THE ROYAL TREATMENT
A consummate creator of the world’s most lavish jewels, it’s only fitting to discover that Dior Fine Jewellery head designer Victoire de Castellane descends from blue blood, writes
A creator of the world’s most lavish jewels, it’s only fitting that Dior Fine Jewellery head designer Victoire de Castellane descends from blue blood.
“WE ARE SO OBSESSED WITH THE FUTURE AND WHAT’S NEXT THAT ARE BECOMING DEHUMANISED”
You may have noticed a tinge of nostalgia permeating the Zeitgeist of late. A yearning for things rooted in the past and for the way things used to be done. In creative industries, in particular, words like “artisanal” and “savoir-faire” have become buzz terms and selling points. The luxury of an object crafted by hand has reached a climatic status, perhaps because we’re envious of the person afforded the time to create and focus on such a task without meetings, emails or social media updates to distract them.
Victoire de Castellane, the artistic director of Christian Dior fine jewellery, has tapped into this sentiment with her latest collection, Dior à Versailles. What appears at first to be a very literal ode to French finery from one of the country’s finest eras is also a cautionary comment on modern times. “We are so obsessed with the future and what’s next that we are becoming dehumanised,” she says, with just a trace of despondence.
We’re sitting in de Castellane’s office in Paris’s 1st arrondissement, a sunfilled spacious room with walls canvassed in a uniform shade of Dior grey. The designer has added her characteristic pizzazz by installing a spray of taxidermied butterflies – in all colours of the rainbow – across one wall.
Today she’s dressed in a neat black Alaïa dress that offsets the mane of strawberry blonde hair with that recognisable blunt fringe that frames her face. She’s dripping in jewellery: I count five gold rings on her fingers (her design, each with a different gemstone) plus three necklaces of varying vintages and lengths, and dangly earrings – trinkets from regional craftsman she picked up while holidaying in Italy. It’s an OTT pastiche she pulls off without any affectation. “When you get older, I find you can be much more adventurous, and jewellery can be like make-up,” she says, though, she doesn’t look a day over fabulous. Besides, she adds, it’s precautionary: “Eighteen years ago I was robbed, they took everything. I was so sad because I had the most wonderful collection – so now I never wear just one piece.” De Castellane, who is a native Parisian, came to Dior by way of Chanel where she first started as a studio assistant, before Karl Lagerfeld installed her as head of costume jewellery. She arrived at Dior in 1998 to launch the fine jewellery collection and has since set about bringing her off-beat contemporary touch to the maison’s most luxurious metier, citing pop-cultural influences including anything from manga characters to Venus flytraps and the Brothers Grimm as sources of inspiration. What has been constant, always, is a theme of opulent experimentation pulled off by the Dior atelier with technical audacity. “When I arrived at Dior, the world of jewellery was very classic – there was no fashion or fantasy,” she says, “but that’s all changed now.” Well this season, de Castellane takes us to the baroque interiors of the Palace of Versailles, taking cues from the rococo-style furniture, graphic parquetry and elaborate candelabras. “It was as if I took parts of Versailles, put them in a blender and created something new,” she says happily of the results. “I played with the Versailles of today and tomorrow.” The designer, who has blue blood running through her own veins (her family tree can be traced back to the 10th century), is just as bewitched with the royal palace as the maison’s namesake. “Christian Dior was very inspired by 18th-century decoration. He loved Marie Antoinette and the Trianon, and so I started with the idea of jewellery in the 18th century,” she says, flipping through images of exquisite (many of them one-off ) styles extravagantly crafted from a mix of metals – gold, silver and platinum – motifs and gemstones, including rose-cut, briolette and baguette diamonds. Part of de Castellane’s process included extensively researching the jewellery that would have been worn during the palace’s most opulent heyday, and she imagined a lavish dinner party
populated by guests wearing precious stones that sparkled in the candlelight. Looking into traditional techniques led her to work silver for the very first time, as platinum was not used in that epoch. While the foundation of every piece is crafted from gold, the silver has been employed in parts purely for decorative effect. “The silver works so well because it is matt and fades into the background, so the stones stand out,” she says pointing out the bracelet named for the Salon d’Apollon, which was housed in the grand apartments of Louis XIV. The elaborate wrist-piece has been fashioned from oxidised silver and engraved in a moiré pattern so that it resembles a ribbon. In the centre sits a sunshaped cluster of yellow diamonds surrounded by a constellation of white diamonds that pop like stars in the night sky.
Another breathtaking piece, the Galerie des Glaces necklace, composed of pear, round, cushion and triangle-shaped diamonds, draws its inspiration from a chandelier. “But I took only a part of the chandelier: it’s not literal,” she clarifies of the creation, which features diamond marquetry in an invisible setting so that it appears to hover over the collarbone. This feat took the Christian Dior atelier more than 1,000 hours to achieve. Can you imagine such a luxury?