Dior debuts a scintillating gems collection
Gem Dior collection
The new Dior High Jewellery Collection marks the Department’s twentieth anniversary. “Gem Dior” announces the collection with a play on words between gem in English and j’aime in French meaning, of course, ‘I love’…”
Without interruption, its creativity is embodied by Victoire de Castellane who, since 1999, has drawn her inspiration from the Dior spirit to nourish her imagination with coloured stones, poetic jewellery-making and whimsical stories. Whether the gem is a diamond, ruby, purple or spessartite garnet, pink sapphire and yellow sapphire, emerald, tsavorite, grenadine or cobalt blue spinel, tanzanite, rubellite or Paraiba-type tourmaline, Gem Dior is a declaration of love to stones and their infinite variety of hues, glorified by intense monochromes and subtle shadings or by virtuoso visual impact.
Framboise, Coquelicot, Glaçon, Tilleul, Jonquille…the jewels take the name of their predominant colour, raspberry, poppy, icicle, lime, daffodil… to invent a narrative and poetic glossary. The cuts harmonise with these chromatic effects, including baguette, square, pear, marquise, cushion and oval, over-layering the stones in a jumbled construction that conceals their settings. Victoire de Castellane describes the rings as a little packet of stones that have been placed on the finger. A throw of stones like a throw of the dice. They topple over one another and wedge together to create effects of volume and relief just like geological strata or certain minerals such as pyrite, which have very geometric constructions.
Behind this tribute to the gemstone and to the exceptional know-how of its stone cutters and polishers, is how the collection resounds throughout with a mineral musicality that is harmonic in its colour combinations and rhythmic in its shapes and mountings. Ninety-nine pieces – by far the biggest collection since the beginning of Dior Joaillerie – that are abstract and geometric yet express Victoire de Castellane’s entire narrative universe with their poetic settings, asymmetrical effects, evocative coloramas and naive futurism.
