Victoire de Castellane, creative director of Dior Joaillerie, likes having fun. For 27 years, her creations have involved bold colours and unpopular stones, such as opals, with cameos from carnivorous plants or piratical skulls. Her knack is to make hit collections that imbue the heritage-bound realm of high jewellery with an aura of storybook fantasy. “Jewellery should be interesting, creative, free,” she says. “When I started working here, the fine-jewellery world was very classic. There was no risk! I told myself, ‘It doesn’t have to be boring.’”
De Castellane, 63, has meticulously straight blonde hair with a blunt fringe that, in tandem with emphatic eyeliner, speaks to a vision of Paris encapsulated in Technicolor movies – something hallucinogenic by Varda or Godard, perhaps. Her sunny office is similarly evocative, on the top floor of one of Dior’s buildings in Paris’s eighth arrondissement, between the Grand Palais and the Arc de Triomphe.
Though her outfit – a black top, an elaborate textured green skirt and bulky trainers – speaks more to our present fashion moment, her necklace, a jewelled likeness of a panther flanked by pearls, could be the key plot device in a detective story. It’s a vintage piece, she explains, that she modified herself. Much of her personal collection was inherited from her grandmother, Silvia Rodríguez de Rivas, who was the Countess of Castilleja de Guzman, a small city in Seville, and married the cognac magnate Kilian Hennessy (just one of many interesting entries in de Castellane’s family tree alongside her great-great-uncle, Boni de Castellane, a man described as “the greatest dandy of the belle époque era”).
It’s a key moment for de Castellane, who is preparing to present Diorexquis, a 163-piece new high-jewellery collection. Depicting natural landscapes, bouquets of flowers, opulent parties and “naïve scenes”, the collection harnesses two historic techniques: plique-à-jour, a way of creating patterns using enamel or lacquer, and opale doublet, where a layer of opal is superimposed on another stone such as onyx or mother-of-pearl, so as to replicate the shimmering palettes of sky or water. The stones are chosen with similar precision. De Castellane is renowned for using not only the archetypal quartet of diamonds, sapphires, emeralds and rubies but also the entire semiprecious spectrum. “It’s always stones that are a bit classic, but which are reworked and accompanied by other precious stones,” she says.
This is around the 40th high-jewellery collection that de Castellane has designed for Dior, and one of two she is presenting this year (along with roughly 10 fine-jewellery collections). The other, the 76-piece, lace-and-nature-inspired Dior Milly Dentelle, launched in January. LVMH, Dior’s parent group, declines to reveal figures relating to individual businesses. But jewellery is proving to be the most resilient core luxury category, with Bain & Company reporting growth of two per cent to reach €31bn in 2024, with high jewellery performing particularly well.
De Castellane has been key to Dior’s success. “I’d say she represents the perfect balance between the highest respect for a certain history of decorative art and jewellery and an incredibly witty approach to the world of fashion,” says Olivier Gabet, director of objets d’art at Paris’s Louvre Museum. In 2020, when he was in charge of Paris’s Museum of Decorative Arts, Gabet wrote a book with de Castellane (whom he already counted as a friend), Dior Joaillerie: The A to Z of Victoire de Castellane, to mark her 20th anniversary at Dior. “She’s one of the best jewellery designers working today,” he adds. “We all have our own benchmarks to know if something is important and will survive us. For me, Victoire’s work will remain, as Jeanne Toussaint [Cartier’s visionary designer] remained for Cartier’s history. She will be part of the story in a century.”
In the corner of the office is a framed black-and-white photograph of de Castellane as a young child. She is smiling sweetly, clutching a plastic dog toy, with no idea that her life path would eventually coalesce around the playthings she adored. “I remember that I’d asked my father for a toy jewellery box, and it contained a bracelet that was a gold snake, in plastic, but with green stones in the eyes. I have a memory of it being the most beautiful jewel in the world,” she says.
De Castellane was born in Paris in 1962, and her parents – a bourgeois French mother and a French-Spanish father belonging to a 1,000-year-old noble family from Provence – broke up not long afterwards. From a young age, jewellery represented escape but also something malleable, something she could fix. At the age of five, she took a pair of pliers to a charm bracelet, a gift from her mother, in an attempt to make earrings. “She was devastated because I had thrown the gold links from the bracelet in the trash,” she remembers. When she was 12, she outraged her mother again by melting down her Communion medals to make a ring. “I said to myself, ‘That’s not jewellery. That’s gold! OK, let’s melt it.’”
De Castellane was – and still is – intrigued by the alternative realities jewellery seemed able to unlock. “I’ve always been fascinated by women and jewellery, the gestures, the sounds. It was something that hypnotised me,” she says. She recalls her mother taking her around the old-fashioned perfumeries that could still be found in 1960s Paris. “One was owned by a mother and daughter, two incredible ladies who would dress all in black with leopard toques, lipstick and red nails. They wore a lot of bracelets with charms on them. For me it was a kind of ASMR, the sound of the packages and the charms. I kept asking my mother to go back.”
She’ll speak sometimes about the importance of maintaining this childlike sense of wonder, not in the final output of her work so much as an openness she adopts in her process. How else could de Castellane – who recorded a pop record in the 1980s and held two exhibitions of “independent work”, somewhere between high jewellery and high art, at Gagosian in the 2010s – play the games she plays with volume and scale, or devise a blockbuster collection based on an imaginary island filled with toxic plants (2007’s Belladone Island)? There is a trade-off to this freedom, however: “When you have this childlike part of yourself, you can be completely unsuited to other situations. I’m capable of delivering collections consisting of 300 unique pieces, but, for example, I’m completely lost in an airport.”
De Castellane has always moved in a range of social milieus – each one seemingly more fabulous. As a teenager, she frequented the nightclub Le Palace, whose regulars included stiletto mogul Christian Louboutin, fashion fixer Vincent Darré and the model and documentary-maker Farida Khelfa. “There were rock groups, there were actors, there were intellectuals, there were unknowns. It was an amazing mix.” At the same time, she caught the dying embers of 1980s high-society balls – which even then were curiously old-fashioned occasions. Figures such as Mick Jagger and Inès de la Fressange were glimpsable amid the fairytale-esque whirl. “It was another world,” she says, reminiscing about how this lost form of jet-set socialising involved pleasure purely for its own sake, before the perma-subtext of careerism and networking set in. “It’s over now.”
Her presence in modish society was the doing of her uncle, the designer Gilles Dufour, then Karl Lagerfeld’s right-hand man, later an artistic director at Balmain. Lagerfeld went on to hire de Castellane at Chanel, where she worked for 14 years, focusing on the maison’s costume jewellery creations. “There was something very free,” she says of the atmosphere. “People were very inventive, very creative. It was a time when everything was possible.”
In 1998, LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault approached de Castellane about bringing her vision to Dior’s newly created jewellery department. Arnault had acquired Christian Dior in 1984 thanks to his purchase of its parent company, the textile and retail conglomerate Boussac Saint-Frères. LVMH’s jewellery holdings today include Bvlgari, Chaumet, Fred, Repossi and Tiffany & Co, not to mention the jewellery divisions of its fashion houses, of which Dior is an exemplar.
The move reflected de Castellane’s evolving vision as a designer, from costume jewellery to something more serious. “In addition to the fantasy jewellery that I created at Chanel, I’d always been obsessed with real stones, antique jewels,” she recalls. “On my lunchbreak, I would go to the second-hand jewellery shops on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. I was obsessed with what I saw. I started to have jewellery made for myself, and people would say to me, ‘Ah, but it’s beautiful. Who is it?’”
In a sector that had been drifting towards conservatism since the 1970s, de Castellane’s designs offered a renewing gust of creativity. “People were content with selling stones. Four prongs. That was enough,” she recalls. “I tried to introduce poetry, colour.” Opals, for instance, were generally shunned back then. “It’s an incredible stone. I wanted to bring it back into fashion. Now everyone’s using opals.”
She hasn’t strayed far from the principles she laid down in her first collection. It’s “exactly what I would do again today”, she says. “I wanted to do something very logical, which was: ‘What would the jewellery have been like if it had existed with Christian Dior himself?’” She cycles through the house emblems. “There has to be a lily-of-the-valley theme, a Milly-la-Forêt [a commune where Dior lived] theme, a couture theme with ribbons and bows. There has to be a theme for balls, because Christian Dior made dresses for balls for very well-known women either in Parisian or American society.”
A few weeks after we speak in early May, the presentation for Diorexquis takes place at Christian Dior’s final residence, Château de la Colle Noire in Provence. The designer bought the 50-hectare property in 1950, seven years before his death, and it remains majestic: a lavishly furnished 19th-century manor complete with a 45m “mirror of water” ornamental pool. Models parade around said mirror wearing the new jewels along with 25 couture creations by Dior’s outgoing womenswear creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri.
One necklace in white and yellow gold depicts the cycle of a single day through a series of panels. Suns, moons, flowers and trees appear in different configurations in scenes almost cartoonish but for the very adult materials at play: white-diamond rain, yellow-diamond flowers, emeralds, sapphires, turquoise and pearl, all centred around a 10.5-carat, cushion-cut tsavorite garnet. Another necklace, the Bal Précieux, features an intensely blue Sri Lankan sapphire of nearly 26 carats in weight, flanked by azure Paraíba-type tourmalines from Mozambique and pear-cut emeralds. Elsewhere, a white-gold ring holds an idealised scene of an enchanted forest complete with a small bunny and a Bambi-like fawn, rendered in diamonds, emeralds and pink sapphires. Prices, naturally, are not listed publicly.
The atmosphere is rarefied – perfectly suited to de Castellane, for whom jewellery has never stopped being a form of fantasy, a place of retreat from the harder edges of life. “Everything I hear that I find very anxiety-inducing pushes me to create things that are much more joyful, much more colourful because, for me, jewellery must be a domain of dreams, happiness, joy.”
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