Dior: Candy Garden

Victoire de Castellane, creative director of Christian Dior fine jewellery, works with such ease that it doesn’t seem like work when she does it. Or at least that is what she would have us believe. Her jewellery brings to the spotlight a world of idealism, almost like a fairytale, depicted through colours and emotions. The same stirring of the heart as would a child’s drawing or an artist’s design, an artist who has learnt everything from the greats only to unlearn it all to be able to follow his or her true path. To put it simply, she doesn’t intellectualise it.

Everything about her work attests to an aversion towards all heaviness. Everything should remain light and simple. “I work as if I were a five-year-old.” Now we should not misinterpret that statement, this charming ease, which one might, at first, perceive as dilettante and at times as eccentric is simply the mark of a strong spirit. A family trait perhaps? A manner close to that of the Mortemarts and the Guermantes, a taste that is avidly looked for in a jeweller. It isn’t surprising then to learn that Louis Cartier regularly consulted with Boni de Castellane, a woman feared for her mocking character who was in fact a ruthless arbitrator of elegance, a responsibility she carried out with the utmost certainty. At the time, aristocrats didn’t work for a living. Today, Boni would have been a creative director of the highest rung, that is to say she had an aesthetic capable of heading any of the great houses that has that special essence which is characterised by the finest of creations. Victoire, like her illustrious ancestor, gives depth to frivolity and cheekiness to solemnity.

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Of earth and the sun

In her last two collections of haute jewellery, Victoire explored the Château de Versailles. In the first collection a study of ornamental details of the place and in the second, Dior à Versailles, inspiration came from the royal gardens on the property. “I wanted that in each jewel, one is able to perceive the paradoxical relationship between nature and culture, so characteristically visible in Le Notre and Le Parc de Versailles,” she says.

It is Versailles on a sunny day, a landscape that time and experience have not disillusioned. The stones shine like glistening sweets, a dreamlike foam spurting different colours. It is also a lesson in minerology: the deliciously precious gemstones – emeralds, rubies, violet sapphires, pink and yellow diamonds – rubbing shoulders with ornamental stones of a prodigious variety – spinels, garnets, tourmalines, opals, amethysts, turquoises – and unexpected gems such as hauynite which creates a marvellous contrast with green lacquer and rock crystal, or agates and sculpted amazonites, which make up the back of a ring, so it reminds you of the bottom of a water body. Behind this childlike view, there is an incredible amount of knowledge, a universal curiosity, extensive labour and exceptional expertise.

A creator’s challenge

“Victoire knows exactly what she wants. She has the jewel clearly finished in her head, and at the same time, she doesn’t know the theory,” says Philippe Scordia, a talent professional, who has spent his life in the ateliers of Place Vendôme. He has witnessed the detailed manufacturing of jewels and the purchasing of one-of-a-kind stones by the high jewellers at Dior since 1998. He has been by her side ever since her very beginnings as the head of the house on Avenue Montaigne and works meticulously to find satisfactory solutions to any challenges Victoire might throw at him.

What pushes him to remain in permanent contact with ultimate in Parisian craftsmanship, we ask? “Victoire’s enthusiasm is expressive and inspiring. We always bring her a large variety of stones because her criteria of selection are not limited to the habitual parametres, like the price for example. Victoire loves stones that have character.” These aspects might sometimes send one’s profession on a bit of a detour. “Victoire doesn’t like brilliant cut diamonds, for example. She finds them rather run of the mill. She prefers the pear cut, the emerald cut, and simply adores the rose cut (an ancient cut that better understands the faces than recent diamonds). It isn’t uncommon for us to ask the lapidary to reduce the brilliance of the stone which for a lapidary is blasphemous, but which, from the point of view of the artist, is a need. A condition without which one cannot create something that, when felt is more impalpable and more precious than rarity, and that something is emotion.”

From the December 2017 issue of L’Officiel India.