The Jewels in the Crown: The Magnificent Dior Joaillerie

When Christian Dior first opened a jewelry boutique offering creations by Victoire de Castellane on the Place Vendôme, famed home of France’s most storied bijouteries, “it was like a UFO had landed,” the designer recalls. The exuberance that de Castellane, who had captivated Bernard Arnault with her brash, resolutely non-hidebound manner of making jewelry when he brought her on board in 1998, is not what people expected from the venerated label. Yes, of course the stones were among the finest in the world, and the metals suitably precious, but who would have anticipated a massive Nougat ring meant to evoke the gooey candy of childhood, or the Milly-la-Forêt necklace that encapsulates hanging fruit, pearl peapods, and even a ladybug, or a carved gemstone skull happily sporting an exquisite diamond crown? “I wanted to play down jewelry, and strip it of the bourgeois stigma that is associated with it,” de Castellane admits. “It is perhaps a younger, more contemporary way of wearing jewelry.”

To celebrate her wildly innovative eye and bohemian spirit, Rizzoli has just published Dior Joaillerie, a glorious 300-plus-page compendium of de Castellane’s ingenious creations, so full of unexpected delights that one wishes the master himself were alive to peruse it. “I have always considered my profession a sort of struggle against everything demoralizing and mediocre that our society can offer,” Christian Dior once declared. In this sense, de Castellane is truly carrying forth the heritage of the house—and having, by all indications, a wonderful time doing it.