Gemstone-studded lace exposes the sensual side of high jewellery at Dior
For all the comings and goings of creative directors at the fashion houses that dominate the Paris Haute Couture schedule, those who helm the city’s jewellery maisons tend to have a more stable tenure. Take Victoire de Castellane, creative director of Dior Joiallerie, the former Chanel costume jewellery designer who established Dior’s jewellery department in 1998 and has pushed it to evermore innovative extremes every year since.
Earlier this month, Dior Joaillerie celebrated its 20th anniversary with an exhibition at Paris’ Museum of Modern Art, showcasing some recent hits from De Castellane’s extensive archive: the gardens of Versailles miniaturised in wildly abundant jewels, the silks and ribbons of the couture atelier wrought in fluid curves of gold and gemstones.
But De Castellane isn’t one to mine the archive for inspiration, and this year’s collection takes a contemporary approach to high jewellery that’s fitting for the house’s youthful status in the industry, relative to the centuries-old jewellers of Place Vend?me.
It’s named Dior, Dior, Dior - but the emphasis is entirely unnecessary, as one glance confirms that the jewels could only have been conceived in De Castellane’s whimsical imagination. A rainbow of sweetie-like stones are strewn gleefully across an intricate lacework of gold, occasionally forming miniature petals, or creeping like tendrils through and around the handworked honeycomb.
The ornate lace effect is seen throughout the collection, and harks back to Christian Dior’s atelier, where the finest French laces were cut and draped across the body, its chaste associations in contrast to the glimpses of flesh it affords.
De Castellane wanted these jewels to offer a similar peekaboo effect, trailing lightly around hands, wrists and necks, the gold and gemstones complemented by the wearer’s skin beneath.
It snakes across bands of cocktail rings, beneath kite-cut diamonds or hot-pink sapphires, and billows like a petticoat beneath cabochon opals in just one of a mismatched pair of earrings.
Sometimes the lace is obscured by the melange of gemstones set into and on top of it; other times its finely wrought structure is left almost bare, with sections periodically picked out in blackened gold and diamonds.
It’s an unashamedly sexy collection, with bondage overtones in rings which extend from the base of the finger to the knuckle, and a hand jewel which sees a diamond and pink spinel ring connected to a bracelet via a meandering, botanical diamond trail.
There’s a palm bracelet, which hooks between thumb and forefinger to hold a pink sapphire on the back of the hand, a double-finger ring and several pairs of mismatching earrings, reflecting the ways in which today’s high jewellery customers style their precious gems.
Modernity and history merge in a series of chokers. The Dentelle Velours choker clasps an emerald at the centre of the throat between looping swags of blue spinel-scattered lace. Fittingly for a designer whose last three high jewellery collections explored the minutiae of Versailles, it wouldn’t have looked out of place in Marie Antoinette’s jewellery box.
Others are a more contemporary take: the Dentelle Tulle choker encircles the neck with overlapping half-moons of lace, bordered by a patchwork of tiny flowers above and, below, diamond discs which quiver excitedly either side of a central emerald-cut emerald or cushion-cut sapphire.
As always with Dior’s high jewellery, it’s the details that bring each piece to life. The closer you look, the more reveal themselves: twisted ropes of gold that wend their way around the lacework; honeycomb-backed choker clasps; ever-tinier gold beads that drip at the edge of gemstone petals; and seemingly hand-scribbled loops of metal that swirl around mismatching earrings worthy of a Bollywood superstar.
High Jewellery from Paris Couture Week
After two extraordinary decades, De Castellane is justly enjoying her turn in the spotlight. And these exquisitely wrought pieces prove that the Dior high jewellery atelier is every bit as worthy of adulation, for having the technical finesse to craft her fantastical ideas into reality.
