Dior Prints high jewellery
Having long wished to “draw prints on jewellery,” Victoire de Castellane brings the idea to life in the latest high jewellery collection from Dior – Dior Prints. Liberty prints, checks, stripes, and tie-dye are among the ultra-precious motifs in the Dior Print high jewellery collection, comprising 137 joyful, virtuoso pieces that seem to swirl like haute couture gowns
After exploring lace in Dior Dior Dior in 2018, textile dye effects in Tie & Dior in 2020, and braids in Galons Dior in January 2022, Victoire de Castellane opens a new chapter in the history of Dior high jewellery, whose collections always build on preceding storylines.
While Couture remains an endless source of inspiration for the House, it is with matchless audacity that the new Dior Print borrows its designs. The whimsical concept – transposing the motif of a two-dimensional fabric onto three-dimensional jewellery – gave rise to 35 “printed” parures adorned with checks and stripes, tie-dye colour gradations, geometric motifs and Liberty prints that mesmerise while their extreme fluidity caresses the skin like a silky breeze.
Each print motif is conceived like fabric in miniature, with the couturier’s hand apparent in seemingly crisp-cut earrings, ribbon-like undulations forming chokers and plastrons, and floral embellishments transposed into rings and necklaces. Not to mention cushion-like volumes that are mastered to perfection on flamboyant drop earrings, pendants, and sensual, voluminous cufflinks.
The colour associations in which Dior excels play an essential role in highlighting each piece’s motifs. The Dior Print collection stands out for the realism of its prints, which are literally transcended by the beauty of the stones used and the exceptional savoir-faire of the Parisian ateliers in which they are made. In order for the motifs to translate to jewellery’s reduced scale, the jewellers adjusted both the types of setting and the density of gem placement. To ensure that the checks and stripes perfectly match the movement and contours of each jewel, special attention was given to relief and perspective.
Showing extraordinary mastery, the 137 pieces in the Dior Print collection beckon French high jewellery down paths that are as dazzling as they are unexpected: for the masterpiece parure, Victoire de Castellane brings together floral prints and stripes. The necklace – an interlacing of multi-coloured ribbons in three colours of gold – is a technical feat. To create its articulated links, master jewellers borrowed a specialised savoir-faire from watchmaking, while the mashup of printed motifs brimming with multi-coloured gems is nothing less than spectacular.
In the same spirit, Dior mixes flowers and stripes with bold gems on jewels emblematic for the originality of their style, such as a necklace in noble metal worked like fabric, a ravishing 11.92-carat Colombian emerald nestled in its folds.
In the family of check motifs, Dior reinterprets navy in sapphires and diamonds. From this classically masculine print, Victoire de Castellane coaxes out the essence of truly feminine chic, for example, on a ribbon necklace adorned with an extraordinary 12.07-carat Madagascar sapphire, a double ring set with a nearly six-carat Ceylon sapphire, or drop earrings whose edges appear sliced clean, as if snipped with scissors.
Elsewhere, stripes mingle with flowers whose petals are striated with pink, violet, and blue sapphires, white diamonds, and mauve amethysts on rings, necklaces, earrings, and an eye-catching secret watch. The colour and quality of centre stones appear enhanced, such as an 8.02-carat lilac sapphire from Madagascar on the pistil of the Dior Print Emerald necklace.
Floral motifs, meanwhile, are magnified by a ruby, spinel, and yellow diamond Liberty print embellishing white gold braiding as well as pendants and rings with cushion-cut gems. Among the jewels in this ensemble, Victoire de Castellane designed two ribbon necklaces that enlace the neck: one illuminates its wearer with a marvellous 10.05-carat cushion-cut D Flawless white diamond. The other features a dazzling 3.04-carat Fancy Vivid yellow diamond.
In a less figurative register, Dior Print celebrates abstract motifs that bring a new energy to classic high jewellery parures. In a “crazy tossing of stones,” the Creative Director of Dior Joaillerie turns a tangle of different-sized diamonds into a random, graphic – and highly beautiful – symphony of rings, cuffs, and asymmetrical necklaces. Among the most spectacular are a 11.58-carat D Flawless pear diamond, a 14.66 carat Burmese sapphire, and a 10.27 carat ruby from Mozambique. Gems of character for a collection with an outsized personality. And for which the high jewellery workshops of Paris have, once again, surpassed themselves.
