Dior High Jewelry Launches on the French Riviera

With her latest high jewelry collection, called Diorexquis, Victoire de Castellane brought it all back home—literally and figuratively, creatively and personally. True to form, the creative director of Dior jewelry, unveiled a jubilant, playful celebration of color and couture, now amped up with some unexpected materials and lesser-known jewelry-making techniques.

It all started with the fragile, fiery, oft-neglected opal—Castellane’s forever favorite because it contains all of nature’s colors, she explained. From there, she turned her painter’s eye to other materials and techniques, broadening her palette with lacquer or plique-à-jour enameling, which produces a stained-glass effect. Diamonds became lace-like overlays or frames for gemstone couture gowns on panels in aventurine glass, a material borrowed from high watchmaking. Using a technique called doublet, she slipped mother-of-pearl or onyx under the opals to play up their natural color fields. As for the bucolic scenes: for all their technical prowess, those were actually rooted in the digital Stone Age.

“When I was little, I used to play with a View-Master for hours on end and spend my time dreaming over old Hollywood films from the ’50s and ’60s, so these pieces are sort of a precious extension of that,” she quipped.