A dictionary-style volume pays tribute to the creative genius behind the maison’s jewelry lines.
In June 2019, the Gem Dior jewelry collection came out in lavish style, celebrating not just the latest designs of Victoire de Castellane, but also her 20th year as Dior Joaillerie’s creative director. Her long tenure at design house Christian Dior’s fine-jewelry division is now the subject of a new book.
Dior Joaillerie: The A to Z of Victoire de Castellane pays homage to both the jewels she’s produced and her creative process. It employs a dictionary format of 158 entries, and the letters of the alphabet that adorn each chapter heading feature her own illustrations. Alongside direct quotes from de Castellane expressing her feelings about the meanings each word conveys, there is commentary by Olivier Gabet, director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
Capping off the book are beautiful photographs of iconic jewels Dior Joaillerie has presented during its 20 years under de Castellane’s direction. The combination of words and pictures provides a frame of reference for the many collectors of the brand, as well as a fascinating look into the mind of a creative personality who has nurtured Dior Joaillerie from its inception.
Les bons mots
The words in this dictionary range from gem and jewelry terms to those “linked to the vocabulary of haute couture or even architecture,” Gabet writes. There are also “more abstract, more subjective words,” and even names of people. The book begins with an entry titled “A to Z” (“As a child, I loved dictionaries,” writes de Castellane) and ends with the word “Zigzag” (“I like to zigzag back and forth between periods and sources of inspiration with complete freedom”).
Under the “Cher Dior” entry, de Castellane informs readers that for the two decades she has been designing jewels for the company, it’s as if she’s been having a conversation with the late Christian Dior (who died in 1957) through her collections. “That was my line of action in the beginning, and I have stuck to it.”
She met LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault in 1998, and the two shared what she calls a meeting of the minds regarding what the Dior Joaillerie line could be one day. “The adventure began with that challenge,” she states, and it is still ongoing.
Yellow, white, and pink gold, platinum, diamonds, rock crystal, emeralds, pink and yellow sapphires, tsavorite and demantoid garnets, Paraiba-type tourmalines, pink spinels, sapphires, yellow diamonds, hauynes, spessartite garnets, peridots, and lacquer. Photo: Anna Leroy.
Design correspondence
The first collection she designed under the Dior Joaillerie aegis debuted in spring 1999. Under the entry titled “Correspondence,” she elaborates that “every collection since 1999 has been a form of correspondence between Christian Dior and myself” — letters that “he doesn’t need to answer.”
“New Look” — Christian Dior’s first haute couture collection, which he presented on February 12, 1947 — gets an entry as well. De Castellane has wanted to create her own New Look “with exacerbated volumes, substituting gold and the generous use of numerous stones for the textiles of Christian Dior’s era.”
Each well-chosen word in Dior Joaillerie is like “the crystallization of 20 years of dreaming, imagination and stories,” writes Gabet. The book is a “dictionary of feelings and love…and a new letter from Victoire de Castellane to Christian Dior.”
Dior Joaillerie: The A to Z of Victoire de Castellane by Victoire de Castellane, with text by Olivier Gabet, was released in September by Rizzoli New York.
WORDS TO LIVE BY
Victoire de Castellane shares her views on:
COLORS: They “form the basis of my work. They provide complete freedom, and every shade in the world is found in stones, so why deprive myself?”
GEMS: “Indispensable!… In jewelry, it is all about gems, as much for the form as for their color.”
IMAGINATION: “It’s my driving force.”
INSPIRATION: “Related a lot more to feelings than to factual things.”
MAXIMUM: “For me, it doesn’t exist, for there are no limits.”
MINIATURE: “Jewels are little miniature treasures that you can take with you.”
NATURAL: “Working with natural stones is like a gift from nature, the height of luxury in jewelry.”
POLYCHROMATISM: “One of the leitmotifs of my collections.”
De Castellane is also forthcoming about her likes and dislikes when it comes to gems. A DIAMOND, she writes, is a “very difficult stone” that can be “extraordinarily powerful. It can annihilate the personality of the woman wearing it by drawing other people’s attention to itself instead of to her.” She likes what she calls “free shape” diamonds rather than “complicated” multifaceted cuts, which are “there only to catch the light and cast the wearer into the shadows.”
Professing her love for GOLD, she calls it the “most beautiful material for creating a jewel,” and one she uses in “every color.” She celebrates the “ideal form” of OPAL as being “every stone in one stone.” And she adores all PEARLS, not just “perfect round ones.”
She likes to imagine stones have a taste: Some yellow diamonds’ “acid color” brings to mind “lemon ZEST, with its light acidic aspect.” An EMERALD, she supposes, “tastes like mint, like a mint cordial,” and the color of RUBY recalls “pomegranate syrup” that is “diluted with water for either a light effect or a richer, deeper color.” She describes SAPPHIRE in more elemental terms, comparing it to “the deep blue of the oceans, the blue-green of the Mediterranean, or even the azure or cerulean blue of summer skies.”
White and yellow gold, diamonds, fancy yellow diamonds, spinels, rubies, black spinels, pink spinels, emeralds, Paraiba tourmalines, demantoid garnets, spessartite garnets, amethysts, sapphires, pink sapphires, and lacquer. Photo: Guido Mocafico.
Main image: Salon d’Apollon bracelet, Dior à Versailles collection, 2016. Darkened silver, pink, yellow, and white gold, diamonds, and yellow diamonds. Photo: Anna Leroy.
1 Comment
Your way of explaining all in this piece of writing is
genuinely nice, all can simply know it, Thanks a lot.