Dior celebrates jewelry in Venice under the banner of the avant-garde

Dior in Venice? Of course. After all, the house on Avenue Montaigne has long shared with La Serenissima a history almost as old as its own: one need only remember, for instance, the extraordinary costumes created by Christian Dior in 1951 for the legendary ball given by Charles de Beistegui at the Palazzo Labia (1,500 guests, including Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Daisy Fellowes and Jacqueline de Ribes…). It was in this extraordinary building, decorated among other things with Tiepolo frescoes, that Dior returned to celebrate Victoire de Castellane’s twentieth year at the head of its jewelry division in 2019, and it was here again that Dior invited celebrities from around the world two years ago for another grand ball, this one called… Tiepolo.

For its grand return to La Serenissima, Dior has set out this year to avoid clichés. Forget gondolas, the Grand Canal, and historic palaces reflected in the water: this time, the house has taken over a building on the Lido, facing the sea, that is as spectacular as it is little known: the Casino. Not the one in Cannaregio, which preserves, in the heart of Venice, the memory of the first gaming room opened in 1638. No: Dior takes you three centuries later, to the modernist building designed by Eugenio Miozzi in 1938, one of those architectural surprises found on the strip of land separating the lagoon from the Adriatic: straight lines, astonishing volumes, period light fixtures, Alpine marble, mosaics and travertine… According to World of Interiors, it is the most beautiful casino in Europe.

The place had been closed for years, and it took all of Dior’s expertise to restore its highly cinematic soul for ten days (the Palazzo del Cinema is just next door), in a setting worthy of a superproduction. Flowers, palm trees, curtains as absurdly tall as the ceilings. Everything, at the end of May, had been designed to offer clients the holy grail sought by all jewelers: an unprecedented experience, one that will be remembered for a lifetime.

At the dinner helm: Mauro Colagreco, who created a three-course menu served on Dior plates patterned with playing cards (even the napkins are embroidered with an ace). Then, in a vast room — the Sala Laguna, with a ceiling decorated with hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades — the show began. For the occasion, Jonathan Anderson created a haute couture capsule celebrating the 112 pieces in the “Diorissima” high jewelry collection. That evening, the presentation had an avant-garde feel, with a soundtrack that winked at Italian cinema (Fellini’s Casanova, Nino Rota’s Pin Penin…) accompanying the deliberately slow pace of the models. Here, a bouquet of flowers; there, a ruby-colored wisteria wrapping around a neck; elsewhere, a piece delicately pinned to the lapel of a dress: all the singular fantasy of Victoire de Castellane unfolds in this suspended moment, before Dean Martin’s “Hey Mambo” rings out and the croupiers open their roulette wheels and gaming tables.

The next day, in an old warehouse next to the Hotel Cipriani — where guests are staying, and also welcomed at the new Orient Express by Aline Asmar d’Amman and the brand-new Airelles Palladio — one had to come back to see the pieces up close. Including the parquet floor, the designer’s office had been entirely recreated, with its colored pens, pencil pots, and even a table presenting the models of the pieces, like an ultra-luxurious leisure center, complete with fake-true modeling clay and synthetic crystals.

In three acts, as in any good play, “Diorissima” explores the depths of the sea, the sky and its clouds, and an imaginary garden. What stands out, beyond the richness of the stones and the finesse of the workmanship, is the coherence of an unusually singular narrative in today’s jewelry landscape: an imagination on the edge of the strange, taking you in turn to dive among algae, corals and fish, before soaring among cumulus clouds created using the doublet technique of opal and chrysoprase.

The forms, sometimes hyper-naturalistic and sometimes childlike, play with abundance, opulence and unexpected pairings. In a field that often focuses first and foremost on large carat weights, Victoire de Castellane once again brings her unmistakably original signature. Of course precious, and of course very expensive, these pieces present themselves to the eye as so many miniature stories one would want to collect in a strange library. That is what a second room also offered, its walls covered with the models of dozens of necklaces, while also displaying jewels from previous collections. At the back, a third, more classic space displayed what is known as “white jewelry,” giving pride of place to diamonds. A way of saying that, in Dior’s decidedly unlike-any-other world of high jewelry, there is something for every taste, and in every color, beneath the waters of the lagoon as well as in extraordinary skies.