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.
Pieces like a sculptural black “Bar” peplum bustier, corolla-skirted minidresses, and a handful of ’30s-inspired gowns garlanded with flowers were striking yet pared back enough to accommodate a single statement necklace or a pileup of jewels, with perhaps a diamond rivière, a pearl sautoir, or brooch at the waist, or a slither of diamonds at the ankle.
But it was a yellow gown in panné velvet that harbored this collection’s Easter egg: the “Diorette” high jewelry necklace-slash-lipstick case created at the suggestion of Peter Philips, creative and image director of Christian Dior makeup. “He asked me for the most beautiful lipstick case in the world, and I decided that it couldn’t just be a precious object—it had to be wearable too,” Castellane said of the piece, made of flowers in gold, titanium, opals, cultured pearls, lacquer and a dozen hues of gemstones.
A splay of fireworks was followed by a rollicking afterparty, but even guests who stayed late turned up early the next day, by boat or by car, at the legendary Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes to take in—and try on, for the most fortunate—Diorexquis pieces like the Soie Dior ring with a 33.88-carat yellow diamond, the Bal Précieux necklace with a Sri Lankan sapphire weighing nearly 26 carats, or the Bouquet Merveilleux necklace with a 7-carat oval-cut ruby from Mozambique and some 2,000 diamonds, rubies, pink sapphires, spinels, and tsavorites worked into flowers, leaves and branches that could be worn as one statement piece or separated into a simpler jewel.
“Nature is a constant inspiration for every designer, particularly in jewelry, but I’m always looking for the fun and the joy,” said Castellane. “To me, everything nature offers is precious—after that, it’s all about the freedom of creation. That’s what keeps me connected to the child spirit.”