Ekaterina Istomina about the new Dear Dior collection

Victoire de Castellan, the famous socialite of Paris, heiress of the de Castellan family, once the muse of Karl Lagerfeld and jewelry designer of the house of Dior, presented a new precious line in a mansion on Avenue Montaigne. The collection received the Anglomaniac name - Dear Dior; it included rings, bracelets and earrings of high jewelry class.

The design of these catchy, flashy jewelry, heavy and bright, makes us talk about the following fact: Victoire de Castellan is gradually moving away from the principles of shock precious surrealism and French boudoir eroticism that she herself praised. Even at the very beginning of her work at Dior Fine Jewelry, Victoire de Castellan clearly outlined her own creative principles - the creation of court and palace jewelry, which she (on legitimate historical grounds) opposed to the jewelry of the “new, bourgeois” world. Her iconic Sun King ring from the early 2000s, with its outrageously huge, triumphant center stone, intricate floral arrangement and many technically challenging details, was considered a manifesto of Dior's jewelry style.

However, in the mid-2000s, Victoire de Castellan became interested in surreal experiments: her jewelry was a predatory jewelry transformer. These were also rings in the shape of flowers, the petals of which could be opened using a miniature lever hidden from view. These were also necklaces, the central parts of which became bracelets or brooches. But it was not only a matter of diabolical cunning and sophistication of technical designs. And it’s not even that Victoire de Castellan chose for her things (they came out more and more often in a single copy) completely forgotten, very rare stones or almost disappeared precious techniques like painstaking “Cinderella dust”, sputtering with diamond dust. Victoire de Castellan, of course, having in mind the significant commercial value of her jewelry, nevertheless positioned it as an absolute, inviolable fact of pure jewelry art. In most cases, these were surreal, unimaginable in terms of colors and complexity, jewelry with predatory, alluring, sometimes dark, erotic overtones. It is worth saying that Victoire de Castellan also had Gothic exercises at a certain time: for example, a line dedicated to executed kings and queens, which included jewelry in the form of skulls topped with diamond crowns.

Dear Dior, presented as part of Paris Fashion Week, is a completely different story. These are items of jewelry couture, in which the themes of embroidery, braid, weaving, as well as family coats of arms are brought to the fore. These are textile, tactile, emphatically plotless objects, reminiscent of military or knightly orders: and it is in this order-bearing quality that one can sense the designer’s desire to once again perform his debut song. A song about aristocracy, family breed, blue blood and fine white bone.

Dear Dior jewels are very beautiful and extremely complex: for example, their reverse side reproduces the exact lace pattern on dresses once created by Christian Dior himself. These jewels are multi-colored and have different volumes: some parts look flat, others, on the contrary, are more convex; thanks to the volume, the stones sound better and play off each other. The ornamentation of Dear Dior refers to the royal costumes of the late Bourbons: Victoire de Castellan always said that in her work she faithfully follows the precepts of Monsieur Dior, who in 1947 released his princess girl, his flower woman, onto the gloomy post-war Parisian pavement. Dear Dior presents the eloquent, priceless orders, the reward for the eternal, difficult, royal femininity.

Restoration of the monarchy