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With her latest high jewelry collection, called Diorexquis, Victoire de Castellane brought it all back home—literally and figuratively, creatively and personally. True to form, the creative director of Dior jewelry, unveiled a jubilant, playful celebration of color and couture, now amped up with some unexpected materials and lesser-known jewelry-making techniques.
It all started with the fragile, fiery, oft-neglected opal—Castellane’s forever favorite because it contains all of nature’s colors, she explained. From there, she turned her painter’s eye to other materials and techniques, broadening her palette with lacquer or plique-à-jour enameling, which produces a stained-glass effect. Diamonds became lace-like overlays or frames for gemstone couture gowns on panels in aventurine glass, a material borrowed from high watchmaking. Using a technique called doublet, she slipped mother-of-pearl or onyx under the opals to play up their natural color fields. As for the bucolic scenes: for all their technical prowess, those were actually rooted in the digital Stone Age.
“When I was little, I used to play with a View-Master for hours on end and spend my time dreaming over old Hollywood films from the ’50s and ’60s, so these pieces are sort of a precious extension of that,” she quipped.
On Friday, for the first time, Dior hosted the event at its private estate, the Château de la Colle Noire in Provence, where chairman and CEO Delphine Arnault welcomed about 300 VIC guests—most bedecked and bejeweled in Dior creations—for a gala evening. Though this was the founding couturier’s last and likely grandest residence, it was also the one where he hoped to live out his days in tranquil simplicity, tending his roses and “forgetting Christian Dior to become just Christian again,” he wrote in his memoirs.
As it turned out, the setting was a discovery for Castellane, too. “I’ve only ever seen it in pictures,” she said. “It’s very poetic and nostalgic, like a bygone world in a region that’s mythical in so many ways, from the expat years of a century ago to the glamour of its present and for all the emotion it conjures. I would have loved to see it in Dior’s day; what a weeklong vacation might have looked like with guests like Jean Cocteau, Mitzah Bricard, and Christian Bérard.”
If only those walls could talk. As it was, the ivy-covered façades spoke volumes as the backdrop for an evening that opened with champagne and cocktails in the garden and unfurled into dinner with custom tablescapes by Dior Maison creative director Cordelia de Castellane, a menu by the Michelin three-star chef Mauro Colagreco, and a surprise appearance by the South African soprano Pretty Yende, who performed Puccini’s “O Mio Babbino Caro” and a few other favorites.
And that was just the prelude to the evening’s main event: a runway show of the 163 jewels in Diorexquis, and 25 couture creations by Maria Grazia Chiuri, staged around an ornamental reflecting pool that, at 45 meters, stops just shy of Olympic dimensions. The creative director of Dior women’s collections struck a regal note with an opulent lineup of painted, embroidered, woven, and beaded looks in velvet. “She understands how dresses can also be the setting for jewels, and she knows that I consider velvet the most beautiful fabric for them,” Castellane offered.
#French #Riviera #Shower #Opals #Opulence #Courtesy #Dior #High #Jewelry
