18 months. All told, he said, Diorama represents the largest stash of gems the house has ever dedicated to a single collection.
Further along, necklaces revealed miniature deer and owls in tonal lacquer, swans gliding on mother-of-pearl lakes, and lush flora with diamond pavé rabbits, foxes, or squirrels in a haute take on Where’s Waldo. Of a suite in Australian opals, one of her favorite gems, De Castellane offered, “it’s like gazing into the ocean depths from the window of an airplane.”
A single parure, dubbed Diorigami, hinted at what to expect come fall as the toile de Jouy theme expands into a more graphic, abstract expression of nature informed, as its name suggests, by the Japanese art of paper folding, and, by extension, couture pleating techniques that circle right back to the Bar suit and the triumph of the New Look.
“I like getting to the truth behind memory,” De Castellane mused. Sometimes it’s rooted in childhood, she added, recalling how after 20 years of therapy she finally realized that her father’s eccentric ways with jewelry actually inspire her aesthetic just as much as associations with her beloved grandmother. “You need to find a good balance in chaos, like in my family,” she quipped, noting that her taste for asymmetry is “just life.”
“It’s like an obsession that I’m happy to share. Because, ultimately, for me designing jewelry is always more about obsession than passion.”